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After Murasakibara screws up and Akashi screws himself over out of a misguided desire to prevent any further screw-ups that might compromise their standing in the middle school circuit, the astral alignment of the Teikou middle school basketball club shifts three inches to the left. It is only three inches, but each inch represents something abstract and dangerous that cannot be described using longitudinal and latitudinal vocabulary. The only one who is immune to this fundamental loss of humanity is Midorima, who had been lacking somewhat in that department to begin with. He is not overly concerned with things like winning or losing or screwing each other over out of a misguided desire to assert one’s autonomy; he simply wants to land his shots. This fascinates Ryouta, who has dragged himself up onto this pedestal so he could hang out with the gods, only for them to get tired of being gods and proceed down a path of self-destruction, leaving him disenchanted with basketball and heaven alike. The rest of their teammates, himself included, have to be beaten up by Kuroko at least once (twice, in Aomine’s case) before they find their equilibrium again. Meanwhile, Midorima carries handheld thermometers and electric shavers in his pocket and goes to college.
After Kuroko finishes beating everyone up and Akashi fixes his heterochromia and his personality, Momoi takes things into her own hands and organizes a get-together at a Mcdonald’s in a location that is central, relative to those of them that had remained in Tokyo. In the end, her concern that someone will try to bring scissors, and the extra pair she slips into her pocket, are unneeded. Akashi cannot be bothered to come down to Tokyo just for them, and Ryouta is, by a stroke of bad luck, busy. They meet up again in their second and third years of high school, forget to do so in the year following that, and then manage to pull it off again thanks to a sudden burst of sentimentality on Aomine’s part. By this point, Murasakibara has long since escaped to France to fight dessert enthusiasts in a high stress environment that smells like butter.
Kuroko has developed a smoking habit. This makes him the unanimous star of the evening, as Momoi pokes and prods at his shoulders, which have become bonier since Ryouta last saw him, and Akashi attempts to psychoanalyze all of them over the top of his glass, sipping at his beer ominously. This year Ryouta himself is present, too, and he makes sure to make the fact known whenever he feels that it is being neglected. Midorima shoots him judgmental looks across the table all through the night, but Kuroko smiles at him. He feels proud of that, somehow.
They end the day with an extra round of drinks courtesy of Aomine, who has decided to use his twenties to redeem himself to everyone he was a dick to in school. They agree to meet up again soon with varying degrees of reluctance and head off to train stations or bicycles or private chauffeurs waiting discreetly down the street, thinking about the cigarettes and expensive leather wallets on the table. Life happens, as life is wont to happen, and they get swept up in the gruelling, uneven pace of adulthood. A generation of haughty, selfish gods grows up, bound only by the shared astral projection of their middle school years, separated by the dramatic high seas of time, space, and different universities. Ryouta cements his life’s work by pulling off a supporting character’s role in a popular drama that is so well-received, he surpasses both of the leads in every popularity poll and at every publicity event. He grows tired of pretending he is a god, and decides to climb off his pedestal. He buys a coffee machine for his apartment. This must be what growing up feels like.
::
When Midorima texts him for the first time in three years with the name and address of a well-established izakaya, Ryouta assumes that the others have been contacted as well. Perhaps he had been struck by a sudden burst of sentimentality. Ryouta will not be the judge of that. He does his hair and pulls on yesterday’s jeans and when he slides into the booth three minutes after the agreed upon time and discovers Midorima sitting opposite him, fiddling with a large stuffed polar bear, he assumes that everyone else will be even later than him. Given their combined track records, this is no surprise, either.
“They are not coming.” Midorima takes a sip of water. There are two glasses on the table. Midorima’s is almost empty.
“Oh, they weren’t free? That’s a pity, I haven’t been in touch with Kuroko lately.”
“I did not invite them.”
Ryouta pauses with his hand in his hair. He’s grown it out again following a brief phase in which he tried to find increasingly horrible ways to cut it short without actually shaving bald, and has fallen back into the habit of fiddling with it as a distraction. He asks the predictable question. “Why?”
“Why what?”
“Why not?”
“Why can’t it be just you?”
Midorima begins to pour soy sauce into a tiny saucer. He does this meticulously, making sure each drop lands at dead center. When the saucer has been filled to the brim, he stops.
“I,” he says, and then stops again, more abruptly. He’s changed his glasses, Ryouta notices. They’re rounder now, framed with a thin band of gold. The look both suits him and makes him look alarmingly different, delicate in a way that his middle school self never was. “I wanted to have dinner with you.”
Well thanks, Ryouta thinks, that didn’t tell me a thing. He doesn’t say this out loud. Midorima’s ordered chicken skewers and quail’s eggs and a plethora of other dishes, and Ryouta thinks selfishly that he wants to enjoy the food before he has to question his purpose and meaning in coming here. It looks good, after all. He does that.
::
“So why did you call me out for dinner?” Ryouta asks several hours later. He’s bitten the inside of his cheek by accident, and the taste of blood mingles with his beer unpleasantly. He’s drunk. Midorima is clearly not drunk. He has moved the polar bear to the space beside him out of concern for its safety.
“I wanted to,” Midorima repeats like a robot. A very tall, green-haired, alarmingly attractive robot. The descriptor “stern, put-together, and slightly awkward” suits a brooding twenty-seven year old neurosurgeon in a gray button-up far more than it did the fifteen year old for whom basketball was the equivalent of a social life.
“That doesn’t tell me anything,” Ryouta puts his head on the table. Thank god the waiter has cleared their dishes. His skin hasn’t been holding up very well lately.
“Okay, then, I saw your annoying face in an advertisement on the street and was reminded that you existed.”
“Much better. That also tells me nothing, but better.”
“I am not the same person I was in middle school, Kise Ryouta.”
“I can see that. You’re a lot more attractive, for one.”
“You’re drunk. I’m sending you home.”
::
Midorima manages to wrangle his address out of him and sends him back to his apartment in his car. He does not try to do anything suspicious like kiss him or fuck him or touch his elbow when he thinks he isn’t looking, although Ryouta would not, he realizes, complain about any of the above, because Midorima is a decent human being instead of an asshole. In the morning he checks his phone and sees another text from Midorima, reminding him to drink more water and not to get drunk in the company of indecent human beings because not everyone is as kind as him. He calls Kuroko.
Kuroko’s voice comes out muffled on the other end. There’s static, and Ryouta thinks immediately that he must be on his balcony again. Sometimes when Aomine gets especially drunk, he cries. The last time this happened, he told Ryouta that he was sad to see their Kuroko grow up so fast. Look at him, Aomine mumbled, wringing his hands together. I bet he doesn’t believe in Santa Claus anymore. I don’t think he ever did to begin with, Ryouta replied.
Ryouta tries to open the call with small talk the way he tries to start everything major in his life, but Kuroko threatens to hang up on him, so he doesn’t get to tell him about the poodle he saw someone walking on the street the other day. It’s a pity. “Don’t you think Midorima’s kind of hot now,” he says instead.
“You said the exact same thing the last time I saw you, Kise.”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about, Kuroko.” Ryouta has no idea what he’s talking about.
“You were drunk.”
Kuroko does hang up on him after this, because he falls silent and can’t be arsed to give a stand-by response while he questions his life and morals. Sighing, he falls back onto his bed, still wearing the clothes from last night. Really, he feels like shit.
::
He knows he’s attractive. If he didn’t know it at this point, he would have to be either very stupid or in possession of a tremendous inferiority complex, and while he will not deny that the latter had caused him much grief in his early twenties (Kuroko can attest to this, having bore the brunt of Ryouta’s infamous late night phone calls), he has finally come to terms with majority of his glorious first-world problems.
This is excluding the strange state of affairs he shares with Midorima. If he chooses to include that, then Ryouta is forced to face up to the fact that his compulsive lying habit has not, in fact, gone away. It may have begun in high school when, forced to sit out of their match due to his knee, he watched Midorima land shot after shot in perfect form up close like a nature photographer in the wild, covered from head to toe in camouflage gear and wearing a straw hat over his head. There he goes, leaping gracefully across the great desert plains while deftly avoiding all enemy attacks; the Midorima is an incredibly rare, respected creature. He can only be found in heaven, shooting basketball hoops and stealing mundane household objects from the mortal realm to furnish his good luck. He’s fucking gorgeous.
Or it may have began in middle school, when Ryouta became disillusioned with the universe and Midorima only continued shooting hoops like he did not find it odd that their middle school basketball team had seemingly imploded overnight. He had always wondered how Midorima did it, if he was really human, if there was a soft, pliable heart underneath that smooth metal exterior. Ryouta stares at Midorima’s text on his phone, his thumb poised over the reply button, and then locks it.
::
They meet again at Ueno park. It’s a Sunday morning and they are surrounded by families and couples and high schoolers disguised in awkward high schooler fashion, and it’s so much like a date that even Ryouta, as good an actor as he is, can’t ignore it. He’s uptight and jumpy while Midorima, four years out of med school and comfortable in his job as a well-respected doctor for families that pay hospital bills as a pastime, goes out of his way to be nice and understanding and somehow that only makes him jumpier, Midorima brushes against his hand accidentally, Ryouta walks into a pole. This leads to an argument, not heated by any means given that Midorima’s voice never rises above a certain decibel count and Ryouta is painfully aware of the disguised high school girls staring at him from across the duck pond, but uncomfortable nonetheless. I did not come here to meet an ice block, says Midorima, pushing his glasses repeatedly up the bridge of his nose. Well I’m sorry I’m not as smooth as you thought I was, I lied about you being attractive, Ryouta bites back. They go home before the afternoon manages to catch up to them.
Three days later, he caves. He crafts a long text message about high school and horrifying, messy feelings and not getting enough sleep because he’s been following a show on Netflix which is really good, Midorima should watch it. He deletes it. He sends a shorter one.
Midorima meets him at the basketball court near his place, because they were born and bred in Teikou and no matter how hard they try to run away to culinary schools in France they will never truly be able to escape the long sweeping shadow of basketball. Ryouta forgets to bring a ball because he’s brilliant like that. Midorima produces one from his bag.
“It is today’s lucky item.” He throws it at Ryouta, who bounces it a couple of times, covers the circumference of the court, returns to stand in front of him. Midorima has not moved an inch, and stares at him with an odd kind of intensity. It’s filtered, intentionally watered down, but still sharp.
“What.” Ryouta tilts his head to one side. He hopes he looks cute.
“It is not worth it if it does not cause you pain. Someone told me this once,” Midorima says, and takes his ball back. He dribbles, stops, straightens out. He takes aim, his pretty hands poised around the curve of the ball. Midorima has always had pretty hands. This is only one of many things Ryouta lied to himself about for convenience’s sake, afraid that he had somehow shifted too far off the straight road and that Midorima would never want to look him in the eye again. He had been a painfully dramatic teenager. They all were, once.
Midorima shoots. The ball glances off the rim of the hoop, but goes in anyway. He does not see this, having already turned and started walking back. Ryouta watches him, twenty seven-year-old Midorima with the new glasses and the nice, expensive-looking watch on his hand but the same old face, the same old curiosities. He always wondered how Midorima managed to stay on the path he had beaten out of the ground for himself, why he did not fall prey to the three-inch astral shift quite as severely as the rest of them did. Midorima was always good at math. He could calculate for time and distance and velocity in half the time it took Murasakibara to eat an umaibo. He never seemed to scar as easily.
“Do you tell that to all your patients before you cut them up?” Ryouta calls back.
Midorima in the wild, in the gymnasium of the Teikou middle school basketball club, on the basketball court beside the convenience store with the faded markings and the crooked hoop, makes his way across the surface of the globe. This, he takes his time with, placing each foot carefully in front of the other as if one move will send everything crumbling back down to ashes. When he finally reaches Ryouta, he stops, not abruptly.
“No,” he says. “I tell it to people that I am in love with.”
“It’s been three weeks. Fourteen years, if you count middle school.” Ryouta sends a silent prayer up to the gods that he used to hang out with during lunch break. Aomine and his delayed adolescent sentimentality, Akashi and his omniscience, Kuroko who he will have to call again after this, or maybe even treat to lunch at a nice fancy restaurant where smoking patrons are allowed. He swallows. “Can I kiss you?”
Midorima gives him a look. “Can pigeons fly?”
“I don’t know. Maybe this one can’t?”
“That is a sad fucking pigeon.”
Midorima has soft lips and warm hands and long lashes that remind him of spider’s silk, and Ryouta isn’t a teenager anymore and bursting with vocabulary stolen from eighteenth century erotica, but god, he wants to drive him down to the beach or something. They can watch the waves slide seductively up the shore and write shitty poetry to each other, and Ryouta can ask him all the questions he’s been bottling up inside of his chest since they were thirteen and Midorima shot a basketball and accidentally snapped his soul in half. Because Midorima isn’t an asshole like Kuroko, he’ll answer them, and then Ryouta will crack open his handsome human exterior and crawl inside and get terribly hurt. This must be what growing up feels like.