Chapter Text
“You are the only one who has understood even a whisper of me, and I will tell you that I am the only person who has understood even a whisper of you.”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, Everything is Illuminated
I.
Once, when Aomine was twelve years old, his mother smiled at him over a cup of tea and said, ‘Did you know you were born with your eyes open, Daiki?’
The boy with midnight blue hair looked up from the basketball he was trying to re-inflate and scratched at his flaking, sunburnt nose.
‘No,’ he said finally, casting a thoughtful gaze out the window. “What was I looking at?”
His mother shook her head, and Aomine wondered if her expression was wistful. ‘It would have been nice if you were looking at me or your father. But you only had eyes for the sun coming through the window behind me.’
Aomine only laughed then.
“I knew it.”
II.
He can’t remember a time where someone hasn’t mentioned to him he looks nothing like his parents. They about it often, a running gag in the family. It’s not true, of course. He has his mother’s eyes and his father’s nose. Both their grins. But there’s something about him that’s sun-drenched; the redness beneath the sweat, the smell of the day in his hair. He’s tall too, for his age, and he shines brightly with some unique confidence that the world is his. As if the sun itself had imbued him with its own light.
Satsuki reprimands him often for his carelessness, however. For a few weeks, she tries her best to make him wear hats and sunscreen.
‘You have to be safe,’ she says to him every morning and jams a cap over his hair. He only responds with a derisive snort and flicks it off his head with a finger, much to Momoi’s chagrin.
‘Oi. How am I supposed to see anything with that stupid thing on my head?’
‘It’s not stupid,’ she huffs, but she can’t hide the growing smile on her face when his head subtly follows the movement of parting clouds to reveal a ray of gold from above.
III.
Basketball is best outside, though the gyms at Teiko are modern and up to standard. Aomine wipes the sweat from his face with his fading grey t-shirt and squints up at the sky. The sun will set soon, he thinks forlornly. Satsuki’s fallen asleep on the bench beneath a tree by the court and he bounces the ball idly with one hand. Daytime doesn’t last forever, and Aomine knows he’s too old to wish that it did. He tucks the basketball under his arm and crosses over to his long-time friend and shakes her awake with a gentle hand.
They walk home together as usual. Aomine is quiet as they watch the shadows grow longer under the setting sun.
III.
It’s no surprise that winter makes Aomine moody. The sun isn’t out as often as he wants it to be and there are days where it’s too cold to travel to an indoor court, let alone play outside. Though it’s not for lack of trying.
But even Aomine supposes that there are only so many times you can play on frost-covered ground without hurting yourself and catching a cold.
Satsuki and his parents rotate turns in nursing him back to health. Aomine frowns deeply at his ceiling the whole time, his twisted ankle throbbing dully under the covers. They give him their sympathies and assure him it won’t be long until he can play again. He mutters in agreement, because while he’s irritated, he’s not bitter.
‘I’ll just make up for it,’ he tells Satsuki when she voices her concern. She blinks, then chuckles with a shake of her head.
‘Of course you will.’
After all, the room is much too small and stifling to hold a light such as Aomine Daiki.