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There is a special place next to Kagami reserved for people like Kuroko, who have spent their whole lives breathing the smoke left behind in the exhaust pipes and challenging themselves to dream a littler farther and love a little faster. Furihata understands this better than anyone else, and perhaps even a bit too much than he should. He prides himself in this understanding and sleeps comfortably at night knowing that there is nothing he can do to change the quality of this fantastic and utterly fatalistic feeling of falling down a sixteen-story building whenever he watches Kagami play on the court.
Kagami finds him near the end of summer, during the training camp after their second Interhigh. It’s early in the morning and the rest of the team are still asleep, early enough that Furihata’s yet to see the sun rise and too late for him to keep his hopes up.
“Oi, Furihata, you’re still awake?” Kagami sits down next to him on the wooden deck facing the beach. “Thought I’d be the only one.”
“We have a practice match against Shuutoku tomorrow,” says Furihata, “so I guess it makes sense that Kagami-kun wouldn’t be able to sleep, haha.” He doesn’t talk about how he’s made this deduction ahead of time and allowed himself another cup of coffee after ten pm in order to stay awake until this time of night when it’s too early to see the sun rise.
Kagami cracks a smile. “Is that right.”
“You should consider taking a nap at least, Kagami-kun. It’s really not good to pull an all-nighter right before we play.”
Kagami doesn’t reply, and they lapse into a hesitant silence that spreads quietly into the darkness. Furihata feels his breaths sharpen against his throat and realizes that he’s treading in dangerous waters then, so he allows the silence to swallow up the beating of his heart.
“Hey,” Kagami says after a while, and doesn’t look him in the eye. “You’re not the calculating type, Furihata.”
“I’m not,” he agrees, and he doesn’t really want to ask, but does anyway. If he’s got to describe it somehow, then he is the type who doesn’t try to ask for much, because he’s never tried to ask for much. “What do you mean by that anyway, Kagami-kun?”
“I mean, you wouldn’t do that. You wouldn’t stay up this late for no reason.”
Furihata swallows. “I guess you don’t know me well enough to form a solid opinion, then.”
“Could it be that you’re–”
“I’m not,” says Furihata. “I couldn’t sleep, that’s all.”
It only takes five words. It only takes five words and then he can let it go and think about other things and make room for different hobbies and interests in that very specific corner of his heart. It only takes five words to confess and he can get it over with after that and stop chasing after things that he can’t reach, objects that he cannot touch without pulling a muscle and sustaining an injury that might take years to recover from. He is not a part of the special place reserved for people like Kuroko, who wear thick masks to prevent themselves from suffocating and undergo stamina training to dream farther and love faster.
“I guess you’re the same as me, then,” says Kagami. “Somehow I’m happy knowing that.”
Furihata smiles into the dark. “Then stay here with me for a while, Kagami-kun. We can watch the sun rise together.”
He takes what he can get.