Title: The Art of Hoping
Characters/Pairings: Imayoshi/Momoi; Aomine/Kuroko preslash
Summary: Momoi has her eye on Imayoshi and is pretty sure he's got his eye on her, but before they can do anything about that, they've got this pesky thing called the Winter Cup to win.
Notes: General audiences. In the universe where Kuroko went to Touou with Momoi and Aomine as described in "Can't Hold On, Can't Let Go," this is how the Winter Cup might go. 45,513 words.
Many, many thanks to Branch and Andrea for reading the draft of this beast and cheering me on when I was slogging through the pits of basketball despair.
The Art of Hoping
Patience is the art of hoping.
— Luc de Clapiers, Marquis de Vauvenargues
Part One
Satsuki kept one eye on the team, watching the mini-game play out precisely as she'd expected it to, and faced up to the truth: she had finally located a boy who had enough brains to appreciate her for more than her bust size, was neither gay nor already in a relationship, and whom she rather liked herself. That last was an understatement, of course, but practice was no place to be dwelling over the way her knees wanted to go wobbly or her heartbeat went all fluttery when she dwelled too long on the possibilities. For one thing, she had better things to be doing during practice. For another, Tetsu-kun had sharp eyes and knew how to use them without looking like he was doing it.
She was even reasonably certain that the boy in question liked her in return. It wasn't as though Satsuki was the oblivious type like Dai-chan, after all, and most boys were distressingly obvious about how attractive they found her body even if they couldn't muster the courage to do anything about it. Dai-chan always had been rather sweet about defending her honor, whether she needed him to or not, and the rest of the team had long since followed his lead and fallen into the habit of treating her like their own sister to defend.
Therein lay the crux of the problem, of course.
She didn't realize that she'd sighed until Harasawa-kantoku glanced at her. "Is something wrong?"
Satsuki recalled herself to where she was and what she was doing. "Ah, no. I'm sorry, I was just a bit preoccupied."
He rested a thoughtful look on her for a moment, then nodded his acceptance of that explanation and turned his attention back to the game. Even so, Satsuki felt a bit warm around the ears—practice was not the time for brooding, she told herself, and turned all her attention to the game. Tetsu-kun and Dai-chan were playing on opposite sides, as they did three games out of four. They'd fallen back into their old partnership after the close of the Interhigh almost as easily as breathing, and it was far more productive to match them against one another during training matches and use that partnership to force their styles to evolve. Tetsu-kun's misdirection and vanishing drives were coming right along, even when he was partnering with the other members of the first string. Sakurai was close to catching ten ignite passes out of ten, which was deadly when combined with his quick release shots, and Wakamatsu was getting to be an outright menace on defense. Imayoshi-san, too—she followed his progress across the court then as he coordinated with Tetsu-kun almost as smoothly as Dai-chan did, letting Tetsu-kun use him to distract Tsuda from his pass to Masuda and then cutting directly into Dai-chan's path—not the initial route Dai-chan had been planning on, Satsuki thought, but the secondary one, the one that Dai-chan had switched to when he'd seen that Imayoshi-san was going to block him. His tertiary route was almost as smooth as the primary one would have been. This time Satsuki sighed with satisfaction. Dai-chan was improving, too, like all he'd needed in life was to have gotten Tetsu-kun back and to have lost to Akashi.
Dai-chan was fairly straightforward, at least in that sense. She'd worried about him for a while, but she'd been right after all. Touou had been the right choice for all three of them.
When the Winter Cup started up next week, it would go differently than the Interhigh had. Satsuki had the data to prove it.
Dai-chan's team won the mini-game despite the fact that he'd been playing against the rest of the team's starters with a fairly motley selection of the rest of the club's members—Tsuda and Hiyama, Ikeda and Morita. Dai-chan grinned over the win, at least until Imayoshi-san raked the sweaty hair out of his eyes and cleared his throat. "Aomine-kun, do you even know what the definition of sharing is?"
It said a lot that Dai-chan wilted and looked abashed. Well, as much as Dai-chan ever looked abashed—he stopped grinning quite so broadly and ducked his head. "I was trying!"
"I'll spare you the lines from Star Wars, but do not think I am not tempted to quote Yoda here." Imayoshi-san pushed his glasses up his nose. "Try harder, brat. No one likes a ball hog." He clapped his hands together and moved on to the next topic, which was Ikeda's tendency to lose track of the other players in his orbit and end up accumulating fouls as a result of that, then Masuda's work on his lateral movements—yes, he'd seen what Satsuki had there, that Masuda tended not to move as crisply on his cuts as he ought to have done. Then Imayoshi-san called an end to practice for the evening and the club began to scatter, some members to the locker room to shower and head home and others to their own private drills. Dai-chan and Tetsu-kun immediately retreated to their corner of the gym to work together—Tetsu-kun's shooting, by the look of it, and that was going to surprise at least a few people the next time Tetsu-kun played against them.
For her part, she took her book bag over to the bleachers and settled in to get a start on her homework. If she could get the English and the math out of the way, that would leave only the literature and the history for later and would give her a chance to ferret through some of the online postings from her network to see what she could add to the profiles of their opponents in the preliminary bracket. She had a fairly good sense of how Meisei would do against them, considering how they had played during the Interhigh prelims, but it wouldn't hurt to check on their progress since then.
She had just spread her notebook across her knees and looked over the English worksheets with disfavor—Kagamin had a low opinion of them and she was inclined to agree—when she became aware that Imayoshi-san had not yet taken up his own practice for the evening. Instead he was standing in front of her chosen seat, a basketball tucked under his elbow. He was watching her; when he saw that he had her attention, he gestured at the work on her lap. "Seems to me that you'd have an easier time working on that at a desk."
Satsuki looked at the careful arrangement on her lap—feet on the bleachers the next row down, skirt carefully tucked in to prevent flashing any of the boys an accidental glimpse of her thigh, the open notebook balanced across her knees and the textbook and dictionary open next to her—but that wasn't really what had piqued his attention, was it? She'd been doing this for months now. "I don't really notice it anymore, to be honest."
"The human spirit can adapt to a great many things, it's true." Imayoshi-san looked away from her as he conceded the point. She didn't have to follow his gaze to know what he was looking at—or rather, who. Dai-chan's laugh echoed off the rafters; Tetsu-kun must have cracked one of his dry little jokes, or perhaps he'd managed to evade one of Dai-chan's blocks to sink a basket. Either would delight Dai-chan. Imayoshi-san watched them for a moment. "I sometimes wonder whether it should. You let me know if you ever decide you'd like an early evening of it."
There were several things she might say to that, and a couple of them hovered on the tip of her tongue: I don't really mind, or The team manager can stay as late as the players, or even I wouldn't mind getting out of here right now, actually, if you'd be so kind. Satsuki discarded all of those and smiled instead. "Thank you."
Imayoshi-san dipped his head, acknowledging that, and left her to her homework with as little ceremony as he'd interrupted it. Satsuki bent her head over her notebook and let her hair curtain her face as she watched him take possession of the three-point line ands shoot a basket, lope after the ball and catch it on the second bounce, pivot and sink another basket, every movement perfectly economical. Yes, she was reasonably certain that Imayoshi-san was interested. Not even Tetsu-kun had taken notice of the fact that his and Dai-chan's practices had kept her late, too, or if he had, he had not thought to ask whether she minded waiting for them every night. (She didn't, not really, but she supposed it would have been nice to have been asked every once in a while.)
Satsuki tapped her pencil against her notebook, plunged back into the conundrum that had plagued her more and more often lately. If Imayoshi-san did have an interest in her, why on earth hadn't he gone ahead and said something about it? As far as she knew, he wasn't seeing anyone, not even the student council president. Rumor had it that she'd angled for him several times, but had been turned down due to other commitments. The determined sleuthing of several classes' worth of girls had yet to turn up any commitment beyond the basketball club itself. To all appearances, if Imayoshi-san was in any kind of relationship at all, it was with basketball.
Perhaps that was her answer right there. Satsuki watched him sink another three-pointer, his form every bit as elegant as Midorin's, and sighed. The difficulty with basketball idiots was that turning their attention to anything not strictly related to basketball was nearly impossible. She looked away from Imayoshi-san and checked in on Tetsu-kun and Dai-chan. Dai-chan was blocking Tetsu-kun's attempt at the net, close enough to be flirting with a foul. Satsuki sighed again. The boys had it so much easier.
Brooding wasn't going to accomplish anything at all. She turned her attention to her English homework.
After the Winter Cup. The issue could wait until after they'd won the Winter Cup. Once they'd taken care of that, there would be time to figure out what Imayoshi-san's reticence meant and how she was going to deal with it.
There were a great many reasons to look forward to Saturday afternoons, but Satsuki was particularly fond of this one: Harasawa-kantoku had used his influence and the team's winning record to finagle an actual office for the basketball club's use. It was nothing fancy like Teikou's facilities had been, or even as nice as Kaijou's basketball club managed, but it was theirs and it made a comfortable place in which to hold strategy sessions with Harasawa-kantoku and Imayoshi-san after they had dismissed practice for the afternoon. The office had a window that overlooked the sports fields and showed the chilly November skies; the view made the room seem that much warmer by comparison. Both Harasawa-kantoku and Imayoshi-san paid close attention to the data she had assembled regarding their opponents for the preliminaries, and that was a warm feeling, too. "Shakuji has played fairly strongly this season and did well in the Interhigh prelims, but their #9 recently suffered an injury during practice and that's left a hole in their defense." She tapped her finger against the sheet of Shakuji's statistics. "He'll be out for the season, which suggests to me that they'll draw their #14 to play in his stead. However, he lacks the game experience that their #9 has. If he's pushed hard, I suspect he'll waver under that pressure."
Imayoshi-san drew the analysis out from under her hand and studied it in silence before passing it to Harasawa-kantoku. In the beginning, she had wondered whether they were checking her work when they did this—Harasawa-kantoku had played for the national team and Imayoshi-san had not known what she could do. Now she waited instead, because they liked to see the numbers for themselves once she'd delivered her overview.
Harasawa-kantoku slid the paper back to her and sank his fingers into his hair. "This would be a good opportunity to put some of our reserves on the floor."
Imayoshi-san nodded as he leaned his chair back, balancing it on two legs. "Couldn't hurt, I guess. Reckon they'd better get used to the idea of playing." He rubbed his chin, thinking the idea over, while Satsuki looked down at her notebook and frowned. Getting the reserve players used to the idea of playing—ah, yes. Of course. The third years would be retiring. It made perfect sense. She flipped through her binder and looked at the statistics of the Touou reserves, though she hardly needed to check what she already knew as Imayoshi-san went on. "Say we start the game with me 'n Susa and Wakamatsu-kun, and pull, oh, let's say Hiyama-kun and Tsuda-kun for starters."
"Hiyama-senpai is much more oriented for defense," Satsuki murmured.
It made Imayoshi-san smile. "But Tsuda-kun goes for the throat every time. It ought to balance out."
Satsuki studied the profiles on the page and thought about the players themselves—Hiyama's indefatigable defense of the hoop and Tsuda's absolutely precise drives down the court—and nodded. It could work against Shakuji's weakened team. But that wasn't really the difficulty, was it? "Would you plan on putting Dai-chan in at all during the game?"
Imayoshi-san smiled, just a hint of glee in it. "Does it make me a bad person if I say I'd like to see what he'd do if I did bench him?"
Harasawa-kantoku coughed into his fist and did a fairly poor job of disguising his laugh. Satsuki shook her head at Imayoshi-san as severely as she could. "Have you ever seen a toddler throwing a fit over not getting a piece of candy?"
That only seemed to delight Imayoshi-san more. "That bad, really? What a tempting thought. Maybe that will teaching him how to share the damn ball."
"Maybe." Satsuki suspected that it was far more likely that Dai-chan would sulk until Tetsu-kun or she found a way to distract him or until he got to play again. "You can certainly try."
"But not succeed, and make your life more difficult than it has to be in the effort." The smile he turned on her then was knowing, perhaps a bit speculative. "Perhaps I'll have to hold that one in reserve." He shrugged. "Hiyama-kun and Tsuda-kun for the first half, and Aomine-kun and Masuda-kun for the second half, I suppose."
"Not Kuroko?" Harasawa-kantoku said, tone mild and idly curious.
"Not for these games." Imayoshi-san set the front legs of his chair down with a thump. "I would prefer to hold Kuroko-kun in reserve for the opponents we'll meet later."
Rakuzan, Satsuki thought. Seihou, or perhaps Shuutoku, or Kaijou. Or perhaps another opponent altogether, given the dark look in his eyes.
Harasawa-kantoku nodded, apparently satisfied by that rationale, and Satsuki cleared her throat. "Looking at our branch of the playoffs, here's who I think we'll see in the final league." Eight teams' worth of data and game projections seemed like a lot, but between the files she'd already assembled in preparation for the Interhigh and her ongoing research, it hadn't been so bad. Tetsu-kun had talked through some of the projections with her in the evenings after he and Dai-chan had finished practice for the night, which had been helpful as well.
It was still gratifying when Imayoshi-san accepted the grids of her projections and whistled, low and impressed. "We did hit the jackpot when we got you."
He'd said it before, but it was still sweet to hear.
"They're only projections, of course." There was nothing there she could guarantee, not with any kind of absolute confidence, but it served as a starting point.
"Nevertheless." Imayoshi-san studied the projections with close attention before he passed them to Harasawa-kantoku, who gave them the same attention. "This does make my job easier. Thank you, Momoi-chan."
Satsuki inclined her head, acknowledging that. He smiled at her. "Someday you really do have to tell me how you do it."
The perpetual question—at least from the ones who paid attention. Satsuki shrugged and spread her hands. "And give away all my secrets?"
"I suppose not." He made a show of sighing mournfully, then sat up straighter, coming to attention as Harasawa-kantoku finished glancing through her projections. And wasn't that just the way it always went? There was never much time to flirt before basketball intruded again.
The boys really did have it easier, Satsuki thought, putting her wistfulness aside to dive into the plans for the final league. They had it down to a science, these days—Harasawa-kantoku rarely needed to speak up, not when Imayoshi-san had a clear sense of the team's strengths and weaknesses (far fewer of those now than there had been even during the Interhigh) and Satsuki had arranged her data to account for that. They thrashed through a plan for the likely disposition of the final league—Dai-chan would sulk for sure, because Tetsu-kun wouldn't be playing there, either, and Imayoshi-san planned on rotating more players through the line-up for the final league, too.
"Not," Imayoshi-san said, once they'd settled on a plan, "that I reckon he'll enjoy this too much, but he can think of it as a learning experience." She must have made some kind of face, because he chuckled, even as Harasawa-kantoku began to assemble his papers—a clear signal that he was done for the afternoon. "Do tell me if he kicks up too much fuss, and I'll see about settling him back down again."
If anyone could, aside from Tetsu-kun—Dai-chan did still step carefully around him—Satsuki supposed that Imayoshi-san might be the one who could do it. "I'll remember that," she said as she began to gather up her own papers.
Harasawa-kantoku was watching the two of them; he generally looked amused when he did that these days. He never said anything, which was a mercy, but Satsuki was certain that he was laughing at them both. But all he said now was, "Be sure to lock up when you're done," to Imayoshi-san and, "I'll see you Monday afternoon," to her as he saw himself out ahead of them, as he'd done more and more often lately.
It was generous of him, except for the fact that there still hadn't been any call for him to do it. Satsuki dropped her portfolio back in her bag and watched Imayoshi-san from behind the fall of her hair, counting down to—"Reckon it's time to get back to work for me."
Right on time, she thought and stood when he did. "Are you going to the gym?"
"Where else?" He smiled and held the door for her. "I suppose it's time you collected your little lambs and shepherded them off to study."
Satsuki couldn't help giggling, because even she couldn't remember a time when Dai-chan might have qualified for lambhood. "It is, I guess." A person did have to watch the two of them. Left to their own devices, they would practice—play—until they dropped. The Winter Cup was far too close to court the possibility of injury through over-exertion.
Imayoshi-san clicked his tongue against his teeth as they turned their steps toward the gym. She would have liked to have thought that he was walking slowly to stretch out their time together, but he moved at the same ground-eating pace as ever. "I do hope they appreciate what they have in you."
Satsuki glanced up at him, sidelong, but he was wearing the same relaxed smile as always, the one that suggested that he couldn't help enjoying the essentially comedic nature of life, and she had no idea what he was thinking behind it. "I think they do," she said, after a moment of wondering why he'd mentioned it. "In their own ways." Which, admittedly, might not look all that appreciative to someone from outside their shared history.
It was good that she hadn't allowed herself to hope that he might have brought it up as a prelude to finally saying something, because he merely nodded at that and went along in silence until they turned the corner and came to the double doors of the gym. The hollow sound of basketballs pounding against wood laminate and the squeak of sneakers filtered out to them; Imayoshi-san shook his head. "I should have known they'd still be at it."
"They're both a pair of basketball idiots, really." Satsuki allowed him to get the door for her again. "Tetsu-kun is just quieter about it."
Imayoshi-san chuckled at that, and Dai-chan's whoop as he slammed the ball through the basket and dangled from the rim greeted them as they went inside. He dropped to the floor; Tetsu-kun's own rather breathless laughter carried across the floor as he tilted his head back to look up at Dai-chan.
It still made something in her chest squeeze tight, seeing that again after being so sure that it had been lost for good. Satsuki breathed through it, pretending that she wasn't aware that Imayoshi-san was watching her, a faintly sardonic curve to his smile.
He gave the boys a moment, then clapped his hands together sharply when Dai-chan went for the ball again. "All right, brats, playtime is over," he called. "Time for you to call it a day."
Early on, he'd had to get sarcastic at them to get them to knock off for the day, but these days they were both trained well enough that Dai-chan only grumbled for form's sake as he began rounding up the last of the stray balls. Not that he bothered to put the cart away, not when Imayoshi-san was about to take possession of it himself. "Back in a minute, Satsuki," he called, waving at her, and loped to the locker room after Tetsu-kun.
Imayoshi-san watched him go, looking even more sardonic over that for some reason. He didn't say anything, and tipped his head at Satsuki after a moment. "Momoi-chan."
"Don't practice too late, Imayoshi-san," she told him, though she couldn't imagine that he would, and took herself and her frustrations to the bleachers to wait for Dai-chan and Tetsu-kun.
Perhaps it was the basketball itself. She wrapped her arms around her knees as he stationed himself on the three-point line and sank the first shot, fluid enough to make her sigh a little. She hadn't thought much of it before, but he wouldn't be in the club for too many more weeks after this, no matter which way the Winter Cup went. (They were going to win. They were going all the way this time.) Pretty soon being captain of the club wouldn't be his first priority—studying would be. Maybe when that happened... maybe.
Tetsu-kun finished changing ahead of Dai-chan, who did like a long shower—and Satsuki absolutely refused to speculate on any of the reasons why that might be. He joined her on the bleachers, quiet in that self-possessed way of his. "No progress yet?"
Satsuki frowned at him, even though the teasing edge of his question was gentle enough. "I could ask you the same thing."
Tetsu-kun only smiled, serene. "It's not time for that yet."
Satsuki raised her eyebrows at him. "Is that what you're telling yourself?"
Tetsu-kun only smiled. "There are some things we need to do first."
One of those things was Rakuzan, she knew that much, but the others—Tetsu-kun's agenda had been obscure to her for a long time now, ever since things had begun going off the rails at Teikou, and it had stayed that way even now that things were better again. There was no way to tell what he had in mind, and he hadn't chosen to confide in her yet. Perhaps he wouldn't.
She sighed over that thought and watched Imayoshi-san bend over to pick up a stray ball, which was a much more pleasant thing to dwell on. Next to her, Tetsu-kun huffed a near-silent laugh. She elbowed him without looking. "Like you're any better when it comes to Dai-chan."
"I might be more subtle."
"No, you're really not," Satsuki told him. "Really, really not."
Tetsu-kun didn't seem to be particularly convinced by that, but before Satsuki could explain how very unsubtle he was, Dai-chan emerged from the locker room and Tetsu-kun proved her point in the way a portion of his attention immediately turned to Dai-chan as he bounded over to join them.
"Really not," Satsuki repeated as she stood and pulled her jacket on. She smiled at Dai-chan when he blinked at their laughter and demanded to be let in on the joke. "Never mind," she told him. "It would lose something if I tried to explain it."
Dai-chan took the news that he was going to be sitting out major portions of the Winter Cup prelims and final league about as gracefully as Satsuki had expected him to, which was not very gracefully at all. "Oh, come on," he said after Imayoshi-san had briefed the team on the upcoming matches. "You've gotta be joking!"
Imayoshi-san folded his arms. "Do I?" He paused a moment, just long enough for Dai-chan to realize that he was treading on thin ice. "Is there something in our strategy that you're finding humorous?"
Dai-chan wouldn't have been Dai-chan if he weren't willing to walk right up to the boundaries people set and give them a nice, hearty shove just to make sure they were holding steady. "Yeah, the part where you don't have me playing."
It was the kind of thing that some of the third-years on the first string still hadn't grown quite accustomed to hearing from him. Satsuki was less concerned about the dark looks coming from the likes of Ikeda and Morita and Wakamatsu's muttered Here we go again, and much more interested in the reactions coming from Masuda and Tsuda and the other second-years who were going to get a shot at playing in these matches. Tsuda was still and quiet, showing nothing of what he thought; Masuda was watching Imayoshi-san, not Dai-chan.
Imayoshi-san leveled a long look on Dai-chan, one that made even him start to squirm as it went on and on. "Beg pardon?" he said, finally. "What was that, brat? I don't think I quite caught it."
Dai-chan did manage to frown at him, though it wasn't one of his better efforts, more bravado than actual bad temper. "But you don't have me playing."
Imayoshi-san's smile tilted just a bit. "Because we don't need you to play." Satsuki winced back from the brutal edge of that truth at least as much as Dai-chan did, maybe more, even though she'd known it or something like it was on the way the moment Imayoshi-san's expression had shifted registers. She curled her fingers more tightly around the edges of her clipboard as Imayoshi-san went on, uncompromising. "This team won games before you joined it and will probably go on to win games after you leave it, Aomine-kun. I reckon we'll do just fine in the prelims, even if we're just keeping you around to decorate the bench. Now will you kindly get it through your thick skull that this team isn't here solely to provide you your daily allowance of basketball?"
Satsuki's fingers ached from holding her clipboard so tightly and most of the rest of the team seemed to be holding their breaths as Dai-chan stared at Imayoshi-san, paler than usual. Imayoshi-san had had to reprimand Dai-chan pretty regularly from the start of the year, but he'd never been quite this blunt about it before. Not in front of the full team, anyway. But then, Dai-chan hadn't ever gotten quite so cocky as to challenge him so directly, either. Now he opened and shut his mouth a couple of times, soundlessly. Tsuda's expression was as stony as Masuda's was purely delighted, and Wakamatsu just looked ready to applaud. (Had he realized yet that he was the presumptive next captain? Satsuki didn't think he had.) Finally Dai-chan said, "Yes, Imayoshi-san." And then, belatedly, "Sorry," which was almost certainly meant for their captain alone but was non-specific enough to cover the rest of the team.
Imayoshi-san squinted at him and nodded. "Guess you are. Stop back-sliding, brat, it's not attractive. And plan on giving me fifty laps here in a bit while you think about what you said." He clapped his hands together, dismissing the conversation, and beamed at the rest of them. "Do we have any other feedback about our lineup for the prelim game we wanna discuss?" He gave it a moment, but no one said a word. "Well, all right then. Let's get to work, shall we?"
The team began to unfold themselves from their seats and head out the door to the gym. Dai-chan went with them, head down, and Tetsu-kun followed close behind him, looking more thoughtful than anything else. Satsuki waited until they were all out of the way before allowing herself to exhale; after the door swung closed behind Hiyama, Harasawa-kantoku said, almost absently, "I believe that might have actually gotten his attention."
"Was pretty much the idea." Imayoshi-san shrugged. "Since the subtle approach doesn't seem to do much good with him."
"I'm sorry." Satsuki uncurled her hand and flexed the stiffness out of her fingers as they both glanced at her. "I didn't tell him that we'd be drawing mostly from the reserves for these games. If he'd known..." Maybe he still would have made a scene, but at least it would have been in private.
Harasawa-kantoku looked back and forth between them and excused himself to go oversee the start of practice while Imayoshi-san shook his head, disagreeing with her. "That wasn't your job, it was mine, and I didn't mind doing it." He smiled briefly, just a touch of wicked humor to it. "Wasn't me who came out of that little chat looking like he'd been raised by wolves, was it?"
"But—" But it was Dai-chan, who'd always needed a certain amount of careful management, which she hadn't really followed through with this time. She just couldn't figure out how to put that in words.
Imayoshi-san took his glasses off and began to polish them, focusing all his attention on that. "Seems to me that Aomine-kun is a big boy now, Momoi-chan." For all that he said it gently, it was no more compromising than any of the things he'd just said to Dai-chan. "Doesn't act much like it sometimes, I'll give you that, but that's his problem, don't you think? I don't see why it ought to be your job to take care of his sensitive, high-strung spirit. You're not his mother, though I do wonder sometimes whether you didn't take him to raise." He held his glasses up to the light, peering at the lenses, then settled them back into place. He smiled at her. "Seems to me that you've got bigger and better things to do with your talents than that."
It hurt to hear that, set against all the long history she and Dai-chan shared, years of it going back nearly as long as she could remember. She'd grown up knowing Dai-chan, understanding him as well as she understood herself and stepping in to smooth the way when his own exuberant nature clashed with the more straitlaced world, making it easier for him because he'd always been there to support and defend her in return. For Imayoshi-san to be all but telling her that she needed to let go of that—"I don't mind doing it."
"Didn't figure you did." Imayoshi-san's smile was still gentle, for him. "You don't strike me as the type to put up with that kind of grief unless you expect it to be worth it, which seems perfectly fair to me. However." He held up a finger. "What you might want to ask yourself here is whether you're doing it for his sake, or for yours." As she sucked in a startled breath, ready to protest that, he tipped his head to her. "It can be a tricky questions, that one. Not one that you can answer easily. I'll just leave you to it. Wouldn't want to miss all of Aomine-kun's laps, would I?"
He left her to wrestle with that question with no more ceremony than that, certainly on purpose—he was exasperatingly good at that kind of verbal judo, drat the man. Satsuki grimaced, all her rebuttals rising to her lips now that it was too late. Dai-chan was pretty bad at communication if it didn't take place by means of basketball, he was bad at noticing details about other people, unless they had to do with basketball—he was just bad at things that weren't basketball, because his world was basketball.
(Would he have been allowed to get away with such a hyperfocus on basketball if he hadn't been so gifted at the game? The voice that asked the question sounded a lot like Imayoshi-san's. Satsuki did her best to quash it, but it lingered in the back of her head, treacherous, even after she'd composed herself and gone out to join the rest of the team at practice.)
Dai-chan was quiet, even after he'd finished running his laps and joined the rest of the team in their drills. He was quiet during his post-practice work with Tetsu-kun, too. It wasn't until they were most of the way home that he broke into her and Tetsu-kun's discussion of the literature homework to say, "But it would be so much easier to win those games if I were playing."
Satsuki let out the breath she hadn't quite realized she'd been holding and Tetsu-kun said, very grave, "No, I don't believe that is one of the themes in the Ugetsu monogatari, Aomine-kun. Unless your copy is different from mine."
Satsuki stepped out of the way when Dai-chan went for Tetsu-kun, trying to scruffle his hair (but not trying too hard, because Tetsu-kun was able to dodge him). "That's not what I meant and you know it." He made another desultory attempt to grab at Tetsu-kun, who cut around Satsuki to get away from him. "What's the point of it? Of not playing either of us?"
So he had noticed that Tetsu-kun was going to be benched for a while, too. The only surprise was that it had taken him so long, Satsuki thought, looking at Tetsu-kun. He lifted his eyebrows when she didn't jump in to explain and did it himself instead. "Think about who will be playing."
"I already know who'll be playing, it's a bunch of the second-years and a couple of the first-years—" Dai-chan stopped there and walked several paces without saying anything at all as the gears finally began turning in his head. His cheeks puffed out on the exasperated way he huffed. "Why didn't he just say that was what he was doing?"
Satsuki sank her teeth into her lower lip to keep from saying anything, and not because of the things Imayoshi-san had said to her, either. She just wanted to see whether Dai-chan would come up with the answer himself, that was all. Tetsu-kun gave her another of those looks of his, one of the measuring ones, and didn't say anything either.
Dai-chan heaved a huge, aggrieved sigh. "Man, that guy just lives to be a pain in the ass, doesn't he?" He wasn't entirely wrong, either, though that wasn't what Imayoshi-san's primary goal had been. "I don't know why he gets such a kick out of yanking people's chains."
These days, it was easy to forget about the distance Tetsu-kun had put between them after things at Teikou had gone wrong. He was very like he'd always been, soft-spoken and sharp-witted, fitting into their friendship as seamlessly as he'd ever done, at least after Dai-chan had apologized and proved that he'd understood what had gone so wrong between them. Had made it clear that it wasn't going to go wrong like that again. All the same, that didn't mean that it hadn't left its mark on him (on all of them), because his voice was sharp when he said, "Perhaps he was hoping you would see it for yourself."
Dai-chan tossed him a quick look, one that was startled and wary. "Tetsu—"
"You don't think, sometimes." Tetsu-kun said it very clearly, as though he wanted to be sure that there wasn't going to be any mistake in how he was understood. "Sometimes you just don't think."
That wasn't anything new—she'd even told Dai-chan as much a few times herself, when his obtuseness had frustrated her beyond endurance—but for once Dai-chan didn't retort that thinking was what she and Tetsu-kun were for. He looked at Tetsu-kun, wide-eyed, as uncertain as he ever got. "Tetsu..."
"It's careless." Tetsu-kun measured the words out carefully, quiet and matter-of-fact now that he had Dai-chan's attention. "Sometimes you're so very careless, even when you shouldn't be."
Dai-chan flinched back from that, a little, but he seemed to be listening to Tetsu-kun, actually hearing him, which was good. After a moment, Dai-chan ducked his head. "Sorry," he said. "Just—I'm ready to play with you again."
Tetsu-kun's smiles were the subtle sort, as quiet as he was. "There'll be time for that." And as easily as that, Dai-chan was grinning back at him and it was all right again.
Satsuki folded her arms around herself against the sudden chilly kick of the wind and was glad, really glad, that they had Tetsu-kun back now. Even if it did feel sometimes like the two of them were running ahead of her together, caught up in their own private momentum.
She shook herself; there was no point in dwelling on it. The boys weren't actually leaving her behind and there was no point in moping over something she didn't really want to be a part of. "Of course there'll be time for that, once we get into the Winter Cup. So focus on that, hm?"
They both came to attention at that, eyes bright and sharp. Satsuki smiled at them, and kept her sighs to herself. At least some things were still simple.
The preliminary game against Shakuji went smoothly enough, in Satsuki's opinion, especially for a game that involved trying out some of the combinations of players that might make up the core of next year's team. But why shouldn't the game go smoothly? Harasawa-kantoku had made it his business to recruit strong players, and not even Dai-chan slacked off in practice these days. Hiyama took the inside and defended the basket with absolute tenacity, refusing to be budged from it or to allow Shakuji to score, and Imayoshi-san was right about Tsuda—when left to his own devices in a game, he did go for the throat every time, sort of like Dai-chan tended to do, but without the same kind of unbridled joy in it. His game was more precise, in its way; she caught Masuda watching him take the ball and drive up the court, looking thoughtful over it, and made a note to come back to that later.
They were in the lead by the time they broke at the end of the second quarter. Imayoshi-san tapped Masuda and Sakurai for the second half of the game, which he had said he'd do as long as things were going well for Touou. He did not single Dai-chan out for comment in front of the rest of the team, but he caught Dai-chan at the very end of the break, just before heading back to the court. "Well, brat?"
Dai-chan, to his credit, seemed to get why Imayoshi-san was angling that faint smile at him. He screwed up his face and heaved a sigh. "You're gonna let me play at some point, right?"
"Oh, I reckon I'll find a reason to throw you in a game eventually," Imayoshi-san said, lazy.
Dai-chan heaved another one of those heavy sighs. "All right, then."
Imayoshi-san laughed at him. "That's better." He clapped Dai-chan on the shoulder and headed onto the court. Dai-chan made a face at him and resumed his seat on the sidelines and watched the third quarter play out with a hungry expression. He was on his best behavior, though, and yelled for Touou and Sakurai's quick release shots and Masuda's tricky play against Shakuji as loudly as anyone else did. That was probably why Imayoshi-san gave Satsuki the nod with two minutes left on the clock in the fourth quarter and let her substitute him in.
"He put me in mind of a dog I knew," was all Imayoshi-san said about it after the game. "Poor thing hated to be left behind and gave you the most pathetic looks whenever you went out without him." He shrugged. "What can I say? I'm a soft touch."
"Stop laughing," Dai-chan said, indignant, while the rest of the team cracked up. "That's not funny!"
"I don't know, it seems accurate to me," Tetsu-kun said. He paused. "The part with the dog, of course. The other part, well." He shot a sly glance Imayoshi-san's way. "Perhaps it was exaggerated for effect."
"Brats." Imayoshi-san cuffed them both, tolerant. "Go fetch the coolers for lunch."
Satsuki threw herself into the fresh data that came in after the preliminary games, staying up late to sift through it so they would be prepared for the final league games and for the start of the Winter Cup itself. "As I expected, there weren't any upsets in the other games in our prelim bracket. Akabane, Tanashi, and Yotsuya all played pretty much as I expected to," she said during the meeting before the start of the final league matches. "I believe we can count on Akabane and Yotsuya to play consistently with my projections. Tanashi might be trickier; they won by a higher point margin than they should have, so they may have something up their sleeves. We'll want to be careful there."
Imayoshi-san studied her précis of the other prelim matches and how that was likely to affect the league matches and nodded. "I don't believe that's any reason to alter our own plans," he said at last. "The second-years have been doing well, and I want to get a look at Masuda-kun and Tsuda-kun's combination play." By which he probably meant that he wanted Wakamatsu to get a look at it.
Nevertheless. "You're mean," Satsuki told him, really rather delighted by the prospect of seeing what Masuda and Tsuda could make of a real game. They were already deadly enough in practice games.
Imayoshi-san just smiled, satisfied as a cat. "Of course I am. It's my job." He settled back in his seat. "Speaking of which, I notice our favorite little problem child has settled down quite a bit."
It wasn't a question, but it was a request for information nonetheless. "He understands the reasons for the player line-up now. He just needed to think about it."
Imayoshi-san cocked his head at her, knowing. "And did he think about it?"
"With a nudge or two from Tetsu-kun," Satsuki confessed.
Imayoshi-san looked at her without saying anything, then sucked on his teeth. "The three of you have a remarkably convoluted relationship." He dusted his hands off. "Now go find yourself some caffeine, Momoi-chan, and stop yawning at me. Makes me feel like I'm boring and that's hurtful to a man's pride."
Satsuki tried to swallow her yawn, guilty. "Sorry," she apologized, but he just waved a hand at her until she went—not to find a vending machine, but to splash some cool water on her face, which was more effective. Caffeine would be for later in the tournament, when there was too much data coming in and not enough time to deal with it and get a full night's sleep between games.
Satsuki patted her face dry and shook her head at her reflection. Sometimes she had no room to talk about the boys being basketball idiots, did she? "It can't be helped," she said out loud, and went to go rejoin her team for the trip over to the arena.