Chapter Text
oo1. Sleep
Kagami is rudely awakened by a wild thrashing in his bed, for the third night in the row.
Well-practiced by now, his lips are pressed into a thin line as he takes Kuroko’s violent frame by the shoulders, shaking him gently and smoothing back his hair to wake him up. For a quiet reserved person like Kuroko, it is really surprising for Kagami to have to dodge two flailing punches and a kick to the groin (he doesn’t quite avoid the last one, and he groans a little). But then again, Kagami knows that it’s for a good reason.
“Kuroko.” The blue haired boy finally, finally comes to, after Kagami has murmured his name into his ear for at least a dozen times. Eyes still wild and unseeing, they dart around the room frantically, and Kagami watches with worry as Kuroko’s Adam’s apple bobs around, the boy simply coming up with choppy sentences. He brings a hot hand up to Kuroko’s cheek, and he’s not surprised to find that it’s damp.
His other hand curls into a fist.
“Baby, it’s okay. You’re in our room.”
Kuroko blinks, once, twice. It’s like watching someone awaken from a very deep sleep when Kuroko finally registers his surroundings, registers that it is Kagami who is holding on to him and not a certain golden-skinned boy from his nightmares. Kagami opens his arms, and Kuroko crawls gratefully into the cage, hands closing weakly over the hem of Kagami’s shirt.
“I’m sorry to have woken you up yet again, Kagami-kun.”
The redhead runs his hands gently up and down Kuroko’s back, holding him closer when the shorter shivers slightly. “It’s okay.”
It’s not, though. In the dark, when Kuroko looks up at Kagami, the taller can see that his eyes are bruised purple, and his irises are webbed with a pain that strikes him in the heart, but yet distant enough to make him ball up his fists uselessly again and grit his teeth because he can’t fight Kuroko’s demons for him.
He’s lying if he says that he’s not insanely affected by the fact that there will always (he hopes not) be another person Kuroko sees against the backs of his eyelids when he closes his eyes, when his fingers run across the ridges of a basketball, or when he swipes past his Teikou jersey while looking for a suitable shirt to wear out on a date with Kagami.
It really, really bothers him, and Kuroko knows that, so the shorter tries to hide it from him whenever he can. But what he doesn’t know is that it simply infuriates Kagami even further, because it fucking sucks to see Kuroko’s demons resurface in slumber, and that they’re all in his head so Kagami can only sit with the boy until he wakes up.
“I’m okay, you know.” Kuroko smiles at him, gently, and Kagami swipes a thumb across his lip. He doesn’t believe him, and his heart really, really aches for him.
“You know that I’ll never let him hurt you like that again, right? Or anyone else.” I would never leave you like he did.
Kuroko stiffens in his arms, but Kagami doesn’t let go. He never does, the hot-headed, persistent bastard. But luckily for him, Kuroko doesn’t get mad, and understands, even if blood thrums in his veins faster than a pair of hummingbird’s wings. “I know that. I’m sorry I worried you, Kagami-kun.”
Kagami snorts, a loud, unattractive sound in the middle of the night that makes Kuroko laugh. The bedsprings squeak as the smaller shifts his weight, and Kagami leans back into the headboard when Kuroko sits up on his knees to press a kiss to his lip. “You’re such an idiot.”
“Sleep.” Kuroko’s voice is still wavery, but at least it doesn’t sound so broken anymore. And Kagami smiles, because it’s really stupid for someone who needs the sleep a thousand times more than he does to tell him to go to bed.
There are bruises under Kuroko’s eyes and in his heart that Kagami can probably never remove. But at the very least, he’s good at nursing them until they hurt a little less, until Kuroko sees Kagami behind the backs of his eyelids, in his closet, on the court for a few extra seconds.
oo2. Love
Kagami's first name may be Taiga, but when it comes to a lot of things, he's nothing like the magnificent wildcat, with a heart that cries out for war and victory with bravery.
More specifically, things that are related to a certain teammate of his.
He blames the process of falling in love with Kuroko entirely on the shorter boy. His descent into gradual insanity was nothing short of plunging and clumsy, for the first time he realised, he had stumbled unceremoniously into a drain, and had to have stupid Kuroko pull him out with concern written all over his face. And all Kuroko did before all that drama was smile at him and wish him good morning in that annoyingly formal way of his.
Kagami's tried very hard to avoid the subject of Kuroko in his head. He's no greenhorn when it comes to relationships, having been in a fair amount of them himself, but Kuroko doesn't have boobs or a curvy waist or soft long hair. Kuroko is a boy, made of hard lines and lean muscle, as delicate as he might look. Kuroko is his teammate, his partner, his stupid goddamn shadow and his best friend, and Kagami really doesn't want to fuck anything up.
But he might as well be fighting a losing war - the more he pulls away and tries to suppress the heat creeping up the base of his neck when Kuroko looks up at him innocently while holding the damned dog in his hands, the more his stupid, deep blue eyes drag him back down. Kagami swears a lot when he realises that he's losing precious sleep and- low and behold- appetite over Kuroko after he realises that it's impossible not to think of him after walking in on the shorter in the locker room while he was changing out of his gritty jersey. And stupid, oblivious Kuroko had noticed nothing, and even turned around to tell him that he left his socks under the bench.
It's been a year and a half now, and over eight months since Kagami found out, but it's still the same with Kuroko. Once upon a time, he'd been driven to do something about it, to confess to the slighter boy and get him on a date, but as Kuroko continues to be distant and formal and annoyingly oblivious, Kagami slowly loses hope. He's never going to get Kuroko, not when Kuroko never looks like he's fighting down a blush while he's around Kagami, and certainly not when he has Satsuki all over him.
He briefly wonders why that damned phantom boy has all the luck - Satsuki is curvy and lean and gorgeous, and has an amazing personality to boot. And here he is, stuck in a rut and hopelessly in love with a boy that's too far, too high away for him to reach.
Generation of Miracles indeed.
Kagami can't afford to show love, at least not to Kuroko when he's everything but a lover. But sometimes it slips out. It slips out of Kagami's pocket when he is easily bullied by Kuroko to treat him to vanilla milkshakes, and he does that partly (okay, mostly) to see the small tilt of the other's lips when he receives his drink. It slips out of Kagami's eyes when he lets his eyes linger a little too long at Kuroko's bare, pale torso in the locker rooms. It slips out of his stomach when he offers the skinny boy one or two of his Maji Burgers, even when he's starving and doesn't have enough money to buy more for himself. It slips out of his mouth too, sometimes, by accident, when he blurts out that Kuroko looks cute in his bedhead or when he has his tie on wrong. But he always regrets it when Kuroko frowns and draws himself up to his fullest (inadequate) height, because it is so fucking cute and it makes Kagami want to throw himself under a truck when Kuroko shoves at him disgruntledly.
But what Kagami doesn't know, the halfwit, is that the way love slips out of him is the same for Kuroko, too.