Chapter Text
Two sharp knocks at the door break the stillness of the room, where Kise lies stretched out in bed on sheets white as milk. The room is warm and bright. A single window has been left slightly open, letting in a breath of heavy air that stirs the worn curtain. The flowers on the cabinet beside it have long since wilted. Kise watches the cloudy, faintly green water inside the vase, which has not been changed in two weeks. He thinks it might be the agency, or a handful of his fans. His face is everywhere, after all, in magazines and online. Anyone can type in his name and somehow end up on a forum where private details of his life are shared. They are not really secrets, and many of those rumours are encouraged by his agency, or even deliberately manufactured. For the past few weeks, the mere thought of watching them cross the threshold of that room has made him feel sick.
A few days earlier, his sister told him that he had a tendency to act like a complete idiot and could turn even a nonexistent problem into a drama. He took it very personally. His “Come in” comes out a little shrill, and the note of panic at the end makes him sink even deeper into the pillows propping up his shoulders.
The door handle dips. Momoi and Aomine come in with a certain hesitation. Ryouta’s heart skips a beat. He can distinctly feel the blood drain from his face.
”Ki-chan, we came to see you,” Momoi says. Her voice is very light, and the vanilla scent of her shampoo fills the sterile space. “We wanted to know how you were doing.”
She glances at Aomine, who mutters in reply, without interest, “To be honest, I was dragged here against my will.”
She drives an elbow into his side, and while he brings a hand to his ribs and rubs at his spleen, he hastens to correct himself. “Okay, I get it. You look terrible, anyway.”
“What he meant,” she cuts in again, “is that it must have been a difficult operation. Did everything go well?”
Since becoming unable to move properly and permanently chilled, Kise gets out of bed only for the earliest stages of rehabilitation. He imagines his face looks gaunt and neglected. He discovers he could not care less. Aomine, on the other hand, looks to be in peak condition. He must have just come from practice. He carries the lightness of someone who has pushed his body past its limit and then returned weightless, as though he could walk on water.
“Why are you here?” he asks. Then, feeling faintly guilty, he gives them the scripted answer. He knows the lines by heart.
Momoi steps closer and hands him a plastic bag. It dangles from her arm, and Kise is struck by the gesture. He looks at Aomine from the corner of his eye, but Aomine has already turned away. He is studying the boxes of chocolates and the letters that have been delivered and now lie on the round table beneath the television mounted on the wall. There are packages of every size and shape, chocolate hearts and, here and there, even homemade pralines.
Kise turns back to the bag now resting in his hands. He pulls out a carefully wrapped packet of biscuits with a small yellow ribbon tied around it. A cardboard charm swings from one corner. It reads, For a swift and lasting recovery.
“They’re the ones you like,” Momoi says. “The butter ones.”
It is an insignificant thing. A packet of biscuits. Nothing special, nothing that would matter to anyone else. He has already received countless gifts like it. And yet, in that moment, the gesture feels capable of moving him, if only Aomine did not interrupt the sentimentality by starting to chew through the chocolates.
“Why do you always have to be so irritating?” Momoi says. She says it without emphasis, as she usually does. Maybe she simply wants to use the word. Irritating. She likes learning new ones and then using them so everyone knows she reads difficult books.
“Kise doesn’t like chocolate.”
“That’s true,” Kise says. “It makes me nauseous.”
“Everyone likes chocolate, Ki-chan.”
He rubs the back of his neck. “You can have all of them, if you want.”
“Aren’t they from your fans?”
Aomine lingers over the word fans, almost mangling it with a trace of disgust. He has never made any secret of how much the girls shrieking from the stands during Teikō practice annoyed him, or the rose-scented letters that slid out of Kise’s locker. Deep down, Kise does not really enjoy that kind of attention either, though he regards it simply as the natural reflection of the admiration he inspires. A compromise he finds, all things considered, quite agreeable.
“It doesn’t matter,” he says. “I’ll get plenty more as long as I’m here.”
Aomine goes back to staring at the tower of boxes, though not before exchanging a glance with Momoi.
“What is it?” Kise asks. He fists the sheets wrapped around him. His mood is already black. He is not exactly happy to have them there at his bedside. He cannot stand up, and the brace holding his leg aloft makes him feel like a puppet with fraying strings. He is already fairly certain the whole situation is humiliating enough on its own, but in front of Aomine everything seems magnified.
When people talk about Aomine, they describe him as a wall, but Kise does not think that is true at all. When he speaks to him, he has the impression of arriving late to his own words. He could remain silent for hours and still believe that Aomine already knew the things that mattered, the things Kise himself had not yet managed to shape clearly. He likes his company because, in reality, Aomine is a fairly quiet person. Sometimes, though, Kise is afraid of being close to him, because of the disconcerting way he forces him to question himself. Any ordinary conversation is enough to make convictions that had seemed solid lose their substance. Afterwards, on the way home, Kise feels as though he no longer knows exactly what he truly thinks.
At the end of their first term at Teikō, their English teacher, Ms Kitamura, assigned the class a three-thousand-word essay about a hobby. Kise decided to write about his experience with basketball, even though he had joined the second string barely more than a week earlier. Sport had always interested him, certainly, but he had never felt genuinely invested in it. Every club he had joined until then had fallen short of his expectations. Then he saw Aomine Daiki play with Teikō’s first team, and something shifted. The lethargy that had followed him until then broke apart all at once.
At the library he only borrowed a Japanese-English dictionary, but once he sat down at one of the study desks he realised he had very little to say. He had been playing for less than a month. He had a good grasp of the rules, but nothing more. He spent the afternoon tapping the pencil lead against the blank page, unsure what to do. Beyond the window: white asphalt, brown-tiled roofs, and the large gymnasium connected to the main building by covered walkways. Perched on the railings of the bicycle parking area, his weight slightly off balance, he noticed Aomine Daiki. He was sitting there alone, eating an ice cream. Getting up and going over to him seemed like a good idea.
“Yo,” Aomine greeted him. Back then, he was always smiling. “What are you doing out here?”
“You have to help me with an English assignment.”
Aomine kept eating his ice cream, raising an eyebrow. “You should ask Midorima about that kind of thing.”
“I have to write an essay about basketball,” he said. “What am I supposed to write?”
“I don’t know, talk about your favourite team,” Aomine answered distractedly, because a group of girls had just passed them, all wearing the summer uniform with their skirts a little shorter than usual. Then, when Kise did not reply, he turned back. “Do you have a favourite team?”
“I’ve been playing for less than a week.”
“You must at least have a favourite player. Someone you can call your idol, or something. Iverson? Tim Duncan?... Nothing?”
At that point Kise felt slightly out of place, something that had never happened to him before.
“Why did you start playing, anyway?”
“I didn’t know there had to be some deeper reason. What is this, do I have to pass an interview to make the first team?”
Aomine laughed. They spent the rest of the afternoon finishing the assignment. Aomine took him to the computer room, and they watched videos of the Philadelphia 76ers until the sun sank behind the treetops. Kise felt embarrassed the entire time, because the reasons that had made him start playing seemed frivolous.
Now that feeling is even stronger. He finds everything depressing. Momoi and Aomine exchange another look.
“Have your teammates come to visit you, Ki-chan?”
“No,” he admits, looking at them suspiciously. “But they’re training for the next rounds.”
“So you’ve been following the games?”
“Not particularly.” Another moment of silence follows. “Listen,” he bursts out. “Why exactly are you here? I’m glad to see you,” he says, as the beginnings of a migraine start throbbing behind one eye, “but I know you well enough to tell there’s something behind this.”
“Just tell him, Satsuki. You’re worrying too much,” Aomine says.
Momoi takes her phone from her handbag, taps something quickly and holds the screen out to him. It is the schedule for the upcoming championship games. Kaijō High will face Tōō Academy first. Kise keeps staring at it while Momoi says, “They won’t actually announce it for another few days.”
“Satsuki thought it might upset you somehow, so she wanted to come and see how you were doing.”
“You make it sound incredibly stupid.”
Aomine shrugs. “Kaijō probably won’t make it past the quarter-finals without you, anyway.”
“Dai-chan...” Momoi hisses. Then she adds anxiously, “You need to focus on resting and getting your strength back. So that...”
Kise reaches out to hand her phone back.
“I won’t be able to play again anytime soon. They’re saying at least eight months, maybe longer.”
There is little else to say. Now Kise understands that he is genuinely angry. Not with them in particular, but with the sense of wrongness that keeps seeping into things for no clear reason. With that vague but persistent feeling of injustice born from not understanding why, sometimes, every choice still leaves him feeling as though he made the wrong one.
He knows Aomine’s presence is not meant to imply anything, and yet by association he finds it demeaning. Six months, perhaps a year away, would carve a chasm between them. He would rather go on not thinking about it, as he has for days now. He ignores messages, stares stubbornly out of the window when people visit, and has not once turned on the television for fear of landing on a sports channel and being reminded that he is leaving his team behind, the team that needs him in order to win.
Aomine is watching him with a concentrated expression, as though he wants to look inside his skull. You wouldn’t find anything, Kise thinks. It would all be black.
Sensing the discomfort hanging in the air, thick enough to slice like butter, Momoi says, “We should go, then. Get some proper rest, okay?”
“Yes, of course.” He puts on his best smile. He watches them leave and remains motionless, staring at the door until a nurse comes in to change his dressings.
*
“You could have been kinder to him.”
They walk along the road. The horizon has lost its sharpness and wavers beneath the weight of the scorching heat. The air trembles over the asphalt, erasing the outlines of things. In July, the city seems suspended: the distant houses, the motionless trees, the depthless sky.
“Kise?” Aomine says, turning only slightly towards Momoi.
“You probably hurt his feelings.” Momoi tightens her hand around the strap of her handbag and gradually slows her pace. “Do you think he got angry? Maybe he thought we came to make fun of him.”
Aomine watches her lower her eyes, as though she is waiting for him to say something. She has always hated silences like that, the kind that never truly end but remain between two people and change the way they speak to each other. For a moment he thinks of asking whether she has felt lonely over the past year. He does not. It seems like a cowardly question, because he already knows the answer. He rubs the back of his neck and looks away. He cannot even tell himself it happened by accident. If something between them has remained unfinished, it is mainly because he kept leaving it there.
“Why are you so worried about Kise? Do you like him or something?”
However hard she tries to hide it behind indignation, Aomine clearly sees her blush. He often makes comments like that about her romantic life, or rather her nonexistent romantic life. She blushes and pines over the love stories she reads, while he enjoys making fun of her.
“He’s my friend” She starts walking again, marching past him. He trots after her.
“This time is different,” she goes on. “This is about his health, not your usual teenage drama.”
“He isn’t angry with you. Don’t worry.”
That does not seem to reassure her. “He didn’t look very happy to see us,” she says, looking back at him. Sometimes she feels as though she is suffocating from how badly she misses the carefree afternoons before their final year of middle school. Then she always feels a little frivolous when she notices her own nostalgia.
“He didn’t look very happy to see me,” Aomine continues, putting his hands behind his neck and stretching his aching back. “Don’t think about it. You wouldn’t understand. Anyway, you can ask him yourself when you see him at the game.”
At first Momoi says nothing. If Kise’s words had carried a second meaning, she had not caught it. “But he can’t leave the hospital,” she points out, confused.
By then Aomine has stopped in front of a drinks machine. He feeds in a few coins and now sips thoughtfully from a cold can. Calmly, he says, “He’ll come.”
She wants to ask what he means, but she already knows she will not get an answer. If there is a meaning, it belongs to a level of understanding she cannot access. Or, as she has long suspected, the two of them share no more than one brain cell apiece, and no matter how hard she tried she would still never understand them.
*
At the end of June, Coach Takeuchi decided to take them out of Yokohama for a training camp in a tiny seaside village. The aim was to build muscle and drill their new offensive plays to exhaustion. New first-year starters had joined the team, all of them particularly enthusiastic, calling Kise senpai with a blend of admiration and challenge in their voices.
During practice, Kise had not managed to enter that perfect competitive trance again since the game against Jabberwock. He knew that Aomine and Kagami had never been able to summon it on command either, but somehow he felt that was not the problem in his case. He ran, jumped, scored. The younger players idolised him, but Kise could feel the penetrating eyes of Hayakawa, Nakamura and the coach on him at all times.
On the bus back, he did nothing but listen to music through his headphones, and nobody spoke to him. Beyond the window, the line of the ocean gave way to narrow roads lined with lush trees and then to tiny houses with wooden gates and steep flights of steps, though in the distance they could still see the long apartment blocks of the city they were returning to. The other players were all together in the front seats, drinking water and clapping one another on the back as they discussed the next international tournament.
Kise had the sense that the last glimmer of his life had been left behind in the changing room of that small country gym. That he was not really there, and everything was happening far away, in another dimension. It was a feeling he had often experienced over the past year, but it came with no clear image of what the correct reality, the one he ought to have been living, was supposed to look like. Only the awareness that it could not be the one through which the present was carrying him inexorably.
The weather remained dry throughout the training camp. They took advantage of the absence of typhoons to swim in the sea. The temperature in the bay was perfect. They also spent one evening improvising a modest beach-volleyball tournament. Kise was on the winning side. By the end of the second set they were crushing the team made up of the basketball second string. Coach Takeuchi handed out fruit juice and energy bars. He was enjoying himself, in his own way. Kise suspected that match had been the proverbial last straw.
On the bus he tried to pretend nothing was wrong, because he suspected his senpai were still watching him, but it was difficult to ignore. The pain began as a dull sensation. He felt it like a creature with long scraping claws, beginning to scratch from somewhere deep inside him. It must have started in the third set, when he had launched himself into a jump spike to show off and finish the match in style. When his foot landed on the sand hardened by their movements, he understood clearly that he was ignoring a problem.
The journey lasted an hour, and he broke out in a cold sweat the entire time. His heart hammered in his chest. If he had said he was injured during training, the coach would have sent him home immediately. He had been playing below his ability for months. He had never properly treated his ankle, and only then did he understand how serious it was.
When they reached the school gates, he waited for everyone else to get off so no one would notice him limping down the steps. But after he had said goodbye to his teammates, Hayakawa and the coach waited for him off to one side. He had not hidden it nearly as well as he thought.
He prefers to forget the rest: the meetings with the doctors, the X-rays, the operation and that painful moment of realisation. Everything began to feel numb. On the phone, he speaks only to the older of his two sisters, Yukari. She lives out of town for university and is the only person in the family who seems to truly understand him. He calls her every morning after rehabilitation, and she always answers. Mostly he complains about the room being too hot, the unseasoned vegetables they serve at the hospital, the nurse with the enormous mole on her chin, from which grows a single thick, hypnotic black hair. But more often than not he ends up talking about his other sister, Natsuki, with whom he famously does not get along at all. And about his mother.
“She really said something like that?” Yukari asked him one day, after he had called her in a panic.
“Yeah.”
“But are you sure those were her exact words?”
“She said very clearly that she thinks I should give up sport for good.”
“And why on earth should you do that?” she asked, and he heard in her voice the assertive tone he loved so much.
“Because then I can make better use of my time. Like studying English.”
“You, successfully learning a language?”
“Come on.” Yukari laughed. Whenever she laughs, Ryouta laughs too. He cannot help it.
“And why English, anyway? Why not maths? Geography? Something you could actually apply yourself to.”
Kise looked out of the window. His room was on the east side of the hospital, and from there he could see the entrance and exit of the underground car park. The cars looked like tiny ants.
“Because apparently, when I go to work at the international company Dad works for, I’ll have to speak English the way he does.”
“Can you imagine?” she said. “Ryouta, photocopy these documents for me. Ryouta, prepare an updated table of delays in intercontinental shipping over the past month, please.”
Other times they would speak and Yukari could tell from his greeting alone that something was wrong.
“You’re thinking of doing something very stupid.” When she did that, Yukari sounded like an expert mathematician performing complicated mental calculations to decipher his perfectly ordinary hello.
“I haven’t said anything.”
“And that is exactly how I know you want to do something I am not going to approve of at all.”
He did not know what to say, and felt an urgent need to grab the water jug from the bedside table and throw it at the wall.
“Does this have something to do with those two friends who came to see you the other day?”
“They have nothing to do with it.”
“Are you feeling down because of that boy you admired so much?”
“Can we talk about something else?”
He imagined his sister pulling a face. He moved the phone away from his ear for a moment and clenched his jaw. He felt his molars grinding against one another.
“Okay,” Yukari said. “Just promise me you’ll be careful.”
“I’m not going to jump out of a plane with a parachute.”
Yukari was silent for a moment. “I’m not worried about your ankle, Ryo-chan.”
“What else would you be worried about?”
She sounded evasive even in her pauses. “I’m just saying you should be careful not to make strange comparisons in your head, all right?”
For a second his field of vision flickered violently, like the beginning of a severe migraine or a panic attack. He put a hand to his forehead. His sister often made him feel naive.
“So it’s not just an osteochondral lesion. Now I’m emotionally unstable too?”
“I didn’t say that.”
“Then what did you mean?”
He imagined he could hear her sigh.
“I meant,” she said, in a tone very much like their father’s when, exasperated, he had to explain something that seemed disarmingly simple to him, “that you are very sad right now. I don’t like hearing you sound sad, but I can’t do anything about it. Just try not to put yourself in complicated situations, okay?”
At that point he understood that her concern was sincere, and that she might also be the only person in his family who had truly noticed. That was why he needed her. The thought struck him in a new way, even though that knowledge had always existed between them. It seemed remarkable to him, and moving too.
“It’s just something I have to do. I’d regret it for the rest of my life if I didn’t go, that’s all.”
“I know,’ she said at last. ‘You’re a hopeless nostalgic.”
*
He is sitting on the bench at the side of the court. The teammates beside him chant encouragement and school cheers Kise has never properly memorised. The coach told him to stay seated there and cheer, though not before giving him a spectacular dressing-down. Kise feels emptied out, like an upturned tin can.
At the end of the first quarter, the score is eighteen to thirty. He knows his teammates are not bad and are actually playing fairly well, but the opposing power forward is Aomine. He sees him there in his pitch-black uniform, his shoes spotless, number five across his back. His posture is relaxed, his arms hanging loose. His figure cuts across the court like a clean line on a white page, precise and irreversible.
He has a tendency to run everywhere. At times he raises one hand to signal his position to his teammates, something he would never have done a year ago. Once, he even lowers it again, sensing that the safer play is a three-pointer from Sakurai. Watching him is a pleasure, and Kise feels like a traitor for thinking so despite his team’s frustration. During the players’ entrance parade, he is sure Aomine saw him. But he did not come over to say anything, and he did not meet his eyes. Kise does not know exactly what would have happened if he had. Perhaps he would have collapsed there in front of everyone, like some pathetic boy filled with regret.
Five minutes into the second quarter, Wakamatsu carries the ball down the left side of the court and immediately swings it to Aomine, even though he is being triple-teamed.
With a quick fake towards the baseline, Aomine forces his defender to shift his weight onto his outside foot. In that instant, he crosses the dribble in front of his body and drives through the middle gap. The second defender steps up to contain him, but Aomine slows just enough to make him rise. The moment he loses his balance, Aomine explodes into a second change of pace and slips past him shoulder first.
Once he reaches the paint, Hayakawa leaves his man to contest the shot. Aomine takes off from his left foot, initially showing the ball in his right hand as though he is going straight for the layup. Hayakawa bites on the fake and jumps early. Still in the air, Aomine sweeps the ball beneath his body with a quick turn of the wrist, transfers it to his left hand and, using the contact to shield it, finishes with a high-arcing finger roll. The ball clears Hayakawa’s hand, kisses the upper corner of the backboard and drops softly through the hoop.
The twenty-four-second buzzer has not yet sounded when the net barely stirs. For one instant the arena remains motionless, then erupts into thunderous applause. They have seen something magical, something wonderful.
Would he have been able to reproduce it? To improve on it? Kise spends the rest of the time before the break thinking about it obsessively. During the play, seized by anxiety, he leaned forwards and drove the sole of his foot violently into the floor without even realising it. Now venomous snakes pulse through his ankle. The pain worsens the vicious cycle of visceral thoughts.
Since being admitted to hospital, he has often found himself brooding on the condition of the human body and mind. The human body can reveal all its fragility, becoming a burden, something terribly concrete and at the same time emptied of all meaning. The mind is no more merciful: it can wear itself away in the relentless return of the same thoughts, an endless motion that, for Kise, nearly always leads to the same destination—what he wants to do and cannot.
He watches the game and feels disconnected from everything, like a zip coming apart. Maybe that is what life is, then: that feeling. His father always tells him, ‘You’re a man now, Ryouta.’ Is that why? Will adult reality always feel like a succession of events with no connection to one another? Without basketball, will it become a dull backdrop against which flashes of moments stand out only briefly?
By the time the fifteen-minute break begins, the pain has become sharp enough to make him nauseous. He has nothing to say to his teammates, and they have nothing to say to him. They pass beside him on their way to the changing rooms. The coach remains silent too, sealed inside his frustration. Kise does not follow them. Plays, different tactics. Either way, he is dead weight.
He limps towards the outdoor landing. The sky is the clear colour of sunlit glass, motionless and smooth as a windless surface of water. The crutches—which he stole from a hospital storeroom—tap against the concrete. When he reaches the railing, he leans his hips against it and lets them fall at his feet. His hands twitch with how badly he wants to throw them out into the empty air.
He takes his phone from his pocket and checks his messages. A bright rectangle shows him a notification from Yukari: I told Natsuki to keep Mum and Dad at home, she writes. The rest is up to you and your luck (which you don’t have).
He is not especially pleased about owing Natsuki a favour, either. He told the nurses he was going down to the cafeteria to get some light and fresh air. He hopes they will not notice his escape.
When he lifts his head, he sees Momoi in front of him, bent over with her hands on her knees as she catches her breath.
“There you are,” she says breathlessly. “Ki-chan.”
Her thick hair has fallen across her forehead and she is wearing the summer uniform. She straightens and looks up at him, and Kise feels something painful in his throat. The air is completely still, and he tries to remain still too. His leg is trembling.
“Momo-cchi...”
“You’re as white as a sheet.”
Momoi steps closer, bends to pick up the crutches and carefully props them against the railing. Kise stands there, overwhelmed by the emotion that is exhaustion, an exhaustion accumulated over weeks.
“And you’re shaking. Does your ankle hurt?”
“I’m fine.”
“You shouldn’t be here.”
He reads concern on her face, but somehow — in a distorted way, he knows — he interprets it as an irritating intrusion.
Then again, he would not know how to describe the relationship between him and Momoi. Old middle-school teammates? Peers? At the moment, probably rivals. What does she want from him?
When the time came to choose the high school to which he would entrust the next three years, Kise went to Momoi with a proposal. Doing so called to mind an entire ritual whose steps he did not truly understand. Without much preamble, he asked whether she might consider choosing Kaijō High, the school that had just recruited him. He told himself it was a matter of common sense: Momoi was an excellent asset to any basketball team, and Kise would benefit from having her there.
He followed her into the classroom, where she was on cleaning duty and wiping scribbles from the blackboard. Small as she was, Kise found her a little funny. He sat on top of a desk, the last button of his shirt undone and his tie loosened.
She kept her back to him and, as she ran the felt eraser over the greenish surface, said, “You know, my fri—... Yayoi Izumi has a crush on you.”
“Oh, okay,” he said, a little confused. “So what do you think of my proposal, Momo-cchi?”
“We had an argument. She thought I... How ridiculous!” She turned around, her face red. “Sorry,” she said then. “High school? I don’t—”
She stared at her hands, her round face wrapped in a little cloud of chalk dust. He found himself smiling at her, because he sensed that both of them thought of themselves as slightly on the outside.
“It’s all right,” he said. “I understand. I wouldn’t have been your first choice anyway, would I?”
Momoi raised her head and looked at him, her cheeks pleasantly pink with embarrassment.
“You’d like to go with Kurokocchi,” he continued. “But in the end you’ll follow Aominecchi, won’t you?”
“What?”
“I just thought it would be easier that way,” he murmured distractedly. He looked up at the pale concrete ceiling, his legs dangling. How long had it been since he had seen Aomine? He had not shown up for the last two games, and by then he was skipping every practice.
“Easier?”
“To beat him. We could beat all of them if the two of us worked together.”
He looked back at her and saw her make a quick grimace, a fraction of a second in which the corners of her mouth flattened downwards, giving her an afflicted look. After a while, he heard her say something he could not make out. “What?” he asked.
Momoi arranged her face into a smile, a rueful one. “It’s nothing. I’ll think about it, okay, Ki-chan?”
He did not see her again until the beginning of the following school year, when they crossed paths amid the succession of high-school games.
She is looking at him now with her hands on her hips, concern and exasperation mingled on her face.
“You could make your condition worse like this,” she is saying. But to him her voice sounds as though it is coming from inside a bubble.
“It can’t get any worse than this, can it?”
“Ki-chan, I understand how important this is to you, but—”
“Satsuki.”
Behind Momoi, Aomine has just stepped through the glass door. His damp hair clings to his forehead in strands. The uniform makes him look taller, so athletic. He looks at both of them in confusion as he approaches in long strides.
“What are you doing here with him?”
The metal railing is cold against Kise’s back. Aomine and Momoi exchange a glance; Kise has the sense that an entire silent conversation has just passed between them. It makes him nervous.
“Aomine-kun, wait a moment,” Momoi says. She turns back to Kise. “I’m worried about you.”
“Listen, there’s nothing for you to worry about.”
“You ran away from the hospital, didn’t you?”
Kise’s eyes sting and he does not know where to look. Aomine has come closer and joined them, uncertain what to do, or perhaps not wanting to do anything at all.
“I can see it perfectly clearly,” Momoi says, in the same analytical tone she uses on the court. “You look as though you’re about to pass out from the pain.”
“Even if I am, it has absolutely nothing to do with you. You have nothing to do with this.”
Her face hardens. It expresses a painful bewilderment. But Kise does not care if Momoi’s eyes fill with tears. He only wants her to go away, for them to leave him alone. He rubs his sternum, feeling unable to breathe.
“If you don’t want to do something for your own sake, fine.” This time her words are pitched with a strange agitation. “But you can’t ask me to stay silent.”
Kise wants to put his head beneath a stream of ice-cold water. He catches Aomine’s gaze, and for a moment he is shaken by the realisation that they are looking at him, that they can see him. They can perceive him the same way he perceives himself. He disgusts himself, and he cannot bear Momoi trying to dig deeper any longer, trying to pull a confession of weakness from his throat.
“What do you mean?” Kise says.
“If you won’t go back to the hospital, I’ll... I’ll have to go to your coach and make him step in,” Momoi says.
“Oi, Satsuki,” Aomine says.
Something inside him draws tight until it hurts.
“What exactly do you want from me? We aren’t even on the same team.”
“I don’t care,” Momoi says. “If you won’t go back and get treated, then someone will have to force you.”
Reality begins to blur in front of his eyes again.
“Has no one ever told you how annoying you are? Why don’t you mind your own—“
The blow sends him tumbling to the ground. The impact of Aomine’s fist against his cheek shifts his weight onto the injured foot, and he lands awkwardly on the paving. The pain in his face cuts across the pain in his leg, and he remains there on the ground, pitiless towards himself, because he deserves it after all.
Their voices reach him muffled, but he can clearly see the tears running down Momoi’s face. She is holding Aomine’s arm, and he is staring at Kise. All at once, the sound of the bell closes around all three of them.
“The game,” Momoi murmurs. “Aomine-kun.”
Aomine turns his back on him, as though to hide an expression. Momoi, meanwhile, seems about to bend down and help Kise to his feet, but he spares her the trouble.
“I can manage on my own,” he says.
They do not wait to see whether that is true.
*
At the beginning of their second year of middle school, Teikō’s administration authorised the basketball club to organise a recreational outing. The purpose: to strengthen the bonds between the players ahead of that year’s championships.
Aomine got up late, ate breakfast at his leisure and left the house thinking that, if he missed the train, it would not be such a terrible tragedy. By the time he arrived, clusters of excited students had already formed at the meeting point. Yawning, he pushed through the crowd in search of Satsuki, but could not find her. Instead, he was intercepted by Kise Ryouta. He was sitting apart on a low wall, his blond hair moving in the wind.
‘If you’re looking for your team,’ he said, ‘they must be down on the platforms, where all the coaches are gathered.’
Aomine had heard about Kise at school even before he joined the club. He was the new transfer student who had attracted everyone’s attention. The girls liked him in particular, crowding around his desk to take photographs with him. At the first practice of the season, Murasakibara had arrived a good half-hour late, complaining that it was impossible to leave the classroom without being dragged into the commotion.
‘He isn’t just a model,’ he had said, half bored and half irritated. ‘He won his old school several football and baseball championships.’
Aomine had leaned over to look at the magazine he was holding, in which Kise was smirking at the camera. The accompanying text called him a sporting prodigy.
‘But he doesn’t play any sport now,’ Kuroko had read aloud. When Kise later decided to join the basketball team, however, Aomine was not surprised.
Stretching his legs along the wall, Kise pointed his thumb towards the railway station behind him. ‘All the first-string players are over there.’
Aomine shrugged. He slipped his hands into his trouser pockets and said, ‘Aren’t you coming?’
The other boy glanced at him. ‘I can’t.’
‘Why not?’ He scratched his cheek and looked towards the place Kise had indicated, where he could now clearly see Midorima and Murasakibara towering over Akashi. The prospect of spending the entire day in a museum with them did not appeal to him.
‘Well, you know, there’s a certain hierarchy.’ Kise tried to deliver the sentence in a way that conveyed several things at once: painful embarrassment, an extra layer of feigned embarrassment suggesting a hint of irony, and the impression that he was annoyed. ‘The point is to interact with the second string, which I’m part of, right?’
‘You aren’t making much of an effort,’ Aomine pointed out. He turned to look at the group from the second gym. The boys were shoving one another and laughing. Kise followed his gaze and watched them with a mixture of disinterest and superiority. He said something about how they barely knew what a ball was, his voice contemptuous.
‘You shouldn’t talk about your team like that,’ Aomine said. Back then he had this idea about teams and commitment. Commitment had to lead somewhere. If you loved something with all your heart and intended to spend your free time improving at it, you could not possibly be an ordinary person. Tetsu was proof of that. ‘They all work hard, you know?’
Kise swung his legs in a way that made him look slightly childish. ‘I won’t be in the second string for much longer anyway.’
‘You have to reach that level first.’
‘When I become a starter,’ Kise said, smiling a slanting, almost indecent smile, ‘you’ll have to play me one-on-one until I win.’ He stood up, and Aomine found the challenge presumptuous and flattering at the same time.
He had not been lying. Within two weeks he would move up to the first gym and replace Haizaki among the starters. After that conversation on the outing, Kise began orbiting Aomine more often. Most days he stayed in the gym until late in the evening; other times he appeared during breaks between lessons, loitered in the classroom, was irritatingly popular with the girls and particularly disliked by the boys. Aomine never asked why he came. They talked a little—or rather, Kise talked and Aomine nodded. At midday they ate lunch with the team, and in the afternoons they met on the roof to throw paper aeroplanes and shove each other around until a teacher found them, after which they spent their weekends in detention making up the subjects they were behind in.
Once, Kise told him that if he did not raise his grades, the school would keep him from playing in matches, and offered to take his place on the team as its ace.
‘And whose fault is it that my grades are this bad?’ Aomine said, refusing to rise to the bait.
Kise shrugged, disinterested again. A moment later he turned. ‘Are you blaming me?’
‘You’re always wasting my time. Do you know what time I get home at night?’
‘That sounds like a painfully obvious excuse.’
Aomine replied prosaically, ‘To be honest, since it’s your fault, you should be the one to find a solution.’
Kise gave him an unimpressed look. ‘I could give it a hundred per cent,’ he said, ‘but I doubt there’s room in that empty head for anything besides basketball.’
Kise seemed to understand the effect school had on him. They shared the opinion that, taken as a whole, it was a suffocating environment. Wearing the same clothes every morning, complying with a series of rules that had no obvious meaning, being watched for any sign of indiscipline. It was a feeling they shared only with each other, because no one else seemed to consider it a real problem. During a middle-school lesson, Aomine had clashed with his history teacher, Mr Tanaka, after being caught looking out of the window instead of paying attention. Having to knot a tie every morning, move through identical corridors alongside hundreds of students and submit to rules that seemed devoid of logic made him feel as though he lived inside an incomprehensible system. At school, even the place where he rested his gaze seemed subject to someone else’s control.
‘You won’t learn anything if you sleep with your eyes open,’ Mr Tanaka said.
Aomine, who by then had lost his patience, replied, ‘There’s nothing to learn from you anyway.’
Recently, Kise told him he remembered the incident. They were sitting beside each other, and Kise held a cold can between his hands.
‘You were fairly cruel,’ he said. ‘Tanaka was one of the more reasonable teachers.’
Aomine did not answer. Kise took a sip and then looked ahead. ‘But I understand what you mean,’ he added. ‘When you say school feels like a prison.’
Over the past year, they had lost sight of each other. After he stopped attending practice, Aomine went through a dark period. His mother tried to discuss it with him, but he only told her it was ‘just a feeling’. Sometimes he thought he was being childish, as Satsuki kept telling him, but most of the time he felt an enormous emptiness in his chest. He did not quite know why, but in his mind losing his enthusiasm for the sport was the same as ceasing to interact with his teammates. He could not find the energy to behave normally. At lunch he sat in his usual place and swallowed his food in mouthfuls without listening when his friends spoke. Sometimes he did not even notice when Akashi called his name, and he had stopped looking Kuroko in the face out of shame at seeing judgement reflected in his eyes. Everyone must have realised something was wrong with him. As for Aomine, he missed the way basketball made him feel, the euphoria he shared with Kuroko, and he missed Kise’s company.
He had never truly noticed how much time he and Kise spent together until, all at once, he discovered endless, dull, repetitive afternoons stretching out in front of him. Kise stopped coming to find him during breaks, and sometimes weeks passed before Aomine saw him again in the changing room. They never said anything to each other. It was as though nothing and everything had happened at the same time. He felt terribly alone. The game he played against Kaijō in his first year of high school sent him into a feverish state. Until he lost to Kagami, he felt unable to say or do anything to mend what he had torn apart.
On the night he lost, Kise called him.
‘It feels awful, doesn’t it?’ he said. Through the interference on the phone, his voice sounded more delicate. ‘When he humiliated me in front of the team, I felt like a complete loser.’
Aomine remained silent. In the darkness of his room, the clothes heaped on the floor looked like old strays lying at the foot of the bed.
‘Listen, Aominecchi,’ Kise continued, softening his voice even further. Aomine answered with a guttural sound to let him know he was listening. That stopped Kise from saying whatever he had been about to say. ‘No, never mind. I only wanted to know what it was like. For you.’
‘What do you think it’s like? I can’t think about anything else,’ Aomine said.
‘Yeah,’ Kise replied. ‘That’s how it works.’
Now Kise is somewhere with a bleeding lip, and Aomine’s hand throbs where it struck his jaw. At the side of the court, the coach asked Satsuki whether she was all right, why she looked so shaken. There are fewer than five minutes left in the game. The gap between the two teams is more than twenty points. An endless buzzing fills his head.
*
He is sitting on a stack of foam mats, between the mops used to clean the court and old deflated basketballs. The pain in his cheek numbs the pain in his ankle. The phone pressed to his ear rings three times before the person at the other end answers.
‘Kise.’ Kasamatsu’s voice is hoarse, rougher than usual. ‘Why are you calling me?’ Hearing his voice unsettles him, like looking into a mirror and seeing something that holds no secrets from you. ‘Is it about the summer championship... and your leg?’
Kise lets himself fall backwards onto the stack of mats. In one corner of the ceiling, he notices a small moth trapped in a spider’s web. He watches it struggle, its thin wings slowly tearing.
‘I made a girl cry today,’ he says.
‘Huh?’
‘Actually, a lot of girls cry because of me.’
‘Are you trying to get on my nerves?’
‘But this time it’s different,’ he says.
He keeps watching the insect jerk and struggle in the hope of escape. A faint beam of light passes through the gap he left in the door. Its shadow trembles; everything about it trembles, as though its edges were indistinct, dim inside and out, exposed to whatever weather raged beyond it.
‘Was she a friend of yours?’ Kasamatsu says.
‘When I feel sad, I tend to think everyone else ought to be as sad as I am.’
The storeroom smells of damp and dust. In the beam of light, he watches motes drift down like snow inside a snow globe.
‘That’s because you’re self-centred.’
With his free hand, he plays with a loose thread at the edge of his shirt. He will have to cut it.
‘Lately I’ve been sadder than usual.’
Kasamatsu says nothing. Kise can barely hear him breathing at the other end of the line. For some reason, he knows Kasamatsu will not give him something obvious or pre-packaged. He will not hang up on him the way other people would.
‘I could tell you not to let the injury affect you, but knowing you, that would be useless,’ he says. ‘You confuse what you do with what you are.’
‘And what is that supposed to mean, senpai?’
‘Nothing. That you’re an idiot.’
Kise stops playing with the thread and closes his eyes.
‘I’m not sure that makes me feel any better,’ he says.
‘Well, I’m not your psychologist. And you’re supposed to be on the bench cheering for the team.’
The moth stops moving. Above it, a black shadow made of long, slender legs draws closer. Kise expected the accusation, but it still lands like a whip. Kasamatsu lets out a sigh that is not meant to be a sigh but, because it is loud, sounds like one anyway. ‘Usually, when you hurt someone, you can always apologise.’
Kise runs his fingers through his yellow-blond hair. He needs a shower.
‘I don’t know,’ he says. ‘I don’t know if I’m the kind of person who can. If I’d be capable of it.’
‘When you talk like that, I want to hit you. It isn’t difficult. You just do it.’
Now he can see only the moth’s blurred outline. The spider has covered it with its small round body, and Kise imagines it preparing to wrap the moth in a cocoon. If he went over and brushed the spider away, would the moth live? It would not be able to fly anyway. And don’t moths live for only a day, like daytime butterflies?
‘Okay,’ Kise says. ‘What about when it’s someone you haven’t had an argument with, but you still can’t manage an honest conversation?’
‘You’re not the type to keep quiet,’ Kasamatsu says. ‘What’s the problem?’
He looks away from the web. Outside the door, he hears footsteps receding, shadows passing over the source of light. ‘Nothing,’ he says.
By the time he ends the call, his phone is almost dead. The battery symbol flashes. He has to return to the hospital. A serious telling-off will be waiting for him when he gets back. He presses the cool palm of his hand to his forehead. He does not want to look at the web, because he knows he will no longer see the moth, only the memory of what was left of it. He feels agitated; the question he asked has drained him, exposed him to a whole series of conclusions Kasamatsu might draw about him and that he himself is not sure he wants to face. He touches his injured cheek, but it no longer hurts as much. He considers throwing himself from the tower of mats, but only for a second. Panic rises into his throat, so he slowly slides down, supporting himself with the crutches. One catches and falls to the floor with a metallic crash. The storeroom door opens.
‘So you were in here,’ Aomine says.
The game must have ended some time ago, because he is now wearing his tracksuit, his face washed and more relaxed. Light floods the whole room, making the dust and age of everything visible, then disappears again when Aomine lets the door close behind him. Kise does not feel like saying anything, because he senses that whatever he could say would be inconsistent with himself. Aomine looks around, then past his shoulder.
‘So you’re hiding?’ he says. Kise only shrugs. ‘Is this what you’re going to do from now on?’
Kise wants to tell him he has some nerve, and does, almost without meaning to. He turns his head, looking at the bare wall rather than at Aomine’s face in the dimness and discovering what he might be thinking. A sound in the corridor distracts them. An alarm, lasting only a few seconds. Aomine turns back to him and says flatly, ‘What?’
‘What exactly do you want, Aominecchi?’ Kise says. He hopes the nickname will somehow distort the tension.
Aomine has to think about it, because a suffocating silence passes between them. A few months earlier he would not have answered, but now he considers doing so. ‘I don’t know,’ he says. ‘Is it really that strange that I’m here?’
In the darkness, it takes Kise a minute for his eyes to adjust and make out Aomine’s features. His agitation is a state of continuous pressure at his temples and behind his eyes. He sways, but has no desire to bend down for the crutch and risk falling.
‘I don’t know. Kind of.’
‘You’re acting strange. You say strange things,’ he says. ‘And the way you’re behaving gets on my nerves.’
‘Okay,’ Kise says. ‘Do you want to hit me again?’
Without warning, Aomine grabs him by the shirt. He closes his fist around the fabric at Kise’s chest and pulls him closer. Kise lowers his eyes to Aomine’s hand. He does not have time to shift his weight. His heel slips on the wooden floor and his back hits the basket of basketballs. The metal frame tilts, then rights itself with a sharp sound. A ball drops from the net, strikes the floor once, bounces more softly and rolls towards a corner of the room. Neither of them looks at it.
Aomine keeps hold of his shirt. Kise raises one hand but leaves it suspended halfway between them. His fingers close slowly. Behind his back, the balls compressed inside the basket shift with small rubbery knocks. Their shoes almost touch. For several seconds, the only sound is the ball finishing its journey and striking the wall.
‘Satsuki was only trying to help you.’
‘But I didn’t ask her to.’ Kise is disappointed by his own lack of conviction. He rubs one eye with the wrist of the hand he had left hanging in the air. Then he adds, ‘I don’t understand what you want from me. Weren’t you the one who said there was nothing at all a winner could say to someone who lost?’
‘That isn’t why I’m here,’ Aomine says.
‘Then why are you?’
A basketball presses into his shoulder blade, hard and cold through the fabric.
‘Exactly. Why?’ Aomine says. It comes out as a question, though it does not really sound like one.
For a moment, Kise’s nervousness turns into a kind of furious vertigo. His knees give way, and it seems as though Aomine is speaking even though he is not; speaking with his eyes and with the way he is looking at him. Then Aomine loosens his grip on Kise’s shirt and stares at his own hand with a surprised frown, as though he had not noticed he was standing where he actually is. Kise feels an intense sense of shame and confusion. Aomine looks at him, then looks away, then looks at him again. Kise senses that there are things they are not saying, things they cannot properly formulate even at the back of their minds. Time dilates, stretches out. He stares at Aomine and Aomine stares at him, and he remembers when they were thirteen. When he scored the winning point in the final second. Aomine had rushed towards him and put an arm around his neck. He had said, Nice shot, and spread his palm over Kise’s chest. It was only a practice match against a team of older students. But that was their world then. In everyday life, their emotions were bound in tight cords, so diligently suppressed that something so simple could become frighteningly significant. During games, they were allowed to touch and cry. No one would draw any conclusions from it. Kise still remembers the way Aomine held him close.
He thinks back to it and then drifts beyond it. There are all the lives he might have had, he thinks. Precise images of things that never happened but pass through his mind anyway. Then there is the life he actually had, which at some point ended and left no instructions behind. No one tells you where it goes. What remains, and above all, what you are supposed to do with it. They only pretended it had never mattered that much.
Something makes a noise outside the storeroom again. Aomine turns his head slightly. Kise watches the tendons tighten beneath the skin of his neck. He could shove him away and leave. His ankle throbs. But when Aomine turns back, Kise knows they are going to kiss, and they do.
The mere idea of doing it brings on a jumble of emotions. He knows himself to feel relatively few emotions, and he cannot distinguish fear from excitement, or envy from desire, or anxiety from anticipation. The first time he imagined kissing Aomine, he thought it would be composed, barely suggested. A chaste meeting between them. Instead, Aomine’s touch has a narcotic effect. Kise is overcome by a stupidity he does not really associate with himself. The debilitating force of desire makes him shiver.
Time feels elastic. He feels Aomine’s fingers brush the nape of his neck. Aomine takes hold of his hair without pulling, simply holding it. There is no sound but the damp smack of their mouths meeting. There is a certain violence in their movements. It turns into a ridiculous contest. Kise is terribly hot now, an acrid heat everywhere beneath and over his skin, in the eyes he keeps tightly shut. Perhaps he is behaving like a petulant child, because he will not let Aomine push him backwards, use the force of his body and somehow convey a precise idea of how things are unfolding. Adrenaline shakes through him.
He does not quite know why, but he has always thought that if anything happened, it would be his mistake, an impulse of the moment. Like all the reckless things he does to satisfy his curiosity. He approached those fantasies as fantasies, and that understanding allowed him to ignore a great many other thoughts he had hidden in dark recesses. A kind of primal instinct, a defence mechanism, or perhaps what people call self-preservation.
An imaginative construction and nothing more. He had been convinced that, if he ever tried to bring it close to reality, he would meet resistance. Instead, everything is now coming apart in front of him.
Aomine pushes his tongue into Kise’s mouth. Kise does the same with equal brutality.
It all seems to happen very slowly, although it lasts only a handful of seconds.
Those seconds will stay with him for ever, he thinks. He will retrace them on the bus, his face pressed to the cold window and his eyes fixed on the circle of condensation left by his breath. They will return to him when his mother slaps him, calls him ungrateful, bows so low to the doctors in apology for his stupidity that she nearly touches the floor. He will think about them when he opens his bedroom door after finally returning home and finds the room exactly as he left it. Only one corner of a poster will have peeled away from the wall, curling in on itself, and he will stare at it for hours before falling asleep.