Black Friday

Disclaimer: I don't own Fujimaki Tadatoshi's Kuroko no Basuke or Steely Dan's "Black Friday".

Author's Note: Sequel to "Last Night on Earth" and "Life in Technicolor", but hopefully this can be read as a standalone fic.

Three cups in and Aomine Daiki is still half asleep, gazing at the wall of the cubicle in front of him. They always make the least-senior person available do the coffee, and by the time each rookie learns how to make actual coffee instead of weak hot black water there's someone newer to make shit coffee. He sighs, runs his fingers through his hair and damn it's getting long again, the front almost brushing his eyebrows. Given the circumstances, it might be excusable—but it's not, really.

He's still half asleep at half past nine in the morning as he drains his fourth cup of coffee and continues to scrawl half-legible notations in the margins of the papers on his desk. If he was still out on patrol, he'd be awake (well, probably—if the streets were quiet, he'd fall asleep in the car with static radio voices as a midmorning lullaby, and his partner would come back with food and clock him several times on the head to wake him up) and alert to whatever illegal deeds happened to be occurring at this particular moment.

When he's in this state of mind, his subconscious draws up things he'd rather not think about. He blinks, then his eyelids are too heavy to reopen and he sees the body, the man slain in some gang turf war, heart cut out and belly sliced, butterfly cut like a well-done steak, eyes wide open and unmoving and expression frozen in unmitigated pain. Aomine squeezes his eyes shut harder to block it out and then opens them. Fuck it. At least he doesn't have to see that shit anymore with this desk job, only read about it as described in words across a sterile page, which is fine because his imagination isn't all that wild.

Aomine fills up the mug with piping hot brew from the pot. Cup number five is just as weak as the first four, but he doesn't feel like he's about to nod off any second. Maybe it's just the morning finally kicking in, his body realizing that it's probably not getting sleep any time soon. Still, he's thinking more clearly about the present and maybe that's a bad thing because as he signs and annotates, he can't help but think about his father in the hospital with emphysema.

Satsuki's already sitting by his father's bed when Aomine arrives. She got off early from work today so she decided to drop by. She's got a weird look on her face like she's trying not to cry, and she shouldn't come here if it upsets her this much (though it may do the old man good to see someone other than his son, the hospital staff, and the parade of roommates he's had (they never stay for long)).

"Go on home, Satsuki," Aomine says.

"What, you want me all to yourself?" his father says with a wheezy cackle. "It does this old man some good to see a nice young woman like you, Satsuki. You're an angel, indulging me like this." The smile on his thinning face is genuine.

"Oh, Aomine-san…"

"But Daiki's right. You should go home and have fun with that young man of yours. Us lonely bachelors will stay here."

Satsuki smiles back and her eyes do not fill up. She kisses the old man on the cheek and gets up and walks to the door.

"What, I don't get a kiss?"

She rolls her eyes and smacks Aomine on the shoulder as his father laughs.

He gets Tuesdays and Fridays off, so in addition to visiting his father every afternoon he spends pretty much all day at the hospital on those days. He supposes this means he has no life of his own, but he hasn't really for a while. He used to play street basketball before his father checked into the hospital permanently a few months ago, but it was pretty boring and he wasn't really friends with the people he played with anyway. He supposes that after his father dies he'll go back to doing that, or Satsuki will attempt to get him into something else again. Or maybe she'll make him go to counseling (that had been a fucking train wreck) like she did after his boyfriend and his mother died within a year of one another. The therapist had been some new age hippie woman who encouraged him to let go of his resentment (easy for her to say; she wasn't an unexpected only child born when her parents were already well into middle age) without really giving him any way how.

But that's over and done with, another unpleasant memory that somehow makes its way to the surface as Aomine waits in the hospital cafeteria line. He fills the cheap paper cup with even cheaper instant coffee and grabs a cup of instant shrimp-flavored ramen. He glances around and sees no open tables, and he doesn't know any of these people sitting by empty seats but then he almost drops the ramen because holy shit is that Midorima Shintarou? Aomine's never seen anyone else with taped fingers on top of no apparent injury like that and hair that shade of green. Why the hell is he here? There's an empty seat across from him, and as much as Aomine would rather avoid small talk, he's in need of a distraction right now.

"This seat taken?" Aomine says.

"No; go ahead," says Midorima, not bothering to glance up from his newspaper.

Aomine slurps noisily at his noodles until Midorima looks up to glare and then chokes on a mouthful of coffee. He manages to gulp it down and then takes a few breaths. "Aomine."

Aomine's still laughing at Midorima's reaction. "Long time no see, Midorima." It has been a long time—Taiga's funeral, maybe? Shit. Aomine's not sure Midorima even was there to tell the truth, because he was a bit preoccupied with holding himself together in front of everyone. Do they even still have any mutual friends?

"Why are you here?" Midorima asks.

Aomine takes a sip of coffee. "I could ask the same of you."

"I work here."

Oh, yeah, he's got that hospital ID—come to think of it, Satsuki might have told him Midorima was a doctor…"Oh, yeah. You're a surgeon."

Midorima pushes up his glasses. "Yes. But why are you here?"

"My dad's got emphysema. I come and see him on afternoons and off-days."

There's not much more to say. Midorima's a doctor; he knows what Aomine's saying. But there's nothing really appropriate for him to reply, as Aomine has closed the discussion.

As luck would have it, Aomine runs into Midorima again as he's leaving the hospital that evening. "Hey, want to grab a drink later?" Aomine says, in part because he expects Midorima to say no (after all, Midorima's always kind of hated Aomine) and it'll be fun to see how twisted he gets looking for an excuse and in part because Aomine's bored and lonely.

Midorima's about to decline when the nurse to whom he's been handing paperwork smiles at Midorima and says, "Oh, you definitely should, Sensei!" She turns to Aomine. "He gets off in about ten minutes, though, so you'll have to wait a bit."

Aomine grins as Midorima scowls. "Great! I'll wait here, then."

There's a sports bar a few blocks away from the hospital that Midorima's about to turn up his nose to, but Aomine insists and says he'll pay and Midorima shrugs. They sit at the bar and order beers and let the awkward silence settle over them. There's a rerun of a playoff basketball game on the nearest television, so they stare at it as they sip. Aomine missed that game, though he tries to watch as much as he can.

"How could he have not called that goaltending?" Midorima says, more to himself than to Aomine.

"That wasn't goaltending at all," says Aomine. "That was just a blocked shot. The ball didn't get a chance to go out of the attacker's hands."

"So? It's awfully hard to block a dunk or a tip-in without it turning into goaltending."

"Like you were ever fast enough to block a dunk."

"Like you were ever tall enough."

"Oi! I'm not that much shorter than you are, and I can jump higher than you can anyway. Besides, no one ever got far enough to try and dunk on me."

Midorima snorts. "Bullshit. I remember that one game senior year when Kise dunked on you five times in a quarter."

"That doesn't count; Kise's in the NBA."

"You can't just make whatever exceptions you want! You said no one. And besides, that's far from the only game someone dunked on you."

"Whatever." Aomine rolls his eyes. "Anyway, that wasn't goaltending."

He's actually kind of missed arguing with Midorima and constantly provoking him, although his insistence on being right even when he's 500% wrong is still irritating as fuck to say the least. At least Midorima's not harping about how dunking is for idiots and how three-pointers are so much better anymore. And it's kind of refreshing spending time with someone who's not his father or his coworkers for once—his only friend left in Tokyo is Satsuki, who works all the time (and, he supposes, her fiancé, Wakamatsu). Kise and Tatsuya are in the US; Tetsu and Sakurai moved way up north after college; he's lost touch with pretty much everyone else. Midorima's a prick, but Aomine's known him since the first day of middle school, a while longer than he's known most of his friends and all of his coworkers.

It's actually Midorima who suggests they should exchange numbers (although he's had a hell of a lot of beer, which may or may not have something to do with that) and they walk back to Aomine's apartment building together because it's on the way to Midorima's place, too. The night ends with Aomine feeling a vague sense of satisfaction with himself.

Now that he's seen him once, Aomine can't stop noticing Midorima in the hospital. Aomine's taken to sneaking up behind Midorima and ruffling his hair to see how deeply he'll scowl and how hard he'll shove Aomine backwards. Apparently, they both have Fridays off, something one of the nurses divulges to Aomine when he asks her if she's seen him on a Friday afternoon when he's been at the hospital all day. Aomine switches to incessantly texting Midorima on those days and counting the variations of "go die" that Midorima sends as his replies (17 on the first Friday).

Midorima is apparently as lonely as Aomine, because even though he's always got some excuse lined up whenever Aomine asks him if he's free, his plans always end up dissipating when Aomine persists in asking (someday soon Aomine will probably get tired of having to ask seven times, "soon" meaning "when he makes some other friends"). He, too, seems willing to put up with the other's shenanigans if it means he has some familiar company. Then again, Midorima's never really had too many friends—Aomine can't recall that he had any in middle school (although, to be fair, they didn't hang out very often outside of basketball and even he wasn't really friends with most of his teammates, and Aomine paid absolutely zero attention in class and somehow Midorima was voted class representative so enough people in their class must have liked him well enough to vote for him).

His father is alert this afternoon, greeting him with a cough and a wave.

"Hey, Dad."

"Daiki," his father says. "Today is the eighteenth, isn't it?"

"Um." He pulls out his phone. "Yeah."

"Tomorrow would have been Kaede's seventy-ninth birthday."

"Oh. Yeah." Aomine has trouble remembering his own birthday, let alone anyone else's. When she was alive, he'd always managed to get his mother a card and flowers, though it was mostly due to his father or Taiga reminding him of the approaching date.

His father gestures for him to come closer. "Every year since she's been gone, I've gone to her grave on her birthday and I gave her the baseball updates. I need you to start doing that, okay?"

Aomine nods, bobbing his head for a few seconds while he formulates his question. "Is there anything I need to bring?"

"Bring some lilies of the valley. She liked those." His father coughs several times, eyes starting to water.

Aomine's mother had been a devoted fan of the Tokyo Yakult Swallows for as long as he could remember (he'd always assumed it had been since she'd moved to Tokyo, although he had no idea when that had happened, only that his mother had grown up in Shimane and left as a young woman). Whenever he had reason to stay at home during baseball season in the evening (which wasn't very often) the game would be on and his mother would be yelling at the television. His father liked game shows and basketball far better than he liked baseball (both he and Aomine agreed that it was pretty boring), but he could only watch them in the off-season or on the Swallows' days off.

Aomine doesn't follow baseball at all, so he spends the night researching what has happened late into the night (at least tomorrow is a Tuesday anyway) and gets caught up in stats he doesn't understand. It's now he realizes how little he really knew his mother, and how little effort he put into knowing about her interests and getting to know her as a person in the twenty-eight years they had shared on earth. He has no clue which stats his mother will care about and whether she cares more about pitching or hitting or defense or the standings, or if she wants to know about the league as a whole or just the Swallows, so he just sticks to memorizing as much as he can.

He buys some lilies of the valley at the local florist and brings that morning's newspaper so he can read the standings. He hasn't been to his mother's grave since the first anniversary of her death, when he'd stood awkwardly and acted like he didn't want to be there and his father had glared and told him not to come back next year as they were leaving. He remembers how to get there, though. No one has been here in a while, clearly, so he cleans it off and places the flowers on top.

"Hey, mom." Aomine feels kind of stupid. He's been to graves before, but he never talks. Still, he's carrying out the wishes of his dying father and even though at this point anything he does for his parents is probably too little too late that's no excuse for him to keep doing nothing. He recites last night's Swallows box score (a 6-2 loss to Hiroshima) and then the standings of both leagues, followed by as much as he can remember from his research the previous night. As he racks his brain, the words keep flowing out and he runs out of baseball but then starts talking about random stuff, how Satsuki's gotten engaged (his mom always liked Satsuki) and how his job is going and whatever thoughts pop into his head.

"Thanks for being born," he says before he leaves, fixing the way the lilies are arranged.

Somehow, the seventeenth of October sneaks up on Aomine. Unlike his birthday, or his mother's, or anyone else's, this is a day that he can always feel the significance of. It's a Friday, so he doesn't have to call in fake sick to work and he's preparing himself for the inevitable when the buzzer rings.

It's Midorima. Why he's even awake so early in the morning on an off day (probably had to wake up early for his stupid horoscope TV show), let alone why he's here, is definitely a question but it's one that Aomine would prefer asking face to face so he lets him up.

Midorima takes one look at the messy living room and wrinkles his nose like a cat faced with a new kind of cat food he's pretty sure he won't like. "Still a slob, I see."

"Did you come here to make snide remarks about my lifestyle, or is there an actual reason?"

He looks a bit jumpy at being asked that question right away, and Aomine's bullshit detector is about to go off. Midorima pushes up his glasses. "Mess is not a lifestyle. As your apartment is on the way to work, I decided to stop by. That's all."

Even for Midorima, that's a damn flimsy excuse. "Today is Friday. You don't work on Fridays."

Midorima's eyes are getting pretty shifty as he's caught in his lie (does no one else call his bullshit ever?) and starts edging toward the door. "I should get going, you know…You have things to do and all…"

Aomine is about to say that if Midorima's going to the hospital it would be rude not to wait for Aomine (because even though he's not going, he knows Midorima's not going, either). Instead, he lunges for Midorima and pins him against the door, staring intently into the bright green eyes.

"You're coming with me today," he declares. Because Midorima remembered and came to check on Aomine in his own, uselessly indirect Midorima-like way, and because Midorima cares. And because Aomine hates doing this alone and won't let this be the third year in a row.

It's so much easier to sit in front of Taiga's grave when he has someone else with him, even if it's someone who wasn't Taiga's friend—in fact, that might make it easier. Being at his mother's grave was one thing, what with the long wait between visits and his father giving him a specific task. He's brought food from Maji Burger (something he does every year) but sitting and eating gives him time to eat, time to remember and to wallow in self-indulgence (it's not really grief anymore, just regret and loneliness and making excuses for himself, like why he hasn't started dating again).

"You're making a mess," Midorima says.

Aomine throws up his hands and rolls his eyes. "I'm sharing some with Taiga! Do you know how much he loved Maji Burger?"

Midorima scowls. "Don't talk with your mouth full; it's vulgar. And that's not where you put the food."

Somehow, with him, it's okay to speak with humor and to argue and to make light of the situation. It's not depressing; he's not wallowing in self-pity. He's willing to admit to himself that he's doing okay (and though he could be doing better, it's his own damn fault he's not). It's okay, no, great, to talk basketball here because no one could talk basketball as long as Taiga or get as ridiculously excited about it as Taiga. And Midorima's even being kind of nice about it, trying to relax a little and not follow up everything Aomine says with an irritated retort, which is weird and fails spectacularly once they really get into the basketball discussion (although it's sure as hell fun to see Midorima try, and Aomine does appreciate the gesture).

Satsuki comes over that night; she went to Taiga's grave in the evening to pay her respects. She asks him how he's doing; he says he's all right and it feels like he's telling the truth this time and not just going through the motions to get her to stop bothering him.

"So did you go with anyone?" she says.

"Midorima."

She looks at him and squints; he's caught her by surprise. "Um…Dai-chan?"

"Yeah?"

"When you say Midorima, do you mean Midorima Shintarou?"

"Uh…yeah? Do we know anyone else named Midorima?"

"The same Midorima Shintarou about whom you once said, 'if there wasn't a stick shoved up his ass I'd shove his head up it'?"

"We were, like, twelve."

"Fourteen," she corrects him. "Since when are you two so close?"

Aomine shrugs. "I don't know. We've both been at the hospital a lot and started hanging out, and, you know…he showed up this morning, I think to check on me because he knows about today, so I just kind of took him with me."

"He showed up this morning. You let him come with you," she says, gesturing wildly with her hands

"Yes, Satsuki, that's what I said."

Her pink eyes are widening. "Dai-chan, are you serious?"

He rolls his eyes. "Why the fuck would I joke about this?" He's saved from the conversation that he senses is about to go in circles by his vibrating phone. It's a text message from Midorima. He grabs the phone and feels himself start to smile for some reason, even though it's just continuing their basketball argument from earlier (of course, Midorima has to be right) and Aomine shoots back a quick reply.

He looks up and Satsuki's leaning over his shoulder, pulling her hair away from her face that is plastered with absolutely the biggest smirk he's ever seen on her (and he's long since lost count of how many times she's smirked at him).

He's still confused as fuck. What is she going on about? "You," she says, jabbing him in the chest hard with a sharp fingernail, "like Midorin." She jabs his phone. "And Midorin," she pauses, "likes you."

This time it's his turn to stare blankly at her.

"You let him go with you to Kagamin's grave, after he showed up at your place, which means either you've had him over or he cares enough to find out where you live . You smiled when you saw his name on your phone screen and responded immediately. You're sending flirty little texts to each other about basketball."

"He's never been here before. He just walked me home," Aomine says, crossing his arms.

Satsuki rolls her eyes at him. "And that's not because he likes you or anything."

As far as Aomine knows, Satsuki hasn't seen Midorima in years. How does she know what he's like now? (Then again, Satsuki always knows everything about everyone.) Besides, he doesn't like Midorima. Not at all. No way, not that guy. Even if Midorima likes him (which probably isn't the case; Satsuki's just jumping to conclusions (the voice in his head whipsers that her conclusions are usually right) and it's really nothing; they're just both lonely and bored, right?) that doesn't mean Aomine likes him back. Midorima's still stuck up, plus he's sure that Midorima's said somehting to him before about incompatible horoscope signs and he never goes against Oha-Asa.

"I'll stay until you admit it," Satsuki says, pulling out her phone. "I can just do work on my phone."

"Wakamatsu will be mad."

"At you," Satsuki replies. "Besides, I think he's going out for a boys' night or something tonight."

Of course, she's right. No matter how many years pass, he's still Wakamatsu's favourite scapegoat, even when Wakamatsu knows it's not his fault.

His phone vibrates again. He tries very hard to physically restrain himself from jumping at it. Satsuki looks up from her own phone, eyebrows raised. Aomine sighs and looks at it. It's Midorima again, and no matter what Satsuki says it's not a flirty text message. It's just about basketball. Still, he can't stop from smiling. It's not the basketball talk; he does that on internet forums and it doesn't make him smile. They're arguing; he should be frowning, lips pursed or pouting, but he's not. Despite his best efforts (which, okay, it's him and his best efforts are still kind of lazy) he has to smile, not because he's winning the argument (at this point he's just trolling really; he knows exactly how wrong he is but he loves it when Midorima pulls out data and shoves it in his face and gets all angry and is so aggravatingly insistent and oh god did he really just say he loved something about Midorima? Fuck. Fuckfuckfuckfuck.) but because...he likes that his words can reach Midorima, wherever he is right now (presumably at home, and Aomine only has a vague idea of where that is). "Fuck."

"You can call Midorin for that," Satsuki says, letting that damn smirk play on her face again.

Aomine's father tells him things, trying to fit more and more between the coughs than he can possibly say or that Aomine can possibly understand and remember. He talks about his childhood in Tokyo, how his parents owned a fruit stand but he sold it because he wanted to be a white collar worker, how bored he'd gotten stuck in a dead end job, how he'd married Aomine's mother because they were in the same (middle aged, childless, office worker) boat, how Aomine had been a surprise and neither of them had any idea how to raise a child, how Aomine's mother had been widowed at age twenty five when her high school sweetheart had been run over by a car and she'd moved to Tokyo to get away from everything and how she was going to tell Aomine about this especially after what happened to Taiga but never got to, how much he'd regretted not having children sooner, how much he'd regretted yelling at Aomine over his mother's grave, how much he misses Aomine's mother, how much he wishes he made more of an effort to know his own son (and Taiga before he died), how glad he is that Aomine doesn't smoke.

He knows he doesn't have much time, has been counting the days and feels his lungs constrict more and more and hears the wheezes get louder each day, feels his cheeks sink in and his body become more and more emaciated. There's no use lying to him, so Aomine doesn't and his father thanks him and Aomine pretends not to see his eyes watering.

Midorima, Aomine decides, is the kind of guy who likes to be spoiled a bit. Aomine's not so great at dating (he's only had one real relationship, and Taiga knew what he was doing even less than Aomine did) but all of Satsuki's dreamy sighs about the gentlemanly guy of her dreams have given him some idea of how to sweep someone off his or her feet. So on a night when they would have gone to the bar, Aomine instead keeps walking, tugging on Midorima's arm to keep him from going inside, and down the block to a more upscale restaurant. Midorima raises his eyebrows, but of course he loves this kind of stuff so he doesn't question it.

Now that Aomine's really paying attention, the elegant way Midorima holds his utensils and takes small bites of his food is really kind of captivating, and he miserably fails at not staring (luckily, Midorima seems too preoccupied with his food to take notice and freak out about it). Aomine lets Midorima pick the wine (because Aomine knows jack shit about wine) and he's picked a really nice white that slides smoothly down his throat.

Midorima tries to take out his wallet but Aomine refuses point-blank. It's at this point when Midorima actually blushes a pale pink and it's very hard for Aomine to sign the receipt while he's so fascinated by Midorima's face.

They go for a walk in a nearby park together and talk, about the food and the park and basketball and work, Midorima seems to be headed somewhere so Aomine just kind of follows his lead, and they end up at the door to a fairly old high-rise building that looks like it's in good shape. They stand outside, Midorima clearly at his destination, which is weird. If this is Midorima's building, then Aomine doesn't know his hometown as well as he thought because this is definitely the opposite way from the hospital that his building is.

"Thank you so much," Midorima says, bowing his head in an out-of-place gesture of humility. He raises his face and his eyes meet Aomine's. Midorima's hand twitches almost violently.

Of course. This is Midorima, and waiting for him to make a move is like waiting for a star to burn out. So Aomine's hand does more than twitch; it reaches up to Midorima's cheek and Aomine leans up and kisses Midorima.

Aomine removes his lips but not his hand, and they stand frozen for several seconds staring at each other. And then Midorima's expression softens into an unmistakable smile. "Good night."

"Good night," Aomine echoes as he watches Midorima turn and enter the building.

His father's doing better than he's been doing lately today; he can form sentences between the coughs and his eyes are bright and almost pierce right through Aomine. They talk about last night's Swallows game (Aomine went to a sports bar with Midorima and they caught the first few innings and Aomine's father saw about that much between naps on the TV out in the patient activity room), the lumbering first baseman Maeshima's second-inning double that seemed to ring through the air, crashing off the wall and over the head of the right fielder who'd tried to play it on the carom and instead had to chase after it as Maeshima rumbled into second and stopped, already red in the face. Aomine's baseball knowledge is still vague and incomplete, though, so the conversation peters out and they sit in silence for a while. Aomine stares at the still blue curtain separating his father's bed from the one on the other side of the bed that is empty once more. It's been a while, and he's spacing out, and he figures his father's gone to sleep when he clears his throat, a pained look on his face (god, his throat must be more than raw from that constant coughing).

"I want tiger lilies," his father says, wheezing. "We had lilies of the valley at your mother's funeral, but I want tiger lilies."

Lilies are the flowers of death; someone told him that once (it might have been Tatsuya). They probably would have had tiger lilies at Taiga's funeral even if lilies had no hackneyed significance, because they were his favourite flower. Aomine had often teased him about that ("It's because of your name, right? Should I call you Tiger Lily, now?" "You're pronouncing it wrong, dumbass.") although he did admit they were pretty ("but all flowers are pretty, I guess.").

"Lilium lancifolium," his father says and falls into a fit of coughing. When it subsides, he continues. "That's the scientific name. Those are the real tiger lilies."

Aomine had no idea there were fake ones, and he's not sure he can remember the Latin name, but he nods anyway. "Tiger lilies. Got it."

A week later, he gets the call from the hospital. This is it; his father's lungs are about to give out completely. He tells the secretary that he has to leave, and she knows all about the situation so she nods and tells him to take a few personal days and that they have enough people to cover for him for a while.

His dad's completely doped up; he told the hospital that he wants to go out like this, completely high and free of pain (if Aomine could choose any way to go, he'd probably choose that way, too). He's pretty much unreachable at this point; his wrinkled, freckled hand is limp as Aomine grasps it.

There are things Aomine wants to ask, like, "Are you proud of me?" but he had his time to ask them and his father had his time to answer them as they hovered in the air but they did not say anything.

The memorial service is a few days later. Tetsu says he'll come down to Tokyo if Aomine wants him to, but he's never met Aomine's dad so it would be pointless for him to take time off work, even though he really appreciates the gesture. Tetsu replies cryptically (because he's Tetsu and that's the way he works) that he can tell Aomine is being taken care of well, and by that Aomine assumes he means Satsuki.

Satsuki cries during the small service, but she's the only one. Aomine doesn't expect Wakamatsu or Midorima to cry, because they're not criers and neither of them ever met his father. But Satsuki knew him before he was bedridden, before the emphysema really set in, when his arms were strong and he took up space and he cooked dinner after he came home from work and his hair was thick and blue-black and he was not young but he was not ancient and frail.

It's just the four of them; Aomine has never known any of his father's friends very well and has no idea how many of them are even still alive let alone how to contact them and even now is only beginning to understand how little of his father's life he had been privy to. He's still kind of reeling, but he's not about to cry or break down or anything. He's mostly confused and in over his head, but he's remembered the tiger lilies, clutches a bouquet of them tightly and lays them over the new grave, and over his mother's as well.

The legal things are taken care of rather easily. Even after all the hospital bills and the expense of smoking a pack a day for more than fifty years, he still had a substantial amount of money left in his savings account. Plus, there's the house, something that Aomine had somehow forgotten about in the midst of everything.

"What do you mean, you forgot about the house and no one's been there for five months?"

Aomine doesn't really get why Midorima is so mad; it's not like it's his house (something tells him that he shouldn't say that out loud, though, so he doesn't). Instead, he sighs and says, "He told me all the bills and stuff were paid automatically from his account and his pension was deposited directly, too."

"That's not the point. What if the house was robbed? What if someone destroyed it?"

Aomine suppresses the urge to roll his eyes. "I'm sure it's fine. And there's nothing really worth taking anyway."

He smirks as Midorima pulls into the driveway and the house looks perfect (the lawn, however, is full of frozen dead overgrown weeds). "We haven't seen the inside," Midorima says but he's frowning harder than usual and puts the car in neutral instead of park, realizing his mistake only after he's turned off the car and Aomine keeps sniggering and pointing at the gear shift.

Aomine unlocks the three latches one by one and opens the door. The house is a mess; Midorima looks momentarily triumphant. Aomine shrugs. "The old man wasn't much of a housekeeper."

"I see the apple doesn't fall too far from the tree."

"Anyway, there really isn't that much." He gestures toward the old tube television, the ratty loveseat covered in dust, and the stained coffee table in the living room. "Maybe the piano's worth something, but even if it's worth an awful lot I might as well just sell it with the house."

"It doesn't look like it," Midorima says. (What does he know about the piano market, anyway?) "Besides, you should go through all the papers and shred the ones you don't want others to have."

As much as Aomine dreads that tedious job, he knows Midorima has a point (damn it; he's so infuriating—he's annoyingly thorough and he's actually right a lot of the time). Still, all the paperwork is going to be in the file cabinets in the basement probably, and it might all be waterlogged by now. Midorima volunteers to check all the other drawers in the house for paperwork (well, he suggests that "they" do it and Aomine tells him to do it while he goes downstairs, which is kind of the same thing) so Aomine goes into the horrible musty basement that had been the most dreaded corner of his childhood world.

He hasn't been down here since he was about twelve, had started avoiding it and managed to keep it up without even thinking about it. It's smaller than he remembered, and the stark ceiling bulb illuminates it better than he'd thought it did. There's mouse shit on the floor and he hears some scratching around, but it's hard to keep them out of the house completely and they don't appear to be in the kitchen anymore. The papers are dry, but there aren't that many of them, and Aomine manages to stuff them all into one of his old gym bags that he finds hanging on a nail in the wall.

They go through the papers together on Aomine's couch that night, Aomine reviewing the information and passing pretty much everything to Midorima, who seems to get a thrill out of sticking the paper in the shredder. God, he's weird; Aomine hates this stuff—but then again, he should be expecting this because Midorima likes to feel important and useful and to have control over everything, so this is just up his alley, double-checking Aomine on the importance of the documents and making sure he doesn't miss a page because two are stuck together or something and then sticking it in the shredder and finalizing the destruction. He looks content, and relaxes into the routine, and Aomine finds himself a bit revolted by how absolutely adorable Midorima looks right now—he's shredding paper. There's nothing adorable about that at all. But he can't resist moving closer and leaning his body up against Midorima's. He's pretty sure Midorima will tense up and start frowning, but he doesn't; he threads his arm around Aomine and reads the papers over his shoulder.

For the first time in eight years, Aomine dreams.

He's three years old, struggling to put on overalls (he's been shouting about how he's a big boy who can do it all by himself now) while his dad watches with an amused look on his face. He's snapping it all wrong and no matter what he does the straps won't go over the right shoulders, and he stomps in frustration, tiny fists clenched.

"Here." His father's voice is deep and rich.

The large, gentle tanned hands un-snap and re-snap the legs of the overalls, and then they work loose the straps from their knots and buckle them securely into place. His father lifts him up in the air and holds him tightly.

Aomine wakes up with his face wet and buried in Midorima's stomach. He lifts his head and discovers that he can't stop the tears from streaming down his face.

His stirring wakes Midorima, who's usually a pretty sound sleeper. Somehow, Aomine starts crying even harder, shoulders shaking while he hunches over and puts his head down. He feels the snot dripping from his nose, too, and tries to wipe it on his shirt but his hands are shaking too much and he only cries harder at his own ineptitude.

It takes him a while to realize that one of Midorima's hands is rubbing circles on his back, and eventually Aomine starts taking deep, shuddering breaths and the steady motion of the warm, heavy hand slowly calms him and he eventually stops crying. Midorima lifts his hand off, and then a few seconds later a balled-up piece of damp cloth hits him in the side of the head. Aomine wipes off his face with it and then tosses it onto the floor. Midorima pulls him back down into a lying position, and Aomine rolls over so he's back to being half on top of Midorima again.

"Sorry about the shirt."

"It's your shirt anyway."

The smell of strong, fresh coffee permeates the air as Aomine reaches over and slaps the alarm clock. The damn thing really has taken a beating; he's surprised it's lasted this long—he'd bought it at a discount variety store for 500 yen fifteen years ago and its tone is still as loud and grating as it was the day he got it. The days are still a decent length; it's late September and the sun continues to send lasers through the venetian blinds. It's easier to get up when the weather's like this, when even closing his eyes he feels the brightness and he can be comfortable with the blankets thrown onto the other side of the bed.

He's able to get ready in twenty minutes, running a comb through his hair (it's getting long again, damn it) as he makes his way into the kitchen, where Midorima is watching Oha-Asa on TV and eating toast. He grabs his thermos, heavy with coffee, and grabs a slice of toast, taking a bite and then returning it to the plate. Midorima scowls, but kisses him goodbye anyway.

The pollen in the air makes Aomine's eyes water, and he notices it all the more because he's actually awake and not just running on autopilot. The coffee is strong and rich and delicious and the unsettling memories are kept in his subconscious for now. Perhaps Midorima should have been a barista—but no. Aomine wants to keep this perfect coffee all to himself. Sure, he has no idea what's in store for next week or next year any more than he ever has, but he's got a boyfriend who's a god with the coffee machine and his past isn't tangling him up and bleeding him out like he's a fish in a six-pack ring caught on barbed wire netting. Things are looking up.