Notes: This chapter feels like a giant clusterfuck. I'm sorry.

Kuroko had lost his grip on what was happening.

Somehow Aida-san had organized a practice match already even though they weren't even two weeks into the new term, and somehow she had pulled it off that their opponent was a team of one of the Generation of Miracles.

He wondered what had gotten into her. Had Kagami won her over too? Or was she just clinically insane? He wasn't sure which would be worse.

Well. If Seirin's first game was against a veteran school with a member of the Generation of Miracles in tow, he didn't really have the leisure of fear or worry. Even if it was Kise — one the weaker ones of the Generation of Miracles (along with himself, Kuroko noted acerbically). Maybe, with just enough luck and training, they'd have a chance.

Kagami certainly seemed to think so, if his batshit grin and piercing stare were any indication. Kuroko followed his eyes to check whether they were actually directed at something specific for once. They were.

"It's been a while," Kuroko said warily.

"Kurokocchi," Kise exclaimed, and something in Kuroko's guts churned. He didn't dislike Kise or thought he was a bad person, he was just too vain to be real most of the time. Kuroko liked him better without this PR stunt of a personality. "I missed you, so I came to say hi. After all, we got along best in the team, weren't we?"

"Not particularly," Kuroko said blankly. If Kise acted like nothing had changed, then so would he. It was true too, mostly. Kise and he had been friends, sure, but not the closest. Kuroko may have missed him now and then, but things were different now, with each one of the Generation of Miracles. All of them had broken too many promises, and they couldn't just keep walking on the shattered pieces forever. At least Kuroko couldn't. Wouldn't.

"Wait," one of the second-years (Tsuchi? Tsuda? Tsuchida) interjected, gaping at Kise. "I've read an article about you somewhere. It said you only started playing basketball two years ago. Is that true?"

Kise gave a sheepish smile, a sign his true self was surfacing. "I'm not that great, really. I'm glad to be considered part of the Generation of Miracles, but almost everyone else is stronger than me. That was also the reason why Kuroko and me always got picked on. You know, we were kind of the plebs among the elite."

"Me?" Kuroko said with a little more edge. "Not really." It annoyed him that Kise had the gall to talk like they'd never stopped being friends.

A basketball disrupted the conversation, whirling toward Kise, who caught it easily. Kuroko didn't bother to look around, he knew who'd thrown it.

"Sorry to disturb your reunion," Kagami's voice resounded from somewhere farther down the gym, gradually coming closer until it came to a halt right beside him. "I was hoping you'd show me a taste of your strength, pretty boy."

Kise smirked. Kuroko didn't like where this was going.

"Alright."

Something cold and heavy weighed down on his chest. It dawned upon him that he had completely miscalculated this whole thing. It was a stupid mistake, too. Kuroko didn't know this Kise. This Kise had already played several matches without him watching, and he'd had to be training. He must be a much better player now than he had been in Teikou's team whereas Kuroko was still the same, petty and bitter, a deserter who felt deserted.

(He had promised Kagami he would make them number one. Why did he keep doing that? It never amounted to anything; he always wound up breaking his promises.

Old habits die hard, he guessed.)

When Kise said he wanted to play basketball with him in the same team again, Kuroko stopped breathing. He tried to inhale, but it was futile. Kise's words had pulled him into a vacuum.

How was he supposed to play basketball with any of them ever again? How had Kise been unable to catch that memo after all that had happened?

Somewhere at the edge of his peripheral vision, the others were whispering urgently, except for Kagami. Kuroko didn't hear what they said, but he knew anyway.

Eventually, his body reminded him that he was not, in fact, in a vacuum and needed air. He obliged.

Kuroko spent the following week in a daze, detached from the world and the people around him. He morphed into an observer of his life, in which things happened to him but remained out of the range of his influence. Even his own body seemed oddly distant.

He wanted to be angry. He wanted to be hurt. He wanted to scream. He willed himself to feel something, anything at all, but he could not. Kise's proposal had been poison. It had numbed all of Kuroko's senses, stuffed his head with cotton and torn him apart limb for limb. Now all that was left was a messy tangle of flesh, bone and regrets, poorly stitched back together.

On Friday his mother talked to him after dinner. He'd been dreading this for a while. She had been giving him these concerned looks.

"How's school?" she asked, purposefully focusing on the dishes in the sink as Kuroko wiped the kitchen table.

"Fine," he said. There was a tenacious stain of soy sauce just at the edge of the table. He wondered how it had gotten there. "Everything is fine."

"That's good to hear." She hesitated. Kuroko tried to concentrate on the soy stain. "Ogiwara-kun called today."

"How've you been?"

"Good, thank you," Kuroko answered, hand sweaty around the receiver. "What about you?"

"Just peachy." Kuroko could hear in his voice that he was grinning. "'M not used to my new uniform yet, though. I hate ties."

Kuroko nodded, realized that Ogiwara-kun couldn't see, and made what he hoped was a noise of agreement.

Ogiwara-kun did not speak for a moment. Then, "How's the new club?"

Guilt welled up inside Kuroko, licking hotly at the backside of his throat. "I —" He had no idea what he should to say. Every sentence, every word, he could think of seemed fragile and paper-thin, mere vibrations in the air, dancing on the backs of dust particles until they disintegrated into nothing.

"No," said Ogiwara-kun. "No, we are not doing this again. Don't tell me you're sorry. You don't get to be sorry anymore."

"I know, I—"

"You don't. You don't know. That's the problem. You keep blaming yourself for things you had no power over, and you keep burying yourself deeper into your misery. It was never your fault that I quit. Do you peg me as someone who'd think it was? We're friends, Tetsuya, and we will still be even when you play basketball and I don't."

Kuroko felt like he was going to choke on his own breath. "You — you really do not mind that I am still playing?"

Ogiwara-kun laughed. Kuroko was amazed to discover that it sounded genuine. "Dude," he said as if it was a proper response. Somehow, to Kuroko, it was.

"Thank you," he said and thought, ashamedly, that he must be incredibly stupid and immature. Ogiwara-kun was right about everything he'd said, and Kuroko had known all of it, but he'd gone on pitying himself because it was easier than dealing with any of it, with the pain and the memories, the regrets and the cold fingers of fear around his neck. He'd been such a coward.

Even now there was just so much of everything, and it all lodged inside his head, screaming at him whenever he touched the worn rubber of his basketball. He wanted it to go away but didn't think it ever would, so he needed to learn to live with it although he had no clue how.

"Anyway, about the club," Ogiwara-kun chirped, undeterred. "Any good players around?"

A picture of Kagami flitted through Kuroko's mind: clear-cut and straightforward — one in a million, for better or worse.

"Yes," he affirmed. "One of them is a lot like the Generation of Miracles."

Ogiwara-kun whistled. "Then you have a good chance to win nationals this year."

"I don't know. Maybe." Kuroko shut his eyes. "I'm afraid."

"That's okay," Ogiwara-kun said. He sounded so sincere that Kuroko could only believe him. "It's alright to be afraid as long as you keep moving forward."

"I will," Kuroko assured him. It was absurd how he hadn't been able to come to terms with this on his own. But that was just the thing, wasn't it? Some things you just can't do alone, and this was one of them, but his self-pity had paralyzed him, blinded him, and frightened him of his own ability to trust.

"Good," Ogiwara-kun laughed, and the sound of it made Kuroko feel a bit more human.

That night Kuroko dreamed of Kagami.

He was watching him in school. He never talked to him, just continued watching. Watched Kagami's confidence that was so outrageous that it was almost intriguing. Watched the way he over-enunciated certain syllables, a drawback from growing up in the USA probably. Watched the red of his hair, stark and sharp like blood and steel in the early morning sunlight.

(Kagami was terrifying in a beautiful sort of way because he had an air of purpose, of a self-fulfilling prophecy. Kuroko was nothing like that. None of what he'd once been belonged to him anymore.

Kagami's smile was radioactive, contaminating Kuroko from head to toe until he felt like smiling too.

Kagami was overbearing and irritating, but he was also endearing in corners Kuroko would have never thought to look.)

The meet-up with the team turned out to be anticlimactically normal, and Kuroko didn't know whether to be angry or glad about that. Nobody commented on his peculiar behavior during the previous week. He hoped the reason for this was careful discretion rather than disinterest. With Kagami, however, he buried this hope as he arrived at the last minute, bloodshot eyes squinting at Kuroko a couple of times before he barked, "What're you lookin' at?"

Kuroko snorted, the sensation soothingly familiar. "Your eyes look even more bleary than usual."

"Stuff it." Kagami huffed angrily. "I couldn't sleep, I was too excited."

Kuroko was not surprised. "What are you, a grade-schooler before a field trip?" Despite the jibe, a smile wounds its way across his face. Giddy with relief and the smooth rhythm of his heart, he eagerly sucked in the flowery mid-Spring breeze.

Kagami elbowed him lightly. It was just a small gesture within an even smaller exchange, but to Kuroko it seemed like something huge, as though the two of them had breached a milestone. He hoped they had.

When Kaijou's coach disclosed to them that they'd be playing on only half a court, Kuroko was just as furious as the rest of Seirin. Right after the opening of the match, he glanced pointedly at Kagami, passed him the ball, and Kagami bolted forward, scored — and broke the hoop. Well, that hadn't gone exactly according to plan. It'd been better. Kagami spun around, twirling the severed hoop around his index finger, and beamed. Kuroko couldn't help mirroring him.

"We apologize, it appears the goal has been destroyed. Would you mind if we used the other half of the field after all?"

Kaijou's coach was practically seething. He yelled something at Kise and his teammates, had the ones training on the other side leave the gym, and the game resumed.

Kaijou's basketball, not solely Kise himself, was even stronger than Kuroko had estimated. If Seirin carried on like this, wasting precious energy and nerves, they would never get any ground on their opponent. As embarrassing as it was, they desperately required a timeout to restrategize.

"What is it?" Aida-san demanded, hands on her hips.

Kuroko clutched at his wristband. "Surely, you noticed," he said quietly. "We are all tiring out already. We need a different approach to this match, or we will be crushed."

Aida-san looked torn. "What did you have in mind?"

"We take advantage of Kise's weak point."

"Weak point," Hyuga echoed. "How come you didn't mention that sooner?"

Kuroko's eyes slanted toward the ground. "There is something else we have to consider. I am losing my efficiency. My misdirection is not going to work much longer."

Aida-san screeched a noise of pure frustration and pulled him into a headlock. "You should have warned us about that so we can prepare for —"

"Timeout over," it sounded across the hall.

She let go of him and started shouting hurried instructions at the team. He did his best to calm his respiration.

"Kuroko," she called from the sidelines as he made his way back on the court. "Slow down a bit! We'll be okay so long as the point difference doesn't get too wide. Can you take care of that?"

By her tone he could tell her enquiry was genuine. She wasn't merely thinking about victory but her players and their respective conditions. Although he appreciated that, he did not intend to resign from the game just yet.

"I will try," he answered.

Kaijou remained the dominating force in the game. Kuroko came close to scolding himself for being so foolish to have believed there had ever existed the possibility for them to win when Kagami burst into roaring laughter and the sane part of the gym into silence.

"I have to thank you," he told Kise, who eyeballed him warily. "I haven't had this much fun in years. It's perfect if I can't win, but don't think I've already given up. This is just the beginning. You're the absolute opposite of him." A smirk sprawled over his face, a lazy, lopsided threat. At the sight Kuroko pictured a predator who couldn't be bothered to deal with a trespassing rival, baring his teeth once or twice so the matter would be settled.

Kagami grabbed him by the back of his collar and dragged him into the conversation. "He's your weakness."

Slightly taken off guard, he disengaged himself from him. "Well, he is half right. Alone none of us is a match for you, but together we are."

"You changed." Kise's mask of cheerful naivety had cracked. "You weren't playing like this in Teikou. Whatever. I'll win anyway."

Kuroko thought of Ogiwara-kun and smiled. He was going forward like he'd told him to, one step at a time, in the right direction.

It proved to be a hard piece of effort, but, eventually, they managed to melt the point difference Kaijou had accumulated. It was almost going too well.

Then Kise's elbow accidentally hit Kuroko's forehead, a flurry of motion, color and pain, and for the next ten or so seconds he was gone. When he came to again, his head stung and burned terribly, and something hot was pouring down his left temple. Blood, he realized, somewhat unpinned.

"Hey," someone said from somewhere outside his cloudy vision. "Are you alright?"

Kuroko tilted his head upward. Kagami scrutinized him worriedly, and Kuroko decided that concern was something distinctly alien and off-putting on his face and thus should be avoided at all costs.

"I am fine," he lied. "The match is not over yet." He pressed his lips together, stood up, wobbled —

And was out like a light.

He only woke up at the conclusion of the third quarter. Faintly, his ringing ears discerned voices, his name and the word "playing". He sat up and winced. Except for the boring throb in his skull, he didn't recall anything from before he blacked out, and the throb was still present, so that was a bummer.

Clearing his throat, he rasped out, "Good morning." Alarmed, Aida-san whipped around. "I will be going now."

"Are you out of your mind?" she shouted shrilly, gawping at him. "Just look at you! You'll go nowhere but a doctor."

Kuroko attempted to play dumb and put on his puppy face, a tactic which had always had an immense impact on Momoi-san. Aida-san did not yield. Kuroko pressed on, stabbing at the dark. "But didn't you say I should play?" Well, semi-dark. If his name and "playing" occurred in the same sentence, there was a rather limited range of meaning left.

Aida-san groaned. "'What if'! I said, 'what if'!"

Kuroko would have liked to groan too. Compared to her, Momoi-san had truly been a shallow shell to snap open. "The situation will only change if I return to the field." His vision blurred, but he forced himself to stay upright. "I promised to become Kagami-kun's shadow. Don't make me break it."

Aida-san grimaced. Kuroko felt a little guilty for putting her on the spot like this, but not going just wasn't an option.

"Alright," she said through her teeth. "If you so much as stagger, though, you're back on the bench."

Kuroko nodded. Fair enough.

The final minutes stretched endlessly. Seirin had caught up with Kaijou at last, and the battle for the last points was an excruciating one. Kise obscured Kuroko's passes whenever he could while the other members of Kaijou made sure none of the offense players got too close to the hoop.

Kuroko's breath burned through his lungs as he pitched the ball forward once more. There were only a few seconds left. Kagami and Kise arrived at the ball's destination, the goal, at the same time, and jumped. Kise began to fall first, and that was Kagami's chance. He slammed the ball into the net.

The referee whistled.

It was over. They had won.

Feeling strangely suspended, Kuroko squinted at the score. 100 : 98. His lungs continued getting ever hotter, two feverish furnaces incinerating him from the inside out. Across the gym Kagami hollered euphorically, punching the air. Their promise was still intact. Kuroko smiled.

Kise cried. It made him uncomfortable, but Kuroko understood him. If the situation were reversed, he might do the same.

Kaijou's captain, Kasamatsu, grinned at them as they parted. "We're in different districts, so we'll see us again at the Interhigh Tournament."

Internally, Kuroko agreed with him.

After the all-you-can-eat steak feast, during which Kagami had gobbled up staggering 16 large portions of meat, rice and more meat, Kuroko stepped out of the restaurant to get some fresh air and a few moments to think for himself. Outside on the sidewalk, he bumped into Kise.

"Do you have a minute?" he asked. He looked serious, no trace of a too wide smile anywhere.

"Sure," Kuroko answered a bit reluctantly.

They walked to a playground just around a corner. Kise sat down on the backrest of a bench, absentmindedly rolling a basketball in his hands.

"I've seen Midorimacchi."

Kuroko made a face.

"I know," Kise said. "I think he came to watch our game. You should keep an eye on him."

"Okay," Kuroko replied, impatient. Hopefully the others hadn't left the steakhouse yet. "Is that all?"

Kise pursed his lips, and he lifted himself from his seat. "I want to know why you quit after the finals of the middle school tournament."