The next day, Makoto is just about to go to the cafeteria to get lunch when he sees a shadow over his desk and glances up to find Fuji Kuroda standing silently beside it, a blue bento box in her hands that she bows to offer to him. "I made you lunch," she says simply.
Makoto is able to recover quickly enough to take it with a warm smile, but inwardly he feels like he's been completely blindsided again. This is way more effort than he ever planned on putting into their "relationship," but Fuji's been marching right along and acting as though they actually like each other. He sets the box on his desk and slides off the lid, glancing down in surprise at the rice neatly packed into one side and the assorted eggs, tempura and vegetables on the other, arranged and presented elegantly.
"Thank you, Fuji," he says, smiling up at her, but her attention is across the room. Makoto follows her gaze and finds Koujirou standing in the open doorway to their classroom, staring at Fuji.
He doesn't speak and he doesn't make any gestures, but some kind of understanding passes between the two of them, and when he turns away, Fuji says, "Pardon me," and walks out the door.
Makoto is confused for only half a second before he becomes enraged. He knows Koujirou has some connection to Fuji, and maybe even a soft spot for her. Teammate or not, if he gets in his way, he's nothing but garbage. Abandoning the homemade lunch, Makoto gets out of his desk and heads to the door, sticking his head out into the hall in time to catch the back of Fuji's head as she walks down the hall and disappears around a corner. He follows silently, keeping far enough behind to avoid being heard or seen, and ends up standing on the staircase that leads up to the roof, holding the door open just a bit to hear pieces of conversation carried by the wind.
"So you're making him boxed lunches now?" he hears Koujirou ask.
He thinks he hears Fuji mutter a response, but it's too soft for him to make out the exact words.
"What are you going to do after this, then?"
He wonders why this is any of Koujirou's goddamned business.
"I don't know Imayoshi well enough to say one way or the other," he hears, frowning at the mention of the name, "They're similar enough that it doesn't really matter."
Makoto is already aggravated at missing half of the conversation and a lot of context, but Koujirou's comment only makes him angrier. He doesn't bother moving, remaining in the hallway even as he hears them stop talking and footsteps start approaching the door to come back downstairs. Fuji is first, and the moment she opens the door and sees him there, her eyes widen. Makoto makes sure to smile, nice and wide and menacing, just so she knows he heard every word. She scurries past him.
Koujirou stops at the top of the stairs, the door leading to the roof slamming behind him, and Makoto rushes up, grabbing a fistful of his uniform below his throat, and rams him against the steel door. "You should've told me you liked her, Furuhashi," he sneers, "I would've beaten the feeling out of you a lot sooner."
Koujirou winces at the initial impact but doesn't react otherwise. "It's exactly the same pattern," he says.
"And what the hell does that mean?"
"The same pattern as when we were in middle school." Koujirou looks him dead in the eye. "When she started dating Imayoshi."
Makoto bites back a few angry accusations for the moment. "What do you mean?"
"Fuji confessed to him suddenly the day after they met despite showing little to no interest. She waited for him after school and went to basketball practice so they could walk home together. Then, she started bringing him boxed lunches." Makoto doesn't want to show any weakness, but Koujirou's stare is starting to bother him, so he pretends he's satisfied and releases his grip on his uniform. Koujirou straightens his tie, looking completely unruffled otherwise.
"Who cares?" he grumbles, "She's anal retentive. I wouldn't be surprised if she had a routine for dating, like everything else in her life."
"That's not the point, and you know it isn't."
He rounds on him, glaring. "What the fuck is this about? And what were you talking about earlier? If you get in my way, I'll make sure you have an accident that ruins your legs for the next few weeks at the very least. Don't think I can't find a replacement for you before the next game."
"I'm not going to get in your way," he says in an infuriatingly calm tone, "I just wanted you to know."
"Know what?" Makoto scoffs, "That's nothing I didn't already know. Remember what I said; don't bother looking after her."
"I'm trying to look out for both of you," Koujirou says quietly, "You like to shatter people, Hanamiya. I think sometimes you get overexcited and miss when there's already glass all over the floor."
Makoto raises a brow. "Getting poetic all of the sudden?"
Koujirou doesn't say anything else, though, and since finding a substitute would be more inconvenient than he lets on, he decides to walk away before he gets any angrier. Glass on the floor, he repeats in his head with a roll of his eyes. What's that supposed to even mean? Is he saying Kuroda was broken before he got there?
Makoto is always careful. If Koujirou thinks a little broken glass is going to keep him from utterly destroying what's left of her, he doesn't know him nearly as well as he thinks.
Makoto is minding his own business as he comes into school in the morning when a slender hand closes around his forearm and drags him down the hallway and into an empty science classroom. Kinaka Daicho glances both ways down the hall behind him and hurriedly shuts the door, looking visibly unsettled.
"Did you need something?" he asks impatiently, and she turns to him with a nonchalant smile, but he sees her hands shaking.
"I've got an update for you," she says, "Would've told you sooner, but it's impossible to get you by yourself anymore. Kuroda is practically glued to your side, since you're dating the ice queen herself."
"Excuses," he rolls his eyes, "What're you so afraid of? If she's glued to my side, she must not be bothering you."
The corners of Kinaka's lips twitch in annoyance. "You certainly wouldn't think so, but…."
He cuts her off with a passive wave of his hand. "I don't care. What did you want to tell me?"
She glares at him, setting one hand on her hip, but doesn't argue. "You've been to Kuroda's house now, right?"
"Yeah. I go every day to work on this stupid project."
"Good. The recordings of your game are stored on her personal computer. As far as I know, she thinks it's risky to make physical copies, so you should be good if you get rid of those."
Makoto nods. "Good to know."
Kinaka's gaze hardens. "That's not going to be enough by itself," she says, "Kuroda's just going to get dirt on you in some other way, and we'll be back to square one. You're going to have to discredit her completely so nobody will take her seriously anymore."
"I'm working on it," Makoto says with a shrug, "I'm still in the information-gathering phase."
"Well, hurry up," Kinaka says with a frown, "I really don't care what happens to you, but my freedom is tied to yours, so you'd better not back yourself into a corner or do something stupid. Kuroda knows what she's doing, and she'll take you for a ride if she can." She jabs him in the chest with one delicately manicured finger. "Don't fuck this up."
"I know what I'm doing, Daicho," he scoffs, knocking her hand away. "Worry about yourself." He opens the classroom door and checks briefly to make sure Fuji isn't somewhere nearby listening, then scolds himself for being paranoid.
Shoichi Imayoshi has been bothering the hell out of Makoto for weeks despite not being physically present. On one hand, if no one had ever said anything, he wouldn't have had any reason to connect him to Fuji, but ever since he heard they'd dated once, his name just keeps coming up until it seems the two of them have some intricately connected past that Makoto is going to have to untangle if he ever wants to know anything.
And since he's too proud to ask Imayoshi a goddamned thing, he's just going to have to stick with the people immediately in the vicinity. He's asked Kinaka, who didn't know nearly as much as he'd hoped, and Koujirou, who's only become more and more obnoxious as this fiasco has dragged on. But now that they're apparently dating and at least pretending to be open with one another, he doesn't see why he can't just ask Fuji.
Except the second the name "Imayoshi" passes his lips, Fuji looks up at him with wide, deer-caught-in-headlights eyes and freezes, pencil hovering over her notebook and book spread open with her free hand on the kitchen table. "Imayoshi?" she repeats uneasily, "What about him?"
Makoto pretends he isn't all that interested, shrugging and looking down at his own paper. He has several pages full of geese and flowers and goose heads popping out of flowers and flowers turning into geese and all sorts of weird shit—he's found it to be somewhat therapeutic. "Just curious," he says, "I heard you knew him, which is funny, because we went to the same middle school."
She doesn't answer. Makoto glances up to make sure he hasn't pushed too far too fast, but Fuji is still just staring down at the table, uncharacteristically quiet.
"We weren't friends, exactly," Makoto continues, "But we talked now and then."
He wants to press a little harder but never gets the chance, because Mrs. Kuroda wanders into the kitchen at that moment looking for something and Fuji takes the opportunity to excuse herself to use the restroom and escape the conversation. "How's the project coming?" Mrs. Kuroda asks.
Makoto smiles sheepishly. "Ah, a little slowly. We're taking the planning very seriously."
"Oh, I understand. Besides, you've got plenty of time." Her gaze travels to Fuji's notebook at the geese flying across the page, but she asks him, "So you went to the same school as Imayoshi?"
Makoto looks up abruptly, surprised. Was she eavesdropping? "I did," he says.
Mrs. Kuroda still isn't looking at him, but her smile is a little weaker than usual. "Hm," is all she says.
Makoto hesitates a beat before he decides to ask, "He's a friend of Fuji's, isn't he?"
Mrs. Kuroda laughs softly. "Goodness, no," she says, and straightens up, attention on Makoto again. She's still smiling a bit, but it seems off now. Makoto has the strangest nagging feeling, like when he mistakes someone for being a complete idiot and they turn around and try to pull the rug out from underneath him. "They dated for a little while," she says, "But they broke it off before too long, which is just as well. That boy was no good. He was lazy, and careless, and not very bright, and just all wrong for her." Mrs. Kuroda is frowning for the first time that he's ever seen, eyes narrow and gaze fixed on point on the wall somewhere next to his head. "I couldn't stand someone like that dating my daughter."
When she suddenly meets his eyes, Makoto's breath catches in his throat and he feels like the tables have been turned, like he's the prey being pinned down by a fearsome predator. Mrs. Kuroda smiles again, but he can't see it as the same blindly optimistic one he thought it was before. For some reason, he thinks she knows a lot more than he realized. "But you're not like that, are you, Makoto?" she asks, and her tone is cheerful but she's staring hard enough that she might as well be looking right through him.
Makoto forces a smile. "No, Mrs. Kuroda."
Fuji comes back from the bathroom then and Mrs. Kuroda moves to let her into her chair, offering to get them some cookies if they'd like, though Fuji turns her down and she drifts elsewhere in the house. Makoto feels unsettled for the rest of his visit and can't stop looking up every few minutes, wondering if Mrs. Kuroda is lurking around the corner listening, if she somehow knows.
What the fuck have I gotten myself into? he wonders, and glances across the table at Fuji, who's already gone back to sketching her geese.
"There's a game this Saturday, correct?"
Makoto looks up from the bento Fuji prepared and finds her slipping into the empty desk beside him. "Yeah, there is."
"I will attend," she says, and pauses a moment before adding, "You are free to play in whatever manner you see fit to attain victory. I will take no action against you."
Makoto raises a brow. "You seriously expect me to believe that?"
She looks offended, but Makoto can't imagine why; she can't honestly think he'd trust her. "As long as you win," she says, holding his gaze, "Then I have nothing to criticize you for."
Despite trying not to think about it, his thoughts immediately fly back to the conversation he had with her mother the previous afternoon, and Fuji's bizarre insistence that her family was extraordinary. "Is this a pride thing for you?" he asks, "You want me to be just as 'high achieving' as your family?"
She frowns but she doesn't answer. Makoto wonders if he hit the mark.
"Well, you've got nothing to worry about," he says smoothly, "We'll win."
"Good," Fuji says evenly, "Because if you lose, you'll have fallen out of my good graces and I'll have no choice but to reveal your secret and break up with you."
Makoto isn't the type to let others have the last word, but he isn't quite sure how to respond to that, so he lets Fuji walk back to her own desk without saying anything. Could this really be about nothing more than appearances? He thought for certain Fuji knew what he was up to and was trying to act first, but this is throwing him off. Now he has to win, and depending on the strength of the other team, he might just be giving her more blackmail material.
It's too early to say that he's messed up. He knows Fuji has footage of his previous games uploaded to her computer, so all he has to do is manage to find it without her noticing him snooping around or her mother deciding that he, too, is not good enough for her daughter. Even though Fuji is going to be glued to his side since they're doing a group project, and her mother has nothing better to do than listen in on their conversations.
He may have backed himself into a corner. Just maybe. He isn't going to admit it yet.
