shards

.

.

You don't flinch when he slams the door. The noise of the wood colliding against the frame comes off as the music to your ears — a type of lullaby that wakes you up instead of letting you fall asleep, some sort of recording on repeat that you've come to know all too well for you to do so much as loathe it.

As always, you offer a perfunctory blink when Aomine huffs, his windbreaker slipping off tense shoulders. He abruptly pulls the seat next to yours and settles with a grunt. Your eyes scan his face — it's almost a canvas of blue, purple, and red, beginning with the uneven patch of bruises on his cheek and ending with the blood dripping down his lips. Noticing your gaze, Aomine wipes the blood off with the back of his hand and says, "It's nothing".

He must have assumed that you're looking down on him, being the delinquent that he is. You know that asking if he's okay would be absolute indecency and bullshit and on your part, because even with your eyes, you can tell that he isn't. There's not much hope that he will be soon. Instead of stating the obvious, you let your fingers brush over his battered skin, and you don't say anything when he groans as your touch lingers on a particularly huge wound.

"Tetsu," he warns, brushing off your hand on him. Sometimes it saddens you to see just how much Aomine can be vulnerable in spite of the violent facade he always puts up. "Don't feel sorry for me, you know I fucking hate it." He exhales shakily, similar to a child who doesn't want to be a child anymore.

Thank the heavens that indifference is one of your strengths. Perhaps it's not exactly indifference — rather, suppression. "I don't," you reply with the quiet that ought to be a whisper of the wind. Even from the inside, you're aware that your icy blue stare is as stone-hard and unwavering as ever. You're only trying to pretend to be what Aomine can't right now: calm and composed.

That's about the only thing you can do for him. It's impossible to assault his foes on your own, even more so to stop him from doing it himself. For now, you're his consolation. A receiving end of his frustrations and times of weaknesses. He looks like he's fine with how things are playing out for the both of you — him always beating up and getting beat up and you witnessing when he stops by your room to show proof of just how fucked-up the world is.

The first time he sought your presence while being drenched in his own blood, you found those undialled numbers in your phone completely useful. You called the hospital, the school president's office, Aomine's home, and the police. You never wanted the publicity; it was just to redeem justice for Aomine. On the other hand, he just yelled at you, in bandages, ingraining in your mind that he didn't want any of the attention, that you betrayed him in the end. The next day, he received news of his suspension from class for two weeks. His assailants were never pursued, and he kept his mouth shut about their identities.

From then on, you figured that you may as well let him wound and receive the same treatment, if that was to earn and keep his trust in you. It's not that it doesn't pain you to trace the scars on his chest and the fresh cuts on his arms — it does affect you, a whole damn lot. You desire for a day when Aomine won't come home with split knuckles and swollen eyes. But for now, just for now, being the withdrawn half of your relationship would do. Not having any pity to spare is difficult, but in some sense that's the only way you can possess at least a little bit of bravery.

You finally crumble when Aomine stumbles into your room with a backpack, lines of red accentuating his eyes and fingers trembling as he wrenches the bag open. "T-Tetsu," he says, and you're not quite sure if his tone is that of anxiety or excitement. You walk to his crouching figure on the carpet, fishing out syringe upon syringe. Aomine chokes when he smiles at the contents of his bag. "I-I—"

You're not surprised when you find the will to grab the collar of his shirt and cast your palm upon his cheek with a resounding slap. It's obvious that you're both trembling for entirely different reasons, and — and when has he become someone like this? It's as if you don't know him anymore, from all the months of faking in front of each other's face that everything's alright. "Daiki," you keep your voice from breaking, and inhibit the guilt to surface once you truly look at Aomine's expression. "Throw those out. You can't involve yourself with drugs."

"They...they make me happy," Aomine admits, and the essence in Aomine's eyes is akin to craving. To lust. "There's nothing to worry about —"

"They make you think you're happy," you say, grabbing a fluid-filled syringe from his grasp. But you're not. Just when you thought that Aomine couldn't spiral down any further, he does. You want to blame him for being such a hot-headed and impulsive idiot who stays too long on the streets, but you glance at him, and he has never looked so helpless before. "Who gave you those, Daiki? Who —"

"It's none of your business!" he shouts. Aomine rises from his position, leaving the syringes scattered on the carpet, and knocks the wind out of you when he slams you to the wall. You open your mouth as you register the pain in the back of your head, and when the blur in your eyesight gradually disappears, you realize that Aomine is already aiming his fist at you. His grip on your neck tightens with the passage of each second, and you — can't — breathe.

"D-Dai..."

Eventually, Aomine recognizes the icy blue of your eyes and draws his arm back. You slump to the floor, coughing and heaving and thinking that it's unfair how big the price is for being in love with someone so broken that he needs to piece himself back with things that would shatter him even more. Aomine cradles his head in his hands, muttering, "I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry," and it's a miracle that you can still hear the genuineness of his voice.

Aomine storms off, slamming the door as usual, and this time, you muster the strength to chase him. You stand up groggily, croaking, "Daiki," as you pace through the corridor and into the sunlight. You have to shield your eyes from the brightness of the outside world, and Aomine's already revving his motorcycle up. You try to call his name out, but you can't — the vicious air that fills your lungs doesn't give you a chance to truly breathe. He seems to hear your faint footsteps, because he turns back and sharply inhales.

You stare at each other for a while, and you wish that it's as simple as closing your eyes and reverting to the way you once were.

Because you're Kuroko Tetsuya. Because you can't help but think that casting your emotions aside would be the best and would be enough.

Because you're a coward, just like Aomine Daiki is.

Aomine begins by tossing his helmet in your direction. You catch it reflexively, very well aware that he's putting himself at risk for security hold-up or for a vehicular accident. You swallow the lump in your throat, and let him speak. "I did it for you, Tetsu," he murmurs, gaze fleeing to the asphalt. "I did it all for you."

To you, at the least, it sounds so similar to goodbye.

He doesn't wait for your response when he speeds away, the image of him becoming increasingly unclear in the distance that he scales. You, however, hold his helmet in your arms — it reeks of Aomine and all that came with his existence — and allow yourself to cry.

It's not surprising to find that you can't cry at all.

A week later, the police department contacts you, but you've heard the news earlier from the cacophony of strangers on the train and saw the headlines all over newspaper racks. You can't fight the tremors that rack your body when an officer tells you himself that they've found the body of a high-schooler with midnight blue hair that might as well be the blanket of the stars. He tells you that the results of the autopsy confirmed an overdose of heroin. He also throws in the fact that his men have put behind bars the suspects who supposedly blackmailed a naive boy into doing things that he damn well knows aren't right.

I did it for you, Tetsu. I did it all for you.

You nod, thanking the officer for the information, and head home like you usually do. Somehow, you're expecting a slam of the door, some ragged breaths, and bruises and wounds that you'll have to trace like constellations later on. They never come. For the whole evening, you attempt to scour your clothes for a fitting funeral attire, and that's when you look down on the floor to see that there are drops of saltwater, some having painted the corners of your lips.

You will always wonder why he threw his helmet at you that day.

(It's almost like hearing him beg, hearing him plead —

"Save me,

Tetsu.

I want to be saved,

too.")

And you will always, always pretend that you don't know the answer.