Golden

Disclaimer: I don't own Fall Out Boy's "Golden" or Fujimaki Tadatoshi's Kuroko no Basuke.

Alex can't quite describe how she feels right now there are so many different emotions. She's happy and proud and excited and it's almost overwhelming. She's not a crier, so she doesn't cry but she shouts as loudly and happily as she can into the phone and from five thousand miles away she feels Tatsuya smile.

"Can you get here tomorrow?" she asks him.

He laughs, now, and if her grin could get any wider her cheeks would split open. "No, but I can do next month." He's very calm about this (but then, he's always calm and besides he's known about this for at least a few more minutes).

She shrugs. That will have to do. And judging by the Japanese school calendar, that's basically as soon as he graduates. Yes, Alex is a lucky woman. Tatsuya agrees to send her his flight information and stuff once he has that sorted out, and they talk about mundane stuff but then he has to hang up because he's still got stuff to do (what ever happened to senioritis?) and the time difference is ridiculous.

But it doesn't matter, because he'll be coming back home and studying and playing basketball at UCLA. He'll be coming home. Alex can't remember the last time she was this happy; it's been a long time.

Of course, he doesn't feel the same way about her that she feels about him, but she is quite sure her own (very, very inappropriate—he's closer to being twenty years younger than her than being ten years younger than her) feelings will fade and besides, she can enjoy just being around him while they persist. And soon he'll meet a nice young woman in college and they'll date and one of them will break the other's heart and then he'll meet another one, and maybe another after that, and they'll have beautiful, graceful basketball-playing children and Alex and Taiga will be the godparents.

But despite her confidence in this scenario, there is still hope left, somewhere within her. She has been crushed so much, seen so many of her dreams go beyond her reach, but she still clings to it and hates herself all the more for it.

She knows exactly how he feels. It's been setting in for years, the unsettlement, the knowledge and realization. Both she and him are cursed with self-awareness, with passion. Specifically, a passion for basketball, where they can leap and grab at the highest heights but not touch them, think they can, believe they can, but believing is not enough. Running and shooting and stretching and training, day in and day out, they hit the wall again and again. They reach their peak and are in a decline before they know it. It would have been the same time, roughly, had they been the same age. As it were, they both reached high school at the top and everyone caught up.

And they keep catching up, and she hears him pacing in the living room at night but knows her words will only make him angry and it won't make him feel better that she's been through the same thing because this is incredibly isolating, this free fall. You don't know where you'll end up, when you'll stop falling, how you'll land.

Still, she lets him know she's there for him without being intrusive. It's funny how she sees herself in him, but still it's only in shades. He's far more outwardly accepting of his fate, far calmer. She raged and fought and her career died in a painful yowl. His will go quietly, like a candle burning to the end of the wick.

She has taught him everything she knows, has learned from him some, too. She has taught him every move in the book; he embodies by-the-book basketball. She's taught him street moves, too, but he tosses those aside when he can, which is more often than she can. He plays organized, semi-professional basketball where there are so many rules and regulations it's impossible for even the referees to keep all of them straight. She plays basketball that has no rules and structure.

He's the only person who's seen her go all-out classic basketball style since high school. He plays that way against her and beats her at her own game, but she holds her own every time, even as her knees creak and her breath hitches. She knows the way his body moves, has seen it develop, gone from jerky motion to smooth, from rough to finessed. It truly is beautiful to watch him run and jump and pass and shoot and dribble, even just making a layup takes her breath away sometimes.

Is she just in love with the basketball he plays? No. That's part of it, but she's in love with how this style fits him like a glove, and with the way he bears this burden by bending and not breaking, the steady way he carries himself, his gentleness and warmth, the way his hair falls over one eye, the curve of his thumb under the TV remote when he changes the channel.

Damn it. He's nineteen. She's thirty-seven. This shouldn't happen. She shouldn't feel this way.

They lose in the final four. It's better than was expected of them, and he's got three more years, but it doesn't matter to him. What if he breaks his leg tomorrow? What if they get bad matchups the next three years? What if this was the best chance they were going to get? What if he burns out all of his talent?

She cannot answer him. All she can do is listen, but that's what he needs right now. No amount of reassurances from anyone can convince him that this is okay right now or that it ever will be.

He cries in front of her. He hasn't done that for a long time, not since just after they met. She holds him and he lets her, sobs into her collarbone. Her heart aches because it feels so damn perfect and right, even with his anguish. However, the tears subside rather quickly. Self-consciously, she tries to pull away.

"Can we stay this way a little while longer? Please?" he asks. It's muffled but full of some kind of yearning, and she can't help but hold her breath a little bit. His arms come up from where they've been pinned by his sides and he hugs her in return. The warmth of his arms is like the warmth of his personality, inviting and calming. Her heartbeat slows (could he tell it was going faster? She can't feel his heartbeat herself.) and she just wants to stay here forever. Damn her masochistic, romantic heart.

"I'll be a better man, okay?" He pulls back and looks into her eyes. "I don't want to give up so easily, and I won't lose."

"Tatsuya…?"

"I know I'm still a kid, and I'm not good enough for you yet, but I promise you won't have to wait too much longer for me, or wait at all because I'll catch up."

"You're already here," she says. "You passed me."

"But I—"

And finally, finally, she kisses him, interrupting him, sealing the end of the sentence away in his head.