Kuroko no Basuke © Tadatoshi Fujimaki and I'm not gaining any profit from writing this fanfiction

0,5. chasing (away) dreams

He wanted to die.

If only it could be done quickly and painlessly, Tetsuya wouldn't give it a second thought. He would just sit there, waiting for the grim reaper to come and pick him up. But he was a coward, and he has been suffering for more than enough.

The announcement hit him like a tsunami wave; it ate anything and everything on his way—Tetsuya's heart, Tetsuya's mind, Tetsuya's being—and he drowned. His lungs choked up on tears and he's breathing in fluids and his ears deafened by water. Tetsuya's dying. He's dying somewhere far, far away off reality; a clone replaced him, functioning like a real person in a real world, well and alive.

He tried to break free, though still at the end of the day he would just succumb to his feelings again, sinking in the very same pool of mud, over and over.

He craved for a way out, but feelings are like shadow, creeping out from the bottom of his heart to the surface of his consciousness. Feelings have hungry hands, with long fingers and claws, touching everything they could reach. Feelings are something that keep hanging on the corners of the room, poisoning the air, haunting him at night when he stares at the ceiling. They're akin to quicksand, and Tetsuya couldn't escape.

More often than not, he despised himself for being so weak, for being a disappointment, for being such a selfish person. Tetsuya also hated Ryouta for being so nice to him, he hated Ryouta for letting himself be taken for granted, he hated Ryouta for loving him too much. He hated his life—for being a grand façade, for the lies that he imposed to himself, for having to act like everything was fine.

And above all he truly hated the fact that he couldn't be like Ryouta—who never hated anything or anyone, who kept living while dreaming and clinging onto the sky lights (even though he knew the stars above weren't real).

But those were Ryouta's dreams, and everyone has dreams; Kuroko Tetsuya used to have dreams; of a distant future where he could be a novelist and live with the person he loves. He would one day woke up in the morning and catch a nice smell from the kitchen, then walk there to find that his soul mate was making breakfast. They would eat together like nothing else mattered, and in the beautiful Sunday afternoon they would lie on the sofa doing nothing, with books scattered around them, while feeling grateful for the warm tea on the table and the comfort of each other's presence. They would talk about history and dramas, debating over which playwright and which author was the better one. Tetsuya would then recite an old Japanese poetry and he knew that one person who appreciated something like it would be Akashi Seijuurou. He knew that Akashi's ideal future would be the same as his.

Tetsuya was right and their dreams were alike; but Akashi had a different image of whom the soul mate was.

Tetsuya was wrong, so very wrong. He was wrong for thinking that they were walking side by side, wrong for thinking that they saw each other in the same way, wrong for thinking that he stood a chance. Wrong for thinking they would make dreams come true together.

And by then, he knew his dreams were dead. Tetsuya chased them away, he swept it clean from his mind, but the scattered remained, lingering in the corners like the smell of something decaying—in which you could never get rid of it even though the source isn't there anymore. The dreams were still there no matter what he did, but they weren't his dreams anymore, those were somebody else's.

Tetsuya now didn't have dreams, but what are people without dreams, anyway?

(They aren't living, they aren't people. They're just shadow, who kept on trying to convince themselves and everyone that they're human.)

And so that night he approached Ryouta on the dinner table, with a cellphone in one hand, screen maliciously bright as it showed an email which the two of them had gotten.

"It's a must," Tetsuya said, "it's a must that we attend Akashi-kun and Midorima-kun's wedding."