Recovering from a long, serious sickness was like being reborn, Tetsu decided later. Incidents happened that he could hardly remember afterward, or not at all, and others that he could recall with stunning clarity. He knew he was in the hospital for about two days, then went home to sleep on a futon in the main room where Taiga and Hiroshi-san could both take care of him with no impediments. But he could remember neither how he got to the hospital nor quite how he left. He suspected that he had slept through both trips, curled up as close to Hiroshi-san as he could get.

He remembered being lost in a haze of misery, his body too hot, too weary, too full of aches and pains, the unbearable weight of it all pressing down on him like a boulder on his back. He also remembered being cradled in Hiroshi-san's arms as if he was half his actual age, being cuddled and cosseted and soothed like a small child. He wasn't embarrassed at the time, too busy absorbing every gram of comfort and affection like a starved creature. And he wasn't much embarrassed later, either, not least because he almost felt like he had been different person before and during his illness. The entire period was bathed in warmth and light in his mind, and this warmth was not from the fever.

"Well, and why would you be embarrassed?" Taiga asked sometime later when Tetsu brought it up not because he expected a useful comment from his blunt big brother, but simply because it was an oddity that stuck in his mind. "You were sick and hurting, and Dad would do anything to help you. There's nothing embarrassing about that. Besides, I think Dad was grateful for the opportunity to treat you like a little kid, since he didn't get to have you when you were actually little. He'd cuddle you right now if you let him, but it's harder when you're in your right mind and being your usual dignified self."

Tetsu blinked. He hadn't expected Taiga to have so much to say in answer to his meaningless reminiscence. "That's surprisingly insightful, Taiga-nii."

Taiga snorted. "Don't worry. I won't let it go to my head."

Tetsu nodded, and the next time Hiroshi-san casually slung an arm around his shoulders, he leaned into it harder than usual and put his arm around Hiroshi-san's back in return. If Hiroshi-san wanted to cuddle him, he wasn't going to object. Ever. One benefit of being reborn through fever was that many of the barriers he had constructed between himself and the world were gone, and they were never coming back. And one benefit of having a new family that had been thoroughly Americanized in LA was the abundance of physical affection.

Most of the clearest memories Tetsu had from his sickness were of Taiga's stories. He remembered curling into Taiga's side in the hospital bed, or putting his head in his lap at home (according to Taiga, Tetsu had bullied him into both positions), then listening quietly while Taiga told him about his life before they met. The story about the wild dogs and the kitten had been scary. The one about his mom had been sad. And infuriating.

"I guess it's an old story," Taiga said, though the discomfort in his voice suggested that it had certainly been new to him. "She wasn't happy. So she found a way to make herself happier."

They were at home, now. Tetsu was in that stage of sickness where he was wretchedly uncomfortable, but there wasn't anything anyone could do about it, so it just had to be endured. He had kicked off all the covers and rucked up his futon trying to find a comfortable way to lie, and he had failed. When Taiga came and sat down next to him, Tetsu groaned pitifully, then crept over to him and put his head on his knee, lying with his bottom half on his futon and his top half pressed against the cool floor.

Taiga chuckled sympathetically and pet his head. "Are you a cat now, Tetsu-chan?"

"No." Tetsu rubbed his face fretfully on Taiga's knee, then went as still as he could. The floor felt good on his overheated skin. "Tell me a story, Taiga-nii." It was beginning to be a familiar demand.

Taiga carded his fingers through his hair. "What do you want to hear about this time?"

"Tell me about your mom. Tell me about what happened to her."

Taiga's fingers stilled. "This isn't a happy story, Tetsu-chan."

Tetsu sighed. "I know. Tell me anyway." He doubted that a happy story would make him feel any better right now. Might as well get all the misery out of the way at once.

So Taiga blew out a breath and began.

Tetsu held very still, trying to understand. "Why was she unhappy? And what did she do to make herself happier?"

"I told you that the time right after we moved to America was difficult for all of us. I was a miserable kid, always whining about how much I hated LA and how no one liked me and I didn't like anyone else. Looking back, I can see that my mom was having the exact same problems. And Dad... He just wasn't there. He worked, and worked, and worked. I was lucky to see him once a day, late at night when he came home a few minutes before I went to bed. It was rough on me, but it was even more rough on my mom. We were all drifting away from each other."

Tetsu tilted his head more heavily into his brother's knee. "Your hardship drove you apart instead of drawing you together."

"Yes. I suppose it was all of our faults, in a way. It should have been the other way around. Instead of treasuring the little time we had with each other, we began to resent the times we were kept apart, and that made us resent each other, too, because much of the separation was by choice. And I suppose my mom blamed my dad for most of it, since it was his career that took us there, and his decision to go."

Tetsu's heart ached. He began to see where this story was going.

"My life improved a lot when I met Aniki and started playing basketball. So when I noticed that Mom seemed happier too, I thought the same sort of thing must have happened for her. She'd found a friend, or a group of friends, and something she could do to enjoy herself in LA, and everything would be good now. But I was wrong. My mom's new friend was...not really a friend."

"A lover," Tetsu said softly.

"Yeah." Taiga rubbed his fingers through Tetsu's hair. "It took my dad a long time to catch on. Months. Years, even. I was too young to understand. So by the time he realized and tried to do something to fix it, it was too late. There was...a lot of screaming."

Tetsu winced. Poor little Taiga-nii. He didn't say it aloud. It was...too little. And far too late.

"My mom said some things that I'm sure she regretted, later. But the worst was when I stumbled into the kitchen after a basketball game, sweaty and triumphant from our win, and found them yelling at each other. All of my happiness ran away in an instant, and Mom turned to me, looked me up and down, saw how filthy I was. And she pointed her finger at me and yelled to my dad, 'You are both alike, in love with this hellish country for no reason I can understand, and I can't endure it any longer.'"

Taiga didn't say the words in a yell. His tone was calm and smooth, the same casual volume he had used for the entire story. But his fingers trembled against Tetsu's scalp.

Tetsu caught his breath. "Oh, Taiga-nii."

Taiga kept going. "Then she turned and walked out of the kitchen. She packed a bag, and she left."

Tetsu's eyes blurred with tears. How could she? How could she say that? All this time later, and Taiga still remembered it word for word. It must have pierced his heart like a knife. Tetsu knew how hard it was for a child not to blame himself when something went wrong in his family, and Taiga's mother had said that she couldn't endure him, had all but yelled it in Taiga's face...

"Dad still tried to fix it, but... Eventually he had to give up. And then it was just the two of us. Things changed, though. Dad didn't work nearly as much. He started giving up opportunities so he could spend more time with me. He came to every basketball game. And he told me again and again that it wasn't my fault that she left, that the blame was entirely his. It was hard to believe him, though."

They were quiet for a moment.

"I haven't thought about that for a long time," Taiga said. "Years. I guess Dad finally convinced me, because... I'm sorry, Tetsu-chan. When you were having so much trouble understanding that what happened to you wasn't your fault, I should have remembered what it felt like. I guess I thought it was more obvious that you weren't to blame for your father beating you with a belt, though."

"No." Tetsu held still for a moment, then pushed himself up onto his knees. Taiga tried to stop him, grabbing his shoulders and making distressed noises, but Tetsu batted at his hands and continued anyway. There he knelt on the floor, swaying like a reed, and stared into his brother's face. And he reached up to pat his head, letting his fingers fall heavily into the mess of dark red hair. "Neither of us were to blame. I'm sure of that now."

Taiga let out his breath in a rush, as if he'd been holding it. And he reached out and pulled Tetsu into a warm, tight hug. "No," he murmured. "No, we weren't."

Tetsu closed his eyes against Taiga's shoulder and let himself be held, even though it was too close and uncomfortable for him right now. This was for Taiga, not for himself, and it felt good to be able to give back to him, to return some of the overwhelming amount of generosity and love that had been poured out on Tetsu since the first time he crossed the threshhold into this home. Even if it was in a very small way, like letting Taiga hug him.

"Where is your mother now?" he asked after they drew apart a little. Tetsu watched Taiga's face, and Taiga stared away at the corner of the room and rubbed his arm over his eyes.

"I don't know. Still in America, I guess." Taiga huffed out a laugh. "Isn't that funny, that me and Dad are back here in Japan, and she's stuck in the country she hated so much?"

No. No, it wasn't really funny at all.

Taiga didn't know where she was. That meant they weren't in contact. At all. She was alive, but she had left. She had left completely. Tetsu didn't know which one was worse.

"I'm sorry, Taiga-nii."

A rough shrug. "It was a long time ago."

But that didn't mean it didn't hurt. It didn't mean that Taiga didn't care. Tetsu watched him carefully, then finally returned to his futon and lay down again. "Tell me a story about something else, Taiga-nii."

Taiga snorted and complied. It was the quickest way to smooth over the hurt of that story, and they were both content to let it fade.

Other stories were not as harrowing. Taiga told him about basketball games and food trucks and sleepovers with Himuro. He talked about school in America, the songs they sang in the classroom and the games they played on the playground and the food they ate in the cafeteria. Birthday parties with classmates and trips to the beach and trying to surf with Alex (an utter failure on all fronts). The color of the sky and the scent of the air and the yells of the players on the basketball court. Taiga kept saying he wasn't good at telling stories, but Tetsu decided early on that this was a lie, and a poor one at that.

Tetsu told stories in return, too, though not as many. It was too tiring. Both talking and remembering took a huge amount of effort, mostly because his mind was a very muddled and confused place for as long as the fever had its grip on him. But Taiga seemed to appreciate his efforts, no matter how feeble they were. It was really nice to get to know each other.

Tetsu knew he had bad dreams during his illness, but later he couldn't remember much about them. No doubt they had been about his father, memories of the pain he had suffered in the past butting up against the reality of pain in his present and making everything worse than it truly was. The more time he spent with Taiga and Hiroshi-san, though, the more the bad was overwritten with the good. He knew that there were nights while the fever was very high that one or the other stayed at his side the entire time, soothing him back to sleep every time the dreams woke him, but they succeeded so well that he remembered almost nothing of those times.

Even after he passed through the sickness and came out the other side, Tetsu still had nightmares every now and then. He thought he probably always would. But they were easy to deal with. He would just drag a futon to Taiga's room and lie down on the floor by his bed and listen to him breathe, and the panic and pain would be washed away, breath by strong, peaceful breath, until he could sleep restfully to the morning. The first time, Taiga stepped on him by accident when he got out of bed, which terrified Taiga and startled Tetsu, both of them yelling so loudly that Hiroshi-san raced into the room half-dressed to see what the problem was.

After that, Taiga was more careful to look around in the morning. And sometimes he woke up when Tetsu came into his room. He would blink sleepily at Tetsu while he set up his futon and blanket, and sometimes if it didn't look too bad he would just turn over on his side and go back to sleep. But if Tetsu looked particularly upset, he would snag his wrist and drag him under his own covers so he could wrap an arm around him and snuggle him to sleep. If Tetsu tried to protest, he would shush him in a rough, half-asleep voice and tell him that nii-san knew best and he should shut up. Tetsu would have no choice but to sigh and accept it.

While he was sick, other people came to visit Tetsu, too. Teammates both current and past, friends new and old. Aomine brought Nigou over as often as he could get away with it. Kiyoshi and Hyuuga had another fight right there by Tetsu's futon in the main room, though Tetsu had no idea what it was about. Later, he was able to remember the faces of his visitors, but very little of what was said when they came. He knew they all cared about him and wanted him to be well, and that was enough.

The strangest thing... The strangest thing was that Tetsu remembered Akashi's face being among those of his visitors. But that couldn't be true. He must have imagined it.

He had a feeling that he needed to apologize to Momoi-san, but he couldn't remember why.

Then came a day when he woke from a sound sleep and felt...strange. He stared up at the ceiling for a little while, trying to figure out what was different. He could hear Taiga rummaging about in the kitchen, humming under his breath, which probably meant that Hiroshi-san was nearby, too. But Tetsu was currently alone on his futon, and he felt fine.

He felt…well. His body wasn't burning with excess heat and his feet weren't icy cold despite doubling up on socks. The body aches from the flu had faded, and even his back didn't twinge from laying on it. He swallowed, and his throat didn't seize up. His head wasn't pounding and his ear wasn't sore. He felt fine.

Tetsu had made it. He was through the fever. He'd come out the other side.

Tetsu sat up slowly, feeling his head spin with the movement. His body felt empty, trembling with weakness. In a few minutes, once he'd had time to acclimate to this state of being, he was going to be very, very hungry. Starving. He couldn't remember a whole lot of the past few days, but he knew he'd had difficulty eating much of anything. Now he was going to need more time to recover, to build his strength back up and reintegrate his body with his environment.

But he was whole. He was healed. He felt like a brand new person, trembling on the threshold of a sudden beginning. A chance to try it all again and get it right this time. A fresh start.

There was one thing he needed to do before he could truly embark on this new journey. Tetsu pushed himself to his feet and tottered off in search of Hiroshi-san, shaky but determined. He'd said they would talk about it again when Tetsu was well, and he was well now.

He wanted to be a Kagami.