(A/N: I am terrible at not updating. This is for doro. Don't die before your birthday. It would suck if you did.)

three;

Back when they were still in middle school, Satsuki was actually thankful on very small occasions that Daiki had turned into a massive jerk. It was somewhat handy to have him around whenever she went out to attend matches – and not just because of his monstrous skill. Boys from other schools apparently possessed just as much of a weakness for girls as the Teikou students did; Satsuki couldn't remember how many times some strange boy had tried to talk to her while she was trying to use her Analyse ability. It was no use telling them that Tetsuya was her boyfriend because boys from other schools seldom noticed that Tetsuya existed at all. Satsuki couldn't bring herself to be upset about that because that was kind of the point of Tetsuya's Misdirection ability.

When Daiki was around, he scared other people off. Perhaps it had something to do with his dark skin, his narrow eyes, his tall physique and his animalistic scowl. Could be. All Daiki had to do was thumb his nose and say, "Haaaaaah?" in that lazy drawl of his and all the boys in the vicinity would run for the hills. It certainly saved Satsuki from having to deal with strange boys.

"Heh," Daiki would say at these times with undeniable smugness. "Bunch of assholes."

"Look who's talking," Satsuki retorted, but she smiled anyway. Daiki was really much more harmless than he seemed. Honestly speaking, he was one of the safest guys for her to be around.

Satsuki thought this, even though she knew beyond a shadow of doubt that her childhood friend was one of the weirdest, most perverted teenage boys in earthly existence.

Daiki knew the name, face and bra size of every single member of AKB48. He had posters of busty idols covering every square inch of his walls and his bedroom floor was littered with soiled tissues and torn pages from girly magazines. Satsuki discovered this when she was cleaning his room for him one day.

"Oi, stop looking at my stuff!" Daiki told her irritably, while he just sat lazily on his bed and turned the page of one of his magazines. Girly magazines did not count towards his 'No Book' rule. If they did, he would have considered himself a voracious reader.

"This is shameful! Dai-chan, this is totally the worst!"

"That's why you should stop looking at it."

"… Why are their boobs bigger than mine."

Daiki peered down at Satsuki from over the top of his magazine. He looked her up and down and then he snorted.

"You're getting there," he said casually.

At the time, his comment only made Satsuki roll her eyes, but later on, she found herself recollecting that little sketch of a moment in a bit more detail. It should have made her uncomfortable, knowing that Daiki noticed these things about her, but it didn't. It was just another stupid fault of his she would have to tolerate, just like everything else about him.

(It was Daiki, too, who first noticed when she had finally attained the status of the models in his magazines. He nudged her during practice and said, "F, huh?" and she whacked him for that because he deserved it.

"Do you think Tetsu-kun might notice?" she asked in the same breath, casting a hopeful glance towards Tetsuya, who was too busy tying his shoelaces to notice her looking at him.

"Why don't you go ask him?"

"Eek! No way! My feelings for Tetsu-kun are pure!"

"… Then why talk about breasts?")

In the end, Daiki was the boy she had grown up with, and she figured if she could be comfortable mentioning perverted things around him, she could also be comfortable talking about the one thing that had tied them together for as long as they had known each other.

Now that Teikou was over and done with, she was the only one who could really talk to Daiki now. Tetsuya was gone, the others too – and just like it had been in the beginning, it was down to the two of them. She was the only one who could convince Daiki to continue playing basketball.

Right from the beginning, it was an uphill battle.

Because, when it was just the two of them…

"Hey, Dai-chan, what are you gonna be when you grow up?"

"Huh? Why do you ask that?"

"Well, if you're not going to play basketball…"

"… Hmph."

"… What are you gonna be, The Idolmaster?"

"Ugh, that was lame, Satsuki."

"Hey, I'm just looking out for you!"

"Yeah, well, you can quit it. I don't need you hanging all over me twenty-four-seven."

"Hmph, you're so unbelievable! Why do I even put up with you?"

… They always ended up bickering.

The problem with Daiki was that, out of all the Generation of Miracles, he was the strongest. Where the others would derive a sense of challenge out of playing each other, Daiki was simply assured of his foreknowledge of victory. If he had ever known defeat, perhaps he would have thought differently, and yet not even telling him about Tetsuya's promise changed his mind, because Daiki was quite right in dismissing his old friend from the equation entirely. ("He can't beat me, Satsuki. He has to find someone else to be his light and there's no one as strong as me.")

Secretly, Satsuki had faith, or at least she clung to a small, vain hope. In the long idle holidays before school started at Touou, Satsuki was at Daiki's house every day. Without the occasional match to turn up to, he was even lazier than usual. He slept past noon on most days and on one occasion, she turned up to his house at around three in the afternoon, only to have Daiki's mother inform her that he was still in bed.

This all filled her with a sense of world weariness. However she was going about it, she was doing it wrong. Daiki could move mountains but he couldn't move his own lazy backside. He frustrated her. Why couldn't he be more like Tetsuya?

That's it, Satsuki thought one day. She had had enough. Daiki was the stupidest, most brutish, most asshole-dickhead-lazy-chicken-shit she had ever met in her life. She rang him up one night and told him, most forthrightly,

"Dai-chan, I'm not talking to you anymore."

"Thank Christ! And wait, what for?"

"Because you are so stubborn and I can't get you to do anything that's good for you, so I'm just giving up now, so there!"

"Yeah, whatever. I can live without you."

He didn't last two days.

To be fair, it was hard for Satsuki too. She found herself thinking at any random hour of the clock whether Daiki was actually managing to take care of himself; in her mind, he really needed someone to babysit him.

So when Daiki rang her – even though he chose the absolute worst moment to do it, which was while Satsuki was watching her favourite TV show, and that was so Daiki, stupid idiot – she felt a little relieved.

"Hey," he said. "I didn't think you were serious."

"Of course I was serious," she snapped, rolling her eyes, though Daiki had no way of knowing that.

"Come over," he said.

"No."

"I want you to do my bed."

"That gives me even less incentive to come over!"

Daiki grumbled. Listening to him, Satsuki felt oddly calm, contemplative, ambivalent, even. There was no other way to describe the feeling that came over her.

Daiki was selfish. He was an immature brat who never did anything for himself, who constantly took her for granted, and who would never, ever say please, sorry or thank you. He was an utter genius, frustrated by the ineptitude of others, too powerful for his own body. He had never had to lift a finger to get anything in his life and still, he had everything a boy his age could reasonably ask for.

… And he was lonely.

It had to happen eventually. Perhaps it was only inevitable. The longer she tried to make him see sense, the more his eyes became blinded to something else.

At that stage, they were only really interacting with each other. Characteristically enough, Daiki never got out of his house and did much of anything. As for Satsuki, she had already begun to pour research and analysis on all the high schools that Touou would possibly play against. She investigated the current students of Seirin, Kaijo, Shuutoku and all the other schools that the separated Generation of Miracles would now attend. She never talked with any of these players, only stayed up to late hours watching them on videos, her eyes glinting with consummate analytical effort. She was surprised to find that Seirin was really a rather weak school, though it had some obvious potential, considering its team was comprised entirely of first-year students. Could Tetsuya really hope to challenge Daiki with such a weak team behind him? No point in thinking about it. It was Tetsu-kun – he was the one player whose growth and movements were too quadratic to predict.

Daiki would not have been interested in any of this, so she didn't mention it to him. Even back in Teikou, he had never taken note of her data. (Ironically, it was the dour, generally unfriendly Midorima who had always paid the most attention.) When she was with Daiki, spending the last days of her holidays with him, it gradually became clear to her that his mind had become fixated on something else altogether.

Daiki, she had always known, was driven almost purely by instinct. It showed in every aspect of his playing style. He never paused to think about anything, but that was perhaps because he thought through all the possible plays so quickly his body came to remember what his mind did not. He wasn't stupid so much as he was perilously one-track minded; and the distinction came to her one day as she was sitting around in his room, licking an icy pole stick and staring vacantly at one of his posters. Out of the corner of her eyes, she could see that though Daiki was silent, he was sitting closer to her than he usually did and his eyes never left her for a moment. One could always interpret his eyes to have a hungry, lean look about them, but today it was unmistakeable.

"Dai-chan," she said, as she finished licking her ice cream clean, "you're acting weird today."

She knew what he was probably thinking about but wondered if the right thing to do was really to leave. After all, she thought she was making some progress on the basketball front. She chattered to him enthusiastically about matches she had seen on TV and he didn't tell her to shut up, which was a good sign. He didn't totally hate basketball, he was merely bored by it, and Satsuki hoped that if he became bored enough of his own boredom, he would return to basketball, if only for the sake of filling up time.

In response to her pointed remark, Daiki only grunted, shifting a little on his bed. There was something that was wholly alien to Satsuki about the teenage Daiki. It had nothing to do with him losing interest in basketball. She would just never understand him the way she had understood him as a child. Something told her that perhaps she didn't want to, anyway.

"Hey, Satsuki," he said suddenly. "Do you like me?"

She snorted out the ice cream stick. For a moment, she just couldn't even find it in herself to say anything. She was simply too shocked by it all.

"Huh? What?" she asked loudly. "No! What are you even asking that for?"

"Well," he said, turning around and closing his eyes, as if he was about to fall asleep when that was actually the farthest thing from his mind. "You know."

"I don't know."

"You're always hanging around me, you know. So. I just thought."

Daiki clearly had no understanding of all the problems he brought about on Satsuki. She didn't even know where to begin in trying to correct him, so she just threw her hands up and made a noise that sounded like "nrrrrggghhhhhhhhhh!"

"What?" he asked, irritably.

"You are an idiot, Dai-chan. You have no understanding of a woman's heart!"

"Oh, yeah. You like Tetsu."

"That's right, Dai-chan! You're learning!"

They were silent for a moment.

And then-

"Still."

"What is it now?" Satsuki asked impatiently.

"You're with me, but you're not with him. I thought you'd go to the same school as him."

Because you need me, Satsuki thought. Tetsuya didn't need her – he never had to, not once, ever. (Besides, she didn't like the look of that small-breasted coach from Seirin.) But Daiki was different – hadn't he pretty much demonstrated how he couldn't live without her?

He really needed to make more friends. The only reason why he was looking at her so strangely right now was because he had no one else except for his elusive idols. He was merely frustrated.

"Dai-chan, if you join the basketball club, you'll have other people to annoy, not just me," Satsuki told him. She had chosen not to respond to the comment about Tetsuya. She didn't need to.

But Daiki only looked at her, frowning. "I don't get it," he muttered. His mouth turned downward jaggedly.

Just like that, it felt like the tension in the room heightened, as if lighted by a sudden flare. It made her feel sick. She just couldn't stand it.

"Dai-chan, I'm gonna get a drink of water." She stood up quickly, but at that moment Daiki was quicker, pushing himself up off his bed with a speed she had only ever witnessed on the basketball court. She never made it to the door.

He grabbed her by the sides of her arm and just stood there, dangerously close to her. His eyes, dark and brooding, bored down on her. She could feel her pulse quicken and alarm bells ring in her head. Her breath was caught in her throat.

The second that passed felt like an hour. Then Daiki seemed to regain control of himself because after a moment he paused and blinked, and then turned away. "Shit," he said, shoving his hands into his pockets. "Just do what you want."

Her heart in her mouth, Satsuki nodded and went downstairs.

And even after that, she couldn't leave him. But she was hesitant about being alone with him because she just didn't know what Daiki would do. Oh, he was so different from Tetsuya.

The next time she went over to see him, her heart was pounding in trepidation. She had a terrible sense of timing. When Satsuki arrived, Daiki's mother was as pleasant and as polite as ever (she was honestly the sweetest, kindest lady Satsuki had ever met – how did she give birth to such a slob?) and Satsuki wondered what had changed in Daiki's house. Maybe it was really a change in her.

She crept up to his room quietly, her hands held protectively in front of her, her feet ready to turn around and skip away at any moment. When she reached the door, she paused before opening it. Hesitating here was something she had never done before. She stayed there, put her ear against the knob – and listened.

It was silent. At first, she thought Daiki wasn't there at all, but after a moment, she could hear him breathing. That was fine, wasn't it? Was he sleeping?

His breathing became louder, slowly picking up in volume until it was deafening. Or maybe she was straining her ears to listen. If she pulled away, she wouldn't be able to hear it. Yet some kind of morbid fascination held her; she didn't know how long she stood there. For all the years Satsuki had been something of a spy for Teikou, this was the first time she felt as if she was prying.

Before long, she heard him speak in a low voice, deeper and more guttural than she was used to hearing from him. He was panting too. That was what the heavy breathing really was.

He was calling out her name.

She didn't open the door. She stood stock still, staring at her hand, which was hovering over the doorknob. In horror, she pulled it away, flinching and rubbing at her hand as she did.

Tetsu-kun, she thought, desperately. I'm sorry, Tetsu-kun.

I don't think I can do it after all.

end part 3 of 4