“Hey, Kuroko!” started saying Kagami in a voice that almost seemed a groan, his body turning around while sitting on his seat to look in the smaller male’s direction. “You’ve been texting back and forward the whole morning. What exactly is so urgent for you, who doesn’t text anyone even if it was to save your life, to be doing it even during classes?”
“Ah… Well, Aomine-kun has been very insistent since last night in getting some advice from me,” answered Kuroko, finishing texting back the tanned male and then flipping his cell phone closed, his teal eyes raising from the electronic device to look to the taller male.
“Advice?” repeated Kagami, one of his dual eyebrows arching slightly at hearing those words. What exactly could that basketball idiot be asking from a former teammate? Suddenly the answer popped up in his head and his heart painfully squeezed at it. “O-Oh… I see… Be sure to help him out, he’s a freaking idiot, after all.”
“I don’t think you are the best person to be calling another an idiot, Kagami-kun,” deadpanned Kuroko, turning his gaze afterwards back to his cell phone when it started vibrating with an incoming text once again.
“Shut it!” roared Kagami, averting looking to the bluenette as he opened his cell phone and started writing a reply to whatever it was that had been sent to him. Feeling extremely irked at the action, he turned around to face forward once again, his elbows landing on his desk violently as he grumbled to himself. “So he already started to find a way to confess to Kuroko… And he’s going around asking the person himself? Heck, he could… have asked for my help… I would have tried my best to help Ahomine out… Idiot… Fucking asshole…”
“Kagami-kun, are you alright?” asked Kuroko, his body motioning sideways on his seat so he could take a peek to the redhead, who was inaudibly talking to himself. “I can text Aomine-kun later, so why don’t we go get our lunch from the cafeteria?”
“Ah! Umm… No, it’s okay,” answered Kagami in a clumsy way, clearing his throat softly to try to restore his demeanour to his usual one. “Focus on helping that bastard out. It’s awkwardly painful to see him acting that way. And I doubt he can actually play any basketball with his current personality. Or at least in his usual way.”
“Yes, he probably can’t,” acknowledged Kuroko, releasing a soft, but slightly exasperated, sigh. He got up from his desk and gave a short walk until he stopped next to the redhead, a small smile on his lips as he looked in his direction. “But even if we have to find a way to break everyone’s curse, we also need to have the energy to think of a way to do so. Let’s go have lunch, Kagami-kun.”
“…” The redhead intently looked to the smaller male for brief seconds and then released a quick snort. “Heh! Always the level-headed one… Even though you turned into a mushy and panicky mess yesterday because of Akashi and your curse.”
“…!” As quickly as he could, Kuroko averted the redhead’s gaze, a dark red blush on his features that he immediately tried to conceal by half-hiding his face with the back of his hand. “P-Please just drop that already and let’s go grab our lunch. Oh, we should also take Murasakibara-kun with us. He must be quite hungry right now.”
“Yes, yes,” teasingly acknowledged Kagami, a knowing smirk on his lips. With the usual expressionless demeanour that the bluenette had on pretty much all the time, this blushing expression surely came as a surprise. Who knew Kuroko can actually blush like an innocent maiden when in love with another person?
The redhead bent his back forward a little bit and opened his school bag, rumbling through its insides as he searched for the purple-haired male’s location.
“Huh?” interjected Kagami, his eyebrow a little bit perked up at what he was seeing… or in this case, at what he wasn’t seeing. A shiver ran down through his spine and he pulled his school bag out of the hook on the side of his desk, fully putting it on top of the table’s surface so he could search better for the tiny male.
“Is something the matter, Kagami-kun?” asked Kuroko, his head slightly tilted to the left as he looked over to the taller male with a quizzical expression on his face.
“Ah… Um… I think we have a problem right now,” announced Kagami, his voice and semblance slightly flustered. “I think… I lost Murasakibara.”
“Eh? What do you mean by you ‘lost’ Murasakibara-kun?” asked Kuroko, an eyebrow also getting lightly arched with the confusion that he felt at the taller male’s words.
“He’s not in my bag. And I’m sure I took him to school. I mean, you saw him in the locker roo—“ started explaining Kagami but he came to a sudden halt to his own words, getting up from his desk like greased lightning. “Shit, we forgot him inside of my locker. He’s so totally going to be pissy about it now.”
“I’m sure he’ll forgive us if we give him some snacks or sweets,” pointed out Kuroko, starting to walk outside of their classroom to go back to the locker room used by the basketball club. “And he’s also at fault for not saying anything. You might have told him to remain quiet in a quite threateningly way, but Murasakibara-kun isn’t really one that obeys other people. Well, if we put Akashi-kun and Himuro-san on the sidelines, of course.”
“Yeah, but I just have this nagging feeling that Murasakibara is just… antagonistic of me, maybe?” added Kagami, heaving a long sigh afterwards. “He says he didn’t want to come to my apartment but he still came with me. And every time we talk with each other, he just glares the crap out of me with those tiny purple eyes of his. Don’t even let me start on how cold his glare is when the topic of the conversation is Tatsuya…”
“Your first meeting wasn’t exactly under friendly circumstances, so maybe it’s a residual effect of it,” said Kuroko, part of him pitying the redhead over his current distress. Kagami wasn’t exactly a person who wanted to be liked by others, but he sometimes put on an effort of getting along with them – Murasakibara was one of those cases simply because he was his ‘older brother’s’ teammate.
“My first meeting with Akashi was far worse and he just doesn’t try to bore a hole through my head every time we see each other. Well, most of the time he doesn’t…” pointed out Kagami, feeling a shudder creep up his spine at the way the smaller redhead had glared at him the previous day when he was searching for the bluenette.
Now that he was thinking about it, it was pretty clear why Akashi had taken such an unusual greeting on their first meeting on last year’s Winter Cup, be it on the opening ceremony, be it on the day they played against each other on the finals. Akashi must have felt threatened by the closeness between him and Kuroko and since it was his crazy persona that was out at that time, he took drastic measures to make it clear who was the top dog when the bluenette was concerned.
Kagami wasn’t really sure how both of them felt throughout the intense game between Seirin and Rakuzan but it must have been an extremely emotionally charged game, perhaps even more than when they faced against Touou, whether on the game they lost, whether on the game they won. Kuroko momentarily lost his best attribute as a basketball player, his misdirection, and Akashi reverted back to his original self, actually admitting that that time around, it was the bluenette’s win.
Most likely, not only that game was the completion of the mission that Kuroko had assigned himself to do, which consisted in correcting the wrongdoings of the Generation of Miracles and prove that his basketball could be as victorious as theirs, but it served to reignite Kuroko’s and Akashi’s feelings for one another, perhaps in a whole new and deeper level.
Then again, I really don’t understand how Kuroko hasn’t realized that all he has to do is let Akashi confess to him and use that chance to break his own curse, inwardly voiced out Kagami, looking at the bluenette walking beside him sideways. From the little that I know about Akashi, I’m 100% sure that he planned this week-long joint practice between our team and his because he knows that one day wouldn’t be enough to force Kuroko to actually come around and confess to hi— …Wait… Does Akashi know that Kuroko is in love with him?
“…” Kagami came into a sudden halt while he was crossing the corridor and fully turned around in the smaller male’s direction, an eyebrow arched high as he stared at him with a questioning expression.
“Kagami-kun?” called Kuroko, also stopping when he noticed that the redhead had become frozen in place while intently staring at him with a dumbfounded look on his face. “Is everything okay?”
“O-Oh, yeah,” awkwardly acknowledged Kagami, readily averting the bluenette’s gaze and rubbing the back of his neck, once again resuming with his walk to the basketball’s team’s locker room.
Kagami never truly understood Akashi all that well – he actually doubted that anyone could if even the person himself – but he knew that Kuroko was in love with him for quite a while now. He recently also came to know that Akashi corresponded to the smaller male’s feelings and that, for as out of character as it may seem for both parties, they exchanged a quite naughty phone call the previous day, most likely caused by the bluenette’s curse and the redhead’s twisted personality that enabled him to use anything, whatever it may be, in favour of his personal ploys and schemes. Though that was the case, Kagami couldn’t really imagine Akashi (the original self, at least) forcing Kuroko into having that type of conversation with him if he didn’t have the inkling that the only reason why his curse had taken such ways was his repressed love towards him.
That being the case… Why exactly haven’t their curses being broken yet, since Akashi surely wasn’t the type to lay low and pass upon an opportunity that had been delivered to him on a silver platter? Also, if Akashi wanted to play on the side of the field that favoured him the most, why didn’t he invite Seirin’s basketball team to come to Kyoto and play in Rakuzan’s home base instead of coming all the way to Tokyo to accomplish the exact same achievement?
What exactly is Akashi’s plan and how much has he actually foreseen to happen in the near future for him to be taking such creepy measures when he could have ended his and Kuroko’s curse yesterday?
Even with all of his musings over that particular subject, Kagami couldn’t figure out what were the smaller redhead’s current intentions. Maybe, just like other people called him, he truly was an idiot.
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