Archive of Our Own

Day 0 - ghost mermaid

Before high school started Taiga’s dad moved them to a place in the Marina, theoretically so that Taiga could ride his bike to the new school. Or maybe so that his dad could save on taxi fare to the international terminal at LAX. At least Taiga had that thought for a hot minute, and immediately felt kind of shitty about it.

And anyway, he’d been wrong.

His dad’s travel schedule mysteriously lightened up, and being close to the water made this weirdly kid-like side of him come out. They were even bonding a little, or something. Getting sunburnt together while paddleboarding counted, right? Or liking the same shrimp dish at the restaurant down the street. Baby steps.

Either way his dad started wearing a lot of board shorts and T-shirts instead of his usual business stuff and started talking about maybe buying a used sailboat. Hey, Taiga figured. Whatever made him happy. And it wasn’t bad, he really could bike anywhere. Like to the boardwalk or to the Venice breakwater or to Alex’s ramshackled honeysuckle-eaten cottage just west of Abbot Kinney Blvd.

Their old house in the city had memories sure, but they weren’t all good: memories of being lonely after moving, and then memories of Tatsuya (that he didn’t want shoved in his face now, kthx) and then there was the way his dad used to sit on the back porch, chainsmoking while looking at Mom’s overgrown garden.

Taiga felt a little guilty over how happy he was to leave that behind.

That morning he’d woken up early. He was restless for some reason, like the feeling he got just before a game, even though he hadn’t played in months and there wasn’t anything important like that in his life now. He staggered out of bed thinking ‘what the hell, school doesn’t even start until tomorrow’ but he was hopelessly up at…he looked at the clock.. 7:04 AM.

Christ. Even their apartment gym was closed.

Taiga tiptoed around to the sound of his dad snoring from the other bedroom, made himself a cup of instant coffee and then went and took one of the paddle boards out of the garage.

Outside the Marina was smothered in fog in a way that was hella cinematic and frankly a little spooky, but would totally burn off before noon. Taiga usually liked things sunny, but the fog made it’s own weird magic hour. You could see all kinds of creatures that normally hid otherwise - sea lions on the ruins of the old docks, giant herons in the rocks of the channel, and sometimes a dark fin in the water in front of his board.

The water was calm, and he felt pretty proud of himself as he stood there on the board, guiding it smoothly through the turns around the parked, darkened yachts. These little bouts of insomnia aside, Taiga thought that maybe things were looking up.

He'd been kind of lost for a while, without Tatsuya. He’d been in a not-great place for part of this past year. But then Alex had stepped in and his dad had stepped in and he’d gotten a little sick of his own emo act and slowly started moving forward. This past summer he’d gotten his learner's permit, gotten a summer job at a surf shop to start saving up for a car.

Maybe he was a little less naively optimistic than he’d been before. And his tempter still got the better of him sometimes. And thinking of the game made something vibrate inside him in a bad way. But hey, it was a new day. It felt like maybe he was headed towards something brighter..

With a few sure strokes of the paddle he rounded the last turn, coming close enough to touch the gold lettering of the last boat on the row.

And then there was a human shape in the gray mist in front of him, stark against the pile of black rocks. Someone was out there.

Honestly Taiga’s first thought was 'holy crap it’s a ghost!’ Because seriously, who the fuck sits in total darkness on cold slippery rocks at ten til eight in the morning. Fucking nobody.

His follow up is ‘or maybe a mermaid?’ because OK, a mermaid might. To be fair Taiga wasn’t running on all cylinders. The line between real and not real blurred in weather like this and all he could think of was that both possibilities were equally bad news because ghosts were scary and forget that ‘Disney’s Ariel’ shit, real mermaids drowned people.

Taiga tried not to breathe too much as his board drifted closer. Actually, he did not want the board to drift closer, he was plenty freaked out and wanted to get the hell out of there before whatever it was noticed him. The current had other ideas. Slowly, he tried to lower his paddle into the water without making a splash.

Just then, a sudden a wave came up and made a dull slapping sound against the side of his board. The sitter looked up.

Now that he was uncomfortably close Taiga could see that it was a guy - a young Asian guy, but with crazy-pale skin, almost white boy pale. Sitting there hunched over he looked cold and still and a little bit like a drowning victim.

All the hair on the back of Taiga’s neck stood up.

Oh the ‘ghost’ theory was definitely in the lead now. It didn’t help that the guy had the creepiest eyes Taiga had ever seen - pale and blue. Possessed-person-in-a-horror-flick blue. CGI Special Effects blue.

They were round and a little red-rimmed and meeting them Taiga felt this massive wave, this almost-visible vibe of 'Go away! Don’t come near me!’ It hit him straight on and like a moron he forgot that he was on thirteen feet of unstable, floating plastic and he stepped backwards.

The board tilted and bucked. Swearing and windmilling his arms, he fell off with a loud-ass splash.

By the time Taiga got done spitting out the Marina’s questionably gas-flavored water, chasing down the paddle and getting his freezing, wet self back onto the board, the fog had lifted and the rocks beside him were empty.

So how was that for a morning? Unreal, right?

He couldn’t stop thinking about it. Even after hauling the heavy board up the boat ramp and curse-running(combined cursing and running, great for when all your insides feel like a bucket of ice) three stories up to their apartment. Even after a scalding shower and downing two giant cups of hot chocolate.

Eventually Taiga scrunched up his face and steeled his courage and googled “Marina Del Rey, ghosts.” But nothing really came up. No mermaid stories either.

Everything had happened so fast in that moment, but as the morning went on he kept remembering little details about the person he’d seen. He’d been wearing one of those old fashioned outfits - a severe button down shirt and honest-to-god slacks. Score another point for the ghost theory, nobody his age dressed like that in this century. Except hipsters maybe.

And he hadn’t been wearing shoes. Just remembering the guy’s thin, bare feet made something under his ribs go squish in a bad way. And as far as he knew ghosts didn’t cry.

Ok dude, calm down he told himself. So you saw some sad hipster, so what.

But it wouldn’t get out of his head. The only thing that put him under was the warmth from the hot chocolate blooming outward from his gut. Combined with the way the sun came in through the blinds and wrapped around him. It was too early for all of this. Taiga’s eyelids suddenly felt like they had thirty pound weights attached.

He fell asleep in his de-frosting blanket cocoon on the couch thinking: That guy looked how I felt five months ago. Maybe I should go back there tomorrow, make sure he doesn’t do anything stupid.

Day 1 - roll call

The next day school starts and instead of waking up early to go back to the bay Taiga almost sleeps through his alarm. So at least there’s a bunch of normal stuff to worry about. It doesn’t chase what had happened out of his mind completely, but it does displace it a little.

Taiga gets to school, barely on time, and maybe gets a little lost finding his classroom.(The overall feeling from the place is ‘tentatively OK’ but he’s still taller and broader than nearly everyone and other kids are already starting to hurry out of his way in the hall. Look, he does. not. have resting bitch face, his eyebrows are just set like that.) So he yanks open the door, already frazzled and already dreading the inevitable first-rollcall bullshit. The kids in the room take one look at his face and look elsewhere.

Now teachers can mostly manage 'Kagami,' LA’s a melting pot like that, but the ‘It’s actually ‘Taiga’ not ‘Tiger'’ explanation is always a freaking pain. And if anyone tries to make a ‘Frosted Flakes’ joke like they did that one time in middle school he is going to kick their ass from here to the Pier.

There's no seating chart yet so, he grabs an open desk by the window. The bell rings.

A middle-aged black lady in a pantsuit walks in with a clipboard. She goes down the list. There’s a Josh and a Stacey and two Sarah’s and a bunch of other easy-to-say-and-spell names. Taiga starts frowning pre-emptively when she gets down to the ‘K’s.’

“Tiger Kagami?”

Yep, there it went. Couldn’t adults fucking read? Taiga raises his hand.

“It’s ‘Taiga.’ Actually. Pronounced like the polar climate thingy.”

At least nobody cracks any jokes, Looking big and scary is good for something.

“Ok, I’ll make a note.” the teacher says. Then she frowns down at the paper. “Oh boy, I might need a little help with this one...”

“Tetsuya Kuroko?”

Ouch. Even with his shitty remembered Japanese, Taiga knows that is not how you say that.

“Present.” says a quiet, softly-accented voice just over his shoulder and he cranes his neck to look backwards and then he almost has a heart attack.

So OK, the creepy drowning-victim kid goes to his school and sits right behind him.

In broad daylight his skin is still exactly that pale and his hair is actually light blue. Legit blue. The color of snow in a Ghibli movie. Unlike that time at the rocks the guy’s expression is perfectly blank, like a budding serial killer.

Nobody says anything about his weird Japanese name either.

Taiga whips his head back around and pretends to be looking through his binder so fast it hurts his neck a little..

Next on the roll-call is ‘Kelly Kurzik’ and she’s absent from class.

Day 2-10 - casual stalking

So for the first week and a bit Taiga sort of hangs back and watches the whole ghost mermaid boy classmate situation develop. And mostly it's pretty painful.

Kuroko(it seems weird to just think of him as ‘Tetsuya’ And what the hell is up with him having a one-syllable difference with ‘Tatsuya’?) is one odd dude. He dresses like an old photograph. Instead of a normal backpack he has some kind of professor’s briefcase satchel-looking thing.

Worst of all, his English is totally basic. He can’t really talk to people, and can’t fit in, and does a million little things wrong every day. From Taiga’s position it’s like watching someone drowning slowly without even trying to swim. And his main deal is that he’s quiet, serious, polite, and simultaneously doesn’t seem to give a single fuck about anything.

The only human reaction Taiga’s seen him have is a slight flinch when the teacher calls on him to answer a question. Probably because she calls him ‘Tetsuya’ and she still can’t say it right. Taiga wonders why he doesn’t just correct her.

Apparently Taiga remembers more about his native?( is it really native if you leave when you’re five?) culture than he thought because he suddenly knows the reason for that flinch. Japanese people are super anal about using first names. Unless you’re a relative or really close, like, lifelong friends or kissing close you just don’t do it. Suddenly having everyone and their dog using Kuroko’s first name casually can’t feel that great.

So why doesn’t he tell the teacher to use his last name?! “Please call me __” That’s a pretty simple sentence! Taiga’s not sure why he’s obsessing about this.

On the other hand maybe it’s better that he assimilate quickly. Taiga had to. People calling him by his first name isn’t even a thing, it seems normal now.

Toward the end of the first week Taiga notices that a slick-looking preppy kid named Todd has been hanging out outside their classroom. Trying to harass the ghost boy apparently. Half the time it’s like watching a man try to punch smoke because that Kuroko has a habit of flat-out disappearing somewhere as soon as the bell rings.

Todd’s wannabe OC ass mostly ends up looking like he’s trying too hard to get cast as ‘Generic Teen Bully Number 3.’

But once or twice Todd catches Kuroko on the way out the door. First it’s just questions. “So are you an albino or what?” This gets him no answer and the ever-popular creepy blank stare blue plate special.

“Kindly fuck off, asswipe!” yells some freckled girl from the back row. Taiga thinks she’s got tourette’s or something, even he doesn’t swear that much.

Kuroko says nothing. Todd leaves.

But he comes back the next day.

“Are you really all Japanese?”

Kuroko gives him another look, this one a little bit more weary than blank. “Why?” he says quietly..

“Why what?” Todd parrots back

“Why you do this?”

“Hey, I’m just curious! No harm in being curious, right?”

Kuroko looks him right in the eyes.

“Bullshit.” he says, still in that soft, flat voice.

‘Ooooooohhh!’ go a bunch of people around the classroom. Taiga finds himself covering up a grin, for some reason.

Kuroko turns away from Todd. Todd has ceased to exist in his own private universe. Pity guys like that just hate to be ignored.

“Hey! I asked you a question!” He slams his arm out into the lockers right in front of Kuroko.

Without missing a beat, Kuroko smoothly ducks under it and keeps walking. For a second Taiga could swear he saw him roll his eyes.

Taiga frowns all through bike ride home, though. He’s seen this kind of thing before. Left alone it’s only going to escalate.

Day 11 - a critical loss of fucks.

On the day Todd brings his two fugly Abercrombie reject friends with him Taiga figures enough’s enough. Today’s the day he’s going to interfere. Instead today turns out to be the day he sees Kuroko lose the last fuck he had left. Later Taiga could swear he literally saw the moment it flew away out the window.

All day in class Kuroko’s been reading a book under his desk. Taiga knows because he can hear him turning the pages, and look, the English unit they’re doing right now is boring as hell. If Taiga had something to read, he’d be doing it too.

After class Todd shows up, and now his little pet goon squad is busy flanking him as they loiter in the hallway. In a perfect recipe for disaster, the teacher steps out to make copies of something.

Kuroko packs up his desk, puts his book in front of his face and walks out like nothing’s wrong. Like he’s got cotton balls in his brain instead of a healthy sense of self-preservation.

With a shit-eating grin Todd smacks the book out of his hands.

It lands on the floor.

Kuroko blinks at it. He looks at Todd, and Todd’s goons. He blinks at them. It may be the most low-simmering hostile blink in the history of the universe. Nobody breathes. Taiga knows he should be doing something but he’s rooted to the ground

Kuroko puts his satchel thing down carefully on the floor by his feet and he draws his skinny pale arm back and he punches Todd full-on in the gut. And man, oh man, Todd goes down.

And he stays down, rolling on the linoleum, holding his gut and dry-heaving a little. Then he wheezes “fuck him up” to his friends.

Though it’s a total David and two Goliaths situation Todd’s monkeys must have a few brain cells to rub together because after that punch they circle in, all cautious, like it’s a freaking wolf they’re after and not a five foot six immigrant bookworm.

And Kuroko’s got some delusions of honor or something because he waits until one of them takes a swing at him and clips him in the shoulder to start hitting back. It’s a short, ugly fight, the way they get when everybody’s serious and by the time Taiga’s suddenly malfunctioning legs get him over there the goons have staggered back and Kuroko’s leaning heavily against the lockers, still with that thousand yard stare, licking at his now-bloody lip.

Before anything resembling a round two happens, Taiga steps in, grabs Kuroko’s book and satchel thing in one hand, grabs Kuroko by the elbow with the other hand like he’s been doing it all his life and drags his dizzy bruised ass around the corner to the nurse’s office before the teacher comes back and they all get caught and written up.

It’s coming up on lunchtime and the nurse must be on break because the room is empty. He guides Kuroko onto one of the rubber beds. He’s either more tired or hurt than he lets on, because he just lets Taiga move him around like a doll, tilting his head up.

Taiga roots around and finds some gauze and cotton balls in a cabinet, an icepack in the big industrial fridge. He holds the icepack out first. It takes him a moment to string the sentence together in his head before he says it.

“**Use that. On your face.**” he says slowly.

Kuroko’s expression doesn’t change, per se but his eyes get very wide.

“**What?**” Taiga bristles. He’s going out on a limb here and the guy’s staring at him like he’s an alien.“**Did I say it wrong?**”

“**I don’t understand.**” Kuroko says flatly.

Taiga squirms a little. He feels like he’s getting asked basically everything: ‘Hey why didn’t you ever talk to me before? Why didn’t you tell me you spoke Japanese? Why didn’t you interfere earlier?’ He doesn’t really have good answers for any of it. Maybe just that thing where he should have said something on day one and then delaying every day after that only made it a thousand times more awkward.

“** Look, I was born there but I kinda suck at Japanese. It’s embarrassing.**” he says.

“My English is more embarrassing.” Kuroko says, carefully enunciating every word and almost adding an extra syllable to ‘embarassing.’

Taiga doesn’t know what to reply to that since it’s basically true.

“**You’ll improve. You’re smart.**” he says awkwardly. Or maybe he says “**It seems like you’re smart.**” instead. Dammit, is that like, an insult? He didn’t mean it as an insult. Shit! Everything is so damn roundabout in Japanese. It’s way too easy to sound passive-aggressive in it.

At least Kuroko doesn’t seem to notice, or give a shit.

“**I’m tired.**” he says. “** Am I going to have to fight them again tomorrow?**”

He does look tired, tired and kind of fragile, with a fresh string of red winding out of his flat upturned nose. But he looks kind of badass at the same time, with the icepack tucked nonchalantly against jaw.

“**Probably not. That guy’s kind of a..**” What’s Japanese for ‘chickenshit’ again? ”**coward, you know?**” Taiga squares his shoulders “**And if they try something tomorrow I’ll help.**”

“**That’s not necessary.**” Kuroko says, all drawn-up and proud like he’s not 130lbs soaking wet

Chist. Taiga wants to pick him up and shake some sense into him.

“**Bullshit! There’s three of them, idiot. You got lucky today but they’ll mess you up if you don’t have some backup.**” Now that bit rolls off the tongue pretty naturally. Wow, thanks dad. His sentence structure is still wonky but apparently thanks to his dad’s collection of obscure gangster flicks Taiga remembers all the vocab for fighting and cursing people out.

Kuroko, that stubborn bastard, shrugs like it’s all the same to him.

“**Kagami-kun is very forceful, even when people tell him to mind his own business. How American of him.**”

So apparently he can express stuff. And his real personality is a lot more sarcastic than that perfect-polite act he pulls in front of the teachers.

“**Well you’re in America now, so deal.**” Taiga says gruffly. He’s made first contact, so to speak so he figures it’s time to beat a strategic retreat outta there. He’s late for Algebra 2.

“**See you tomorrow.**” he says, from the doorway.

Kuroko’s answering stare is like a physical thing on his skin.

---

And OK maybe Taiga finds an excuse to loiter around after school until he can see a certain blue-haired wannabe tough guy safely get onto one of the orange school buses at the end of the day.

Day 12 - high noon

Turns out Todd is not smart.

“Hey! Hey you! You psychotic little albino chink asshole!” he yells, spotting Kuroko at the other end of the hallway after second period.

It would be a lot more dramatic if Todd’s face wasn’t still kinda green, if he wasn’t still a little hunched over. At least his shitty friends are a little smarter, given how they’re not there at all.

Welp. Taiga thinks. Here we go.

He puts his backpack down, flexes his toes inside his shoes, grateful that he wore his really old and ratty Nikes today, and tucks the chain with his ring under his shirt. He doesn’t actually like fights that much, and with the size that he is the teachers might give him shit for ‘instigating’ it or whatever, but Todd’s only an inch or two shorter than him so it’s more or less fair and punching him seems like an excellent start to the morning.

He’s not even alone. On the other side of the hallway Stephanie Chang and Jackie Yun look ready to square up over the ‘chink’ thing. Who the hell even says that?

In the center of the hallway Kuroko puts his satchel-thing down again and slowly unbuttons the sleeve of his crisp old-man shirt, slowly rolls it up.

“Would you like another?” he says, soft and dangerous, holding up his pale bony fist, bruising heavy and yellow-blue across the knuckles.

The whole hallway breaks out in whoops and hollers.Todd mutters something under his breath like a chickenshit and limps his sorry ass off in search of easier prey.

Taiga can’t help it, he cheers with the rest of the crowd. For a guy who looks like a Fight Club librarian, Kuroko was pretty cool just then.

Day 12+ - interpreter

Taiga didn’t know what he was thinking exactly. It’s not like he could show up in front of the guy, totally avoid the whole ‘hey, I saw you crying that one time and you saw me fall of my board, I won’t tell if you won’t’ conversation, tell him he spoke Japanese and would fight this other guy with him, and then never talk to him again for the rest of High School.

And it was a moot point anyway since Kuroko sat right behind him.

So, Taiga rolls up his own metaphorical sleeves and gets to it.

“Hi.” he says to Kuroko in the morning, as he slides into his seat.

Kuroko stares at him blankly. If Taiga were to guess he looks maaaybe the tiniest bit surprised.

“**You have to say ‘Hi’ back. It sounds like the word for ‘yes’ but flatter.**”

“Hi” Kuroko manages. “**They taught us ‘Hello’ in school.**”

“**Absolutely nobody younger than 50 says ‘Hello’ here**”

“Hi” Taiga says to Kuroko the next morning.

“Hello.” says Kuroko, that day and the day after.

What a little shit.

Still, for some reason Taiga doesn’t drop him like a hot potato. Instead he explains to Ms. Whitney that if she wants Kurko to like, participate in class more she should probably call on him by his last name.

Taiga pretty much becomes Kuroko’s walking American assimilation assistance device from the fight onward.

He translates deadline times because for some reason the American mm/dd/yyyy thing throws Kuroko off like nobody’s business. In English class he haltingly, in truly half-assed Japanese, explains the plot of “Catcher in the Rye.” It’s teeth-pulling torture for Taiga but Kuroko listens really closely and briefly looks a little more alive and a little less like the human version of a dead fish. Apparently he really likes introspective artsy books or something.

Taiga texts his dad to see if there’s a Japanese bookstore anywhere in Venice because how the hell would /he/ know. He can sort of speak, but reading anything besides hiragana? Forget it.

By the end of the week he’s probably the only guy in school who doesn’t do ESL but knows where the ESL room is.

“** Kagami-kun, I am in your debt.**” Kuroko tells him out of the blue one day, straight-up, super formally, even bowing a little.

“Dude. Stop.**Cut it out**” Taiga hisses, feeling deeply embarrassed down to the tips of his toes.

People are looking at them and everything. He realizes, belatedly, that he’s basically missed that magic first-two-weeks window for making new friends because he’s been sort-of-stalking Kuroko and then sort of stapled to his side.

Fine, he gives up. Taiga’s new maybe-friend this year is apparently the overly-sincere creepy fight-me-bro kid who can barely speak English. He’s just going to have to accept it and go on from there.

Besides, they’ve got to find something in common eventually. Maybe he can teach him how to surf.

Night 12 - Kagami family challenge.

“So dad, remember how we used to do this whole ‘speak Japanese as long as you can’ thing?”

Taiga’s dad looks up from the couch where he’s hip deep in sailing instruction books, apparently still way on that boat kick.

“Oh yeah, ages ago.”

“Can we start that back up?”

“Seriously? I mean sure. But why the sudden interest?”

“Well, there’s this fresh off the boat Japanese kid in class and I’m kind of stuck as his interpreter and I can, like, barely talk to him. My vocabulary's shit too. It’s embarrassing.”

For once Taiga’s normally 6’4’’ fuzzy bear of a father looks deeply, deeply unimpressed with him.

“Kiddo, we were fresh off the boat ten years ago.”

“Right. Oops. Sorry. That was a dick thing to say.”

“**Yes, a deeply rude thing to say.*”

“**Ok.. Umm.. right.. Umm.. What do you want…**” Taiga thinks that if this is what Kuroko feels like every day, it’s hell. And this is technically his own native language for chrissake. “**What do you want for dinner?**”

Day 15 - brings a boy to the yard.

That morning starts out lucky/unlucky. An old winter coat falls on Taiga as he opens the hallway closet to look for some shoes, but he finds $20 in the pocket. So hey.

After third period he pokes Kuroko in the side of the head and says “Hey, wanna go to In-N-Out?”

Kuroko tilts his head ten degrees right - Kuroko-ese for ‘I have no freaking idea what you just said to me.’

”**Want to go have lunch at this burger place?**” For a while Taiga’s clearly going to have to say everything twice.

They walk over in silence. Without school stuff for a context Taiga’s not really sure what to talk about. It kind of blows.

At least soon he has to translate the menu.

Kuroko sits quietly in his seat That weird flash of cold fire that he had, back in the hallway fight a week ago is nowhere to be found. He’s like a low quality pod person. At least he sorta expresses things now - he makes a dainty set of chewing sounds and a little hum of approval as he eats his little hamburger.

And then he raises his eyebrow pretty high as he watches Taiga mow down two double-doubles and kick his feet back in satisfaction.

But then their milkshake orders come out, a little late - the machine had a hiccup apparently. And then things get interesting.

With an air of ritual about it Kuroko breaks open the straw for his vanilla shake, he puts it through the plastic lid. He actually straight-up sniffs at it, like the guy Taiga once saw doing professional wine-tasting on the Food Network. What. Even.

Finally, he hollows out his cheeks ( losing about 90% of that blank serial killer vibe and briefly looking about 12) and takes a drink.

Something weird happens to his face. Taiga has to squint but there’s a tiny curl to his normally flat-pressed mouth. It makes him look… fluffy. Harmless. Almost happy.

“Wow you are REALLY into milkshakes huh?”

Kuroko’s blank-face slams down like a wall. He shrugs, but doesn’t deny it.

“**This isn’t bad.**” he says.

---

“**Can we go to the burger place with the shakes?**” he says next week, popping up from behind Taiga and brandishing a crisp $10 bill in his face.

‘This isn’t bad’ his ass. About time Kuroko bowed down to the awesomeness of In-N-Out.

Day 20 - Basketball Addicts Anonymous

Aside from the milkshake incident and a few other little moments like that here and there, Taiga slowly comes to understand that Kuroko is a guy currently operating with a lot of his primary systems shut down. Something had fucked him up pretty bad back in Japan and it seemed like mentally he was still kinda stuck there, half-sleepwalking through America like he expected to eventually wake up.

Taiga tries not to take it personally. LA is great, and one day Kuroko’s gonna see that.

As someone who had only a recently gotten unstuck himself (and largely thanks to Kuroko landing in his life like a tiny pastel-blue meteorite) Taiga figures he ought to be patient but at the same time it’s burning him up.

Like, he is so out of practice with this ‘becoming friends’ thing. He wants to skip ahead and be better friends //right now//. Maybe then he could help the guy out. Talking about things was supposed to help, right?(Was he ready to tell someone about Tatsuya?) But Taiga was, let’s face it, kinda socially awkward outside of a court, and Kuroko, in his hyper-reserved polite way was also a little awkward and the language barrier was a bitch.

“So, umm what are your hobbies? What did you like to do back in Japan?” Taiga asks him one day, when they’re hanging out by the baseball field, feeling like he’s playing 20 questions.

Please please please don’t say something boring like shogi.

“**You’re asking about my hobbies?**”

At least Kuroko understood him that time.

“**Yeah. Just tell me your number one thing. You may be hosed if it’s like ‘pachinko’ or something but we’ve got a lot of other stuff here.**”

“**Well up until last year…**” Kuroko leans against the chainlink fence. He looks at Taiga, way up at him, thanks to the height difference but for some reason Taiga is the one who feels skewered by that look. Those intense eyes are weighing him somehow, trying to decide if he’s worth telling something clearly Important.

“**Up until last year I used to really love basketball.**” he says finally.

That is the absolute last thing he expected.

Kuroko’s short. Maybe not back in Japan but here he’s hella goddamn short. Taiga’s stupid tactless mouth kind of wants to burst out laughing. On another frequency, his heart is beating double time. Because, well, basketball.

Without his say-so his body steps closer, almost crowding Kuroko against the chain link fence.

“Seriously? For real?!” His hands are shaking.

Kuroko nods. “For real.” he says solemnly. His l’s still sound like r’s a little, but Taiga doesn’t care. “**Does Kagami-kun play? He wears nothing but basketball shoes to school.**”

“I used to. Then I stopped. It’s a long story. So like, what happened with you? **We can do Japanese if you want. And ummm, only if you want to tell me, or something**”

For some reason Taiga being awkward is what seems to make up his mind because Kuroko shakes his head. “No. It’s fine. Let me try.”

A gust of wind rips through the field but Taiga’s back shields him from most of it so it only blows Kuroko’s bangs in his eyes. Taiga thinks it’s fine, this is a story for him, he doesn’t want anyone else to overhear it.

Kuroko takes a deep breath.

“I was on a team. In all of middle school. Basketball team. We won, many times. Three times, nationals champions.”

“Holy shit! Nationals?! Are you kidding?!” Taiga whispers, and has no idea why he’s whispering.

“Not kidding. We keep...no. we kept winning. There was… much pressure. And then there was...drama.” He says it so softly, and in his accent Taiga’s not sure if the word wasn’t ‘trauma’ instead.

“I lost.. Important person. People.”

“They left me behind.” he whispers. Kuroko looks up at him. He’s not crying or anything and his mouth is straight but there is so much pain in his face that Taiga sort of wants to cry for him.

He knows people are assholes, and middle school is it’s own kind of friendship breakup hell, but who does that to someone? To this guy. Who’s way too sincere about everything, and only hits back once he’s hit.

Kuroko derails Taiga’s nebulous revenge plans against these middle school punks by poking him in the side.

“**Now that I’ve spilled my guts it’s Kagami-kun’s turn. I’ll accept nothing less.**”

“Fine, fine. Sheesh.” Taiga needs a moment to get his thoughts together.

”**So when I was a small kid we came to the US. A long time ago. I was lost. Then Mom died. Dad was busy. I couldn’t do anything right. I couldn’t make friends.**”

Shit, this was hard. But having to lay it out in Japanese gave everything a kind of distance. Like he was looking from the outside on that whole sorry year. And anyway Taiga couldn’t wuss out after Kuroko had put all his stuff out on the table.

“**I just didn’t have anything. Nothing was special about me. Nothing I was good at. Nothing I liked. And then this other kid, one year older than me. His name was Himuro Tatsuya. He took me in. We got so close we became brothers. Thanks to him, everything changed. Later we met this lady who’s like our sensei but kind of like my second mom.**

**Anyway, we were both improving a lot. We played street ball together, and beat almost everybody. He was always better than me. But I liked that. I just thought ‘I want to be strong like you, strong enough to be your equal’ And though our play styles were very different I was getting close.**

**One day, end of second year of middle school, out of nowhere he said to me ‘let’s play this game. Don’t hold back, give me all you got. And if you win, then we can’t be brothers anymore’.**”

“**You held back didn’t you.**” Kuroko says, somewhere under his chin.

“What the hell was I supposed to do, huh?!” Taiga realizes that he’s yelling and forces himself to dial it down “**What was I supposed to do?! I couldn’t lose him over a game!**

**The thing is, the more I think about it I don’t think there was a way to win that. And I thought about it so many times. All of last year I couldn’t play and I thought about it.**

**Maybe Tatsuya wanted me to lose no matter what I did. Maybe my brother got tired of me. And wanted to get rid of me.**

Which..um…fucking hurts. **Which is really painful.**

**I mean like, what is…**” here Taiga totally blanks on the right verb for ‘to win’ but for some reason he remembers the word for ‘victory’ so he goes with it. “**What is victory? What’s the point of competition if at the end of the game you lose the person you’re playing with. Isn’t the point so that you can all play each other again and again and get stronger together? Man I don’t even know. I don’t know where I’m going with this. Or what do I do with the game now?**”

Taiga blows out a noisy sigh.

”**I don’t know shit, basically. My best friend ditched me and got out of town and I don’t know shit.That’s the takeaway**”

And for maybe the first time since that day in the nurse’s office Kuroko is 100% with him, face open, eyes huge and hanging off Taiga’s every word. Taiga scratches at the corner of his eye, which itches from the baseball field dust, totally from that.

“**That enough of my guts for ya?**”

He takes a chance and looks down. Kuroko looks thoughtful, curled against the fence.

“**Yes.**” he nods. “** It was really arrogant of me, to think that I was the only person who thought about these things. To think that I was the only person who ever struggled with it.**”

And then Kuroko smiles up at him. Actually full-on smiles. Taiga has no idea what to do with this.

“**Thank you, Kagami-kun.**”

“**Don’t thank me out of nowhere! Who the hell just says stuff like that?! You sound like a drama character.**”

So that got intense.

Each of them sort of do their own version of dusting themselves off. Kuroko straightens his shirt collar. Taiga puts his hands behind his head, leans against the chain link fence and tilts his face to the sky. God, he feels a little bit like sprinting away, but also he feels light.

“Wow. I just unlocked your tragic backstory huh? And you got mine, I guess. Does this mean we’re level 4 friends?”

“**What?**”

“**Nothing**” Taiga says, and on a whim ruffles Kuroko’s hair. He was looking way too serious.

Kuroko glares at him and punches him in the ribs, but pretty softly.

-----

“We should play.” he says, later when they start walking back to the main building.

“Huh?”

“**Kagami-kun and I should play one-on-one.**”

“Now?! Dude, it’s like night soon. **It’s really late**” Taiga says but it’s a token protest. Inside part of him is going ‘yesssss, do it. I don’t even care that he’s short.’

Buses on the West Side still kind of suck and Taiga’s battered old heap of a beach cruiser has pretty solid luggage rack.

“Fine. There’s courts by my house, hop on then.”

Kuroko sort of narrows his eyes at the suggestion, like Taiga just offered him something totally bizarre. Taiga doesn’t get it. Is it some kind of cultural thing? Is sharing a bike super uncool in Japan or something? He sees adults do it all the time here.

He tells Kuroko that, look he can pedal and Taiga will happily sit on the luggage rack except he’ll really hate himself in the morning and will probably be too worn out to play and in the face of actual logic Kuroko lets it go.

On the way there, his little but hella strong fingers practically tear holes in Taiga’s hoodie as he hangs on, but the whole contraption works and they get to the court in Taiga’s apartment complex in more or less one frozen piece.

The court is unused, pristine, and mostly gathering fallen palm leaves because apparently geriatrics don’t ball.

And maybe the cold is doing funny things to Taiga’s brian because it feels like this empty court was waiting for them all along. Like Something Really Important is about to happen.

This Upcoming Epic Moment is a little delayed by Taiga running upstairs for a ball, because they’re both morons apparently. And then...

They’re terrible. His Airness wept, they are SO bad. Tired, rusty, just total crap.

Taiga tries to dunk, misjudges the height of the jump and almost whacks his head on the rim. Kuroko seems to have forgotten the basic form for jump shots completely, if he ever knew it at all.

At least he can dribble, sort-of. And pass. At least he can pass.

After 30 minutes of struggle(it’s not a game, it’s a two-man conga line of fail) Taiga just can’t take this shit anymore and falls over laughing. He’s playing basketball again, against a tiny guy who apparently won three national titles while sucking really badly, and there is an honest-to god painful stitch in his side and he needs to stop because any second now Kuroko is going to really punch him and then his ribs will probably cave in and he’ll die.

“Oh man, what. We suck! We suck so frigging bad!! But you especially.”

Kuroko is lying a couple feet away, wheezing like a serious asthma patient. Hearing this he inchworms himself defiantly in Taiga direction.

“**I couldn’t hear Kagami-kun exactly but I’m sure he was talking shit.**” he mumbles, raising a wobbling fist and blowing sweaty bangs out of his eyes.

“**Kind of was, I admit it. That’s what we get for building it up so much.**”

‘Kuroko looks relieved to put his fist down, it was probably taking more energy than he had left to even try to be mad.

“**A little disappointing, isn’t it?**”

But his lips are curling up into this tentative, unpracticed grin. Taiga feels like laughing again.

“You mean a lot disappointing. It’s not the worst though.**It isn’t bad**”

“**I like playing with Kagami-kun too.**”

OK it clicks. This is the moment. They’re friends for real now, Taiga can feel it between them like a small sliver cord.

Day 23-24 - shoe cabinet

After Too-Many-Feelings-And-Worst-One-On-One-Ever Day Taiga figures it’s no longer awkward to ask Kuroko to come over to his house and chill. He’s a little out of practice at hosting but he’s got two liters of Coke and homemade salsa and he may have made a slight detour by Mitsuwa market on Centinela to get some real ‘Japanese’ snacks just, you know, because.

Puffed shrimp chips are still a big thing over there apparently.

“Hey dad, I’m inviting my friend over on Saturday.”

“The Japanese exchange student kid?”

“I think his parents actually moved here, but yeah. The one I told you about.”

“Yeah! Sure, that’s fine!”

Taiga’s just thankful his dad doesn’t make a big deal about it and acts like this is totally normal for them. Like Taiga has had people over all the time since Tatsuya left the country. (Spoilers: no)

Friday night Taiga walks in to find his dad installing a shoe cabinet by the front door. It looks new, with a cheerful department store label with some kind of zany mascot character and a bunch of kanji that Taiga has no hope in hell of reading.

Given Taiga’s totally reasonable look of ‘what the fuck, pops?’ his dad scratches the back of his neck.

“Oh, you know. I was around Sawtelle on the way back from work. Swung in to pick up some tofu skins for inari and then these were on sale and I thought, ‘Hey, you know we should have one!’”

He spreads his arms out cheesily with a big fake aw-shucks grin on his face.

Taiga sure hopes he doesn’t look that obvious when he’s lying.

And OK, it’s sweet, in a way. His dad’s pretty crap at saying things but he’s obviously /trying/ to help Taiga out. But in another way it’s also a little messed up.

“Look... “ Taiga starts. “Look, Dad. I know I made a big deal about how weird and Japanese he is. But he’s not. like, judgey about it, you know? I don’t think he’s gonna run home to his folks and tattle: ‘Wow, Taiga’s house doesn’t even have a shoe cabinet! What a bunch of lame-ass Americanized twinkies, I’m never going back there again!’ So relax, OK?”

His dad sags heavily onto the hallway bench.

“Sorry kiddo, I don’t mean to give you all my weird issues. It’s just that after that whole thing with your grandparents...”

Taiga’s got one set of grandparents in Fresno. They don’t visit much since grandpa broke his hip but they send holiday cards and care packages. He’s got another set in Chiba that basically stopped talking to his dad after Mom died. Not like it was his fault or anything, guess they were just looking for an excuse to start pretending their half-blood son-in-law and three-quarters grandson didn’t exist.

“Hey it’s fine.” Taiga says. “You’re not a real American kid if your grandparents aren’t racist, right?”

His dad bursts out laughing and goes on for way too long. When he’s done he gives Taiga one of those long sappy looks.

Taiga puts his sneakers into the shoe cabinet with a shrug (yeah OK, it saves on space but it’s not like they have to keep it) and goes to the kitchen to start dinner.

---

Still, he can’t help staring at his face later when he gets out of the shower.

When Taiga was a little kid it wasn’t noticeable or anything, all the small kids back in Tokyo had looked a little bit alike and unfinished anyway.

But now that he’s getting older he wonders if people can tell. Objectively he is kind of huge, no getting around that. And his nose is a little too long, just like his dad’s. Maybe his eyes are a little bit the wrong shape. Argh, who the fuck cared! With his eyes people mostly noticed the color anyway.

Forget it. A solid middle finger to all that bullshit. He’d never had that ‘racial purity’ angst before and he sure as hell wasn’t going to start now.

And who wasn’t mixed in LA? Even the really white people were mixed. Two parts Irish and one third French, or whatever.

Tatsuya was the only Japanese guy his age that he’d known and his face had been even and fine-boned. ‘**Refined.**’ even. That was the right word for guys like him. The whole time he knew him it never occurred to Taiga to be jealous of anything but the graceful way he cut through a court, his basketball skills. But now, maybe...

For just a second he wonders what he looks like, to Kuroko’s eyes.

OK, there it was. Second’s over. Taiga scowls at his dumb brain, brushes his teeth and falls asleep as soon as his body hits the bed.

Day 24 - no worries.

Kuroko comes over on Saturday. They play a couple rounds of Soul Calibur 4 and watch a game off the DVR. It’s effortless. It’s fine.

Day 25 - the opposite of a twelve step program

“Ugh, this court kinda sucks” Taiga says, after like the third time he has to dribble awkwardly around a root that’s come up to crack the pavement.

“It is sub-optimal, yes.” Kuroko agrees, with his usual flair for level five SAT words and awkward sentence construction.

The really famous courts by the beach are almost always taken by the gymrats next door, or tight-knit crews with sticks up their asses who don’t play well with strangers. So they’ve been doing kind of a running tour of all the public(and not-so public that Tatsuya had shown him how to break into) courts on the West side . So far the ones in the park on Penmar and Rose are winning. They’ve still got the rope nets intact and everything.

And this one does, basically, suck. They keep playing anyway.

The more they do this the more he learns about Kuroko, about his game. For one thing, he’s actually got skills. He can pass and steal like nobody’s business.

People kind of freak out when they first see him - they ask the usual ‘Whoa, do you have albinism?! Are you really Japanese? What’s up with your blue eyes?’ questions (LA is a melting pot but it’s a melting pot of rude, nosy assholes sometimes) but then they somehow forget about him right after. Taiga’s never seen anything like it. It’s like some bizarre mundane superpower.

He thought Kuroko was pulling his leg a little when he talked about having a ‘**low presence**.’ How did you even translate that? But turns out it’s totally a thing. And crazy useful in pickup games.

“Were your ancestors stealth-master ninja assassins or something?”

“Maybe.” Kuroko says thoughtfully, eyeing Taiga up and down in a way that suggests he could assassinate him anytime he wants to.

He’d like to see the little punk try. If he bumps Taiga off he’ll have to learn how to do a sweet alley-op combo with himself.

Still, he’s impressed. A player with low-to-average stats, crap stamina and no shooting skills and Kuroko is still freaking amazing. His game is kind of like his punches - people never see it coming and then they’re kind of stuck there gasping while Kuroko does whatever he damn well wants with the flow of the play.

And the longer they play the more Kuroko seems to be getting his groove back. And with it, this massive amount of sass. Yesterday he even said something about his ‘guns.’ Shit was hilarious.

The game is coming back to him too. Maybe a little more slowly. Taiga is this mix of really happy/annoyed/fired-up about it. He avenges himself by shamelessly pressing his size advantage and ruffling Kuroko’s hair extra hard as a penalty every time he loses their one-on-ones, which is still all the time. His lower ribs may be permanently bruised.

For such a closed-off guy Kuroko’s kind of soft on the surface - fluffy hair, smooth skin. Bet he’s one of those magic teenagers who doesn’t even get acne. Some people have all the luck.

At least he sweats like a pig, and it’s pretty funny how his hair goes limp and one shade darker.

They go twenty more minutes and then Taiga almost eats pavement tripping over that root again. It’s probably time for a break.

Kuroko is under the basket, leaning tiredly against the pole, shielding his eyes and squinting up at the setting sun. His mouth moves.

“.. **a shadow**...” is the bit Taiga can hear.

“Huh? What’d you say? Sorry, you’re shit outta luck! There are no shadows in SoCal. It’s all light, all the time.”

“Yes.” Kuroko turns to look back at him and for some reason he’s smiling a little “I think you’re right.”

As they’re walking to the bus stop (Kuroko is, for some reason reluctant to ride passenger on Taiga’s beach cruiser again, the proud bastard) Taiga voices the thought that he’s been having for a couple of days now.

“I bet the gym at school’s nice and air conditioned right now.”

They look at each other and they have this weird moment of total synch. If they’re gonna keep playing they might as well play inside too. Might as well have regular people to play with.

Tryouts for the basketball team are in two weeks, it’s time to pull out the big guns.

Day 26 - stepmom

Out of all the Improbable Exes stories he and Tatsuya used to hear from Alex back in the day, ‘tiny, angry pro-baller kendo-enthusiast motorcycle chick from Akita’ is the one that turns out to be true. At least that’s Alex’s explanation for her surprisingly decent(if hopelessly dude-like) Japanese.

And at least she’d been wearing pants when she answered the door.

Kuroko tends to take things slow with new people, and at first he clearly wasn’t sure what to make of her (not many people know what to do with Hurricane Alex. She probably likes it that way) But as the day goes on the strict line of Kuroko’s back relaxes into his chair on the porch and Taiga can tell that Alex likes him a lot.

He’s man enough to admit how happy that makes him. He tries not to grin like an idiot as he’s making tacos in her disaster of a kitchen, and probably fails.

Hopefully this fuzzy mutual-appreciation thing is gonna last even when Alex starts assigning them hellish footwork drills in the hot sand. She’s got that look on her face already.

Day 38 - sweet vindication(what, he’s not a dumb jock. He knows what ‘vindication’ means)

Bad news: Taiga was totally right about the hellish sand training. He kinda forgot what a beast Alex can be when she gets serious.

Good news: At least Kuroko lives nearby. So he can just text him and they can go night running on the beach. Taiga’s always kind of hated running just for the sake of it and at least this way they can talk during the cooldown bits.

Further, Super Good News: They make the team.

It’s a little touch and go for Kuroko, who looks limp and winded during the laps part but he comes back on the weights. He can lift an impressive amount for a guy his size, even the sophomores and juniors take note.

And of course they kill it at the practice game.

Taiga makes a decent showing of himself, cutting a path through the defence but avoiding fouls, dunking with his left and with his right to show he can do either.

Kuroko steals the ball like seven times. He makes opportunities for his team to score, screening people and getting in their way, and then Taiga ends up by the basket, Kuroko does that half-court swirly death-ray pass thing and everybody’s jaws basically hit the floor and start rolling.

Taiga gets the urge to beat his chest a little, Tarzan-style. He wants to yell “Booyah! Get it now, guys? Isn’t he amazing?! I knew he was awesome way ahead of you!”

So yeah they’re golden.

Though Kuroko still goes a little wide-eyed when Captain Alejandro claps him on the shoulder and grins “Your passes and steal rate is freaking awesome Kuroko but if you could shoot after you steal that would really help the team. I’ll have Mendez set some time aside during practice to help you out, OK?”

Taiga thinks he might have to get in on that. God knows he loves his dunks but maybe Alex has a point and he kinda sorta relies on them too much. Time to step his game up. And maybe he doesn’t like the idea of getting separated from Kuroko for too long, even for practice. Besides, he might still need him around to translate something.

“What’s up?” Taiga asks later, when tryouts are over and the adrenaline crash has both of them kind of leaning against each other on the bench.

Kuroko has one of his hard-to-identify expressions on, watching the senior captain jog over to the coach with a spring in his step and his dreads bouncing in his ponytail.

“He is very different from my last captain.”

Day 42 - halloween

Kuroko blinks owlishly at the vast army of pumpkins, banners, fake gravestones and that black and orange sparkly tinsel thing that has taken over the school the week before Halloween.

Taiga launches into the very necessary cultural lecture about how Americans should really rename October, November, December into the months of ‘Halloween, Thanksgiving and Christmas.’

Kuroko still looks mostly confused but as the Monday goes on, Taiga sees him asking a bunch of other people, teachers and classmates about the way Los Angelenos celebrate Halloween while missing the essential elements ie. changing leaves, and shitty weather. Taiga has the urge to hover threateningly in the background to make sure they don’t feed him any BS but he figures Kuroko’s English has gotten good enough that he can handle himself. His people-reading skills are miles better than Taiga’s anyway.

“What are you afraid?” Kuroko asks him at lunchtime, poking him gently in the shoulder to forestall the usual jump-scare so that Taiga doesn’t accidentally choke on his food.

“What are you afraid of” Taiga corrects him, absently. “**Don’t freaking ask me why the ‘of’ is there, it’s just always there. Some weird grammar thing. And I guess… angry dogs? Ghosts? Tearing my ACL? Pretty normal stuff. Are you like, trying to ferret out my one fatal weakness so you can prank me later?**”

“Yes, exactly.” Kuroko says, doing that smirking-with-his-eyes thing. He’d figured out how to pronounce “exactly” exactly right sometime last week so now that’s his answer to a lot of stuff.

“‘Dogs’ is not normal fear.” he adds, after a moment.

“Oh yeah, well you try getting bit by a giant rottweiler when you’re eight. Shit stays with you.”

“**I just thought if there was some other meaning to the festival. Facing and acknowledging one’s fears by embodying them. Or something like that.**”

“**That’s getting way, way too deep. Mostly it’s an excuse to wear weird stuff and buy candy half-price the day after.**” Taiga takes a bite out of his cafeteria lasagna before it gets cold “**What about you? Greatest fears giving you any good costume ideas?**”

“**It’s fairly difficult to cosplay ‘The feeling of being discarded by your closest friends.’ Though I suppose someone more creative than me could do it.**” Kuroko says with his best blank-face.

Taiga laughs, it’s startled out of him.

“**Hey, no way man, I call dibs! I had that one first.**”

After a beat, and picking his pickled cucumber gracefully out of his bento box, Kuroko tilts his head back thoughtfully. “**When I was younger and learning to swim I was afraid of open water.**”

Taiga thinks, by the time spring comes up we gotta fix that. I am gonna teach this guy to surf even if it kills me.

“Well, did I tell you that the first time I saw you I thought you were a mermaid?”

---

And that conversation is how Taiga ends up being a werewolf for the big Halloween party. His dad thinks it’s hilarious and helps him glue the ears on. Hey, Taiga figures, it’s cheaper than therapy. Apparently he’s OK enough that dog //costumes// don’t set him off anymore.

He gets a couple nods when he walks through the door of Jenny’s giant family house on Superba. They have an actual fenced-in garden with //grounds// or something ridiculous. Then Justin from the track team( who he’s kind of side-eyeing for the way he used to hang out with that loser Todd) pokes at his hairy paws and makes a ‘hairy palms’ masturbation joke. Someone snorts Sprite up their nose.

Taiga rolls his eyes. He can’t wait for Kuroko to get there.

Up front by the entrance there’s this sudden hush.

As usual Kuroko has appeared out of nowhere, but for once he is amazingly hard to miss.

Mostly because he’s covered in scales and silvery body paint, and naked from the waist up. He has a long black vinyl mermaid tail and cute little starfish barrettes in his hair. There is scarily realistic blood on his sharp-looking trident.

He looks amazing and otherworldly and absolutely not to be fucked with.

“Whoa, dude. Wow.” Taiga says, intelligently.

“Hello” Kuroko says, very carefully, around a mouthful of fake needle-sharp teeth. Somehow he makes them look right.

“Hot. Damn.” some girl Taiga doesn’t know the name of says as she pokes her head in from the kitchen.

Then someone breaks out the inevitable cooler full of booze .

Taiga drinks one can of beer. In his defense, he’s suddenly super dry-mouthed and tongue-tied and he wants Kuroko to have a nice evening without Taiga saying something awkward to mess it up.

Kuroko sniffs and turns up his nose at the questionable marvels of Coors Light. Or maybe just alcohol in general, he seems straight-edge like that. He walks slowly, gracefully around the house and Taiga trails after him like a pet, you know.

Girls stare at him. Guys stare at him. Taiga stares at him, a little. Objectively it IS an awesome costume and Taiga kind of suggested it.

Kuroko handles it all with this unnatural level of poise, or maybe just his usual epic lack of fucks. Who the heck else does Taiga know who would just casually show up shirtless to a party full of their classmates? Fucking Nobody. Nobody on planet earth.

Hell Taiga would be too shy to do that if he’s being honest,(though he’s totally fine being shirtless at the beach or on a court, it’s just different somehow, don’t ask him how) and he knows he’s got nothing to be ashamed of.

Though neither does Kuroko. Out of his clothes he’s not actually weedy so much as wiry. Toned and sort of skinny-tough. Yeah Taiga’s definitely seen bigger guns but Kuroko’s body suits him.

As the party gets more rowdy (at least by Jenny’s tame social circle’s standards ) he and Kuroko end up in the garden, just kicking it, away from the crowd. And OK, occasionally they kind of sort of scare the eventual groups of tipsy kids who go wandering there to take a piss or make out.

It’s almost a pity they both have to take out their fake teeth to talk.

Day 44 - culture shock special: sadie hawkins

Taiga is kind of spacing out after World History when Sandra raps her knuckles on her desk, startling him.

“Sup Taiga~” she drawls.

“Oh, hey.” he says, racking his brain for what the heck Ms. Sits-In-The-Front-Row Student Treasurer would want with him. Dammit, zero clues found. Tatsuya used to have his finger on the pulse of all the social caste stuff. Taiga mostly just blunders through that shit.

“Sadie Hawkins is next week, wanna go with me?” Oh. That. That’s what’s up apparently.

“Have we like, even talked before?” Taiga says before his brain-to-mouth filter kicks in. Case in point about that blundering thing.

“Nope!” she says, cheerfully “But you’re pretty hot, in a young, Asian Channing Tatum sorta way, and so figured I’d ask.”

“Umm, sorry. Don’t swing that way.”

“Oh whoops! Guess I need to take my gaydar to Radio Shack, get that shit fixed..”

“Hey” he holds his hands up, trying for ‘casual’ but also trying to get some distance between himself and this whole crazy conversation. “no harm, no foul!”

---

“Geez. What even.” Taiga mutters under his breath after she leaves.

Though he kinda envies girls sometimes. They can just straight-up ask a guy out without doing, like, recon and having to throw a fake gay cousin into the conversation to test the waters or weighing the chances of ‘hey are you gonna flip out on me’ Well, not all girls actually. Or maybe just straight girls? But straight guys like Todd exist, so nevermind.

Also, what the heck? Like, he showers regularly and has his own style and maybe gels his hair a little sometimes but he’s not metro by any stretch. And apparently that’s not enough? What did a gay guy have to look like anyway? Does everyone in class think he’s straight? Should he do anything to change that? Does he have to staple a freaking rainbow to his forehead?! Ugh!

That’s why he hates thinking about this stuff. It’s just one big headache. Not like he’s planning on dating anyone anytime soon. Not like he’s felt the urge to, honestly. I mean sure, he was lonely before, but now he’s got Kuroko. And not like it’s anyone’s business anyway.

Taiga sinks his head down onto his desk, making a medium ‘thunk’ sound and rubbing at his temples in frustration.

And then there’s a quiet sort of shuffle behind him and Taiga’s realizes he has a whole other problem.

Kuroko sits behind him. Kuroko’s probably been there the whole time.

“Hey was that -” he starts, trailing off. A surprise? Like in a bad way? Japan’s a lot more conservative as far as LGBT stuff goes. Shit shit shit.

He tries again.

“Are we-”

“**Kagami-kun’s orientation will never be a problem.**” Kuroko says with his eyebrows scrunched up in a serious way, like he’s even a little mad that Taiga thought it would be a thing.

Taiga sort of sinks back into his desk chair, the adrenaline of the previous moment all whooshes out of him and frankly he can’t be assed to move right up until the bell rings. Even then he’s still kind of breathing funny.

Kuroko offers to carry him down the hall to World History if he’s feeling delicate. Taiga calls him a smartass. They’re cool.

Dary 43-44- sadie hawkins part 2, electric something

“Hey, Tetsuya.”

Candace Jones says Kuroko’s first name a lot better than most people would - right accent on the right syllable and everything. Taiga has to give her props for that. He thinks he can say it better though, given the chance.

“Hello.” Kuroko says. He is just never going to say ‘Hi’ out of spite.

On the outside his face looks normal but Taiga can tell he’s a little off-balance. Still not as off-balance as most guys would be when a pretty girl comes up to them out of the blue.

They look pretty good together too, he has to admit. It’s a match, style-wise. Kuroko still wears button-downs and jeans to school most of the time, sometimes with honest-to-god ties.(But he changes into almost-normal clothes after school before he goes to practice, or to the courts with Taiga) Candace is always in these old fashioned dresses with tights and mary janes, like a black Anne of Green Gables.

Taiga feels like he’s got front-row tickets to a slow-motion car crash as he watches her ask Kuroko to the Sadie Hawkins dance.

Though what the heck, he should be really happy for him! This was the ultimate in shitty teenage American acceptance rituals, right? Wanting to flail around together to bad music and gently grope someone’s waist on the slow dance. That was the dream, right?!

And God knows plenty of people had noticed Kuroko at that Halloween party.

Taiga is so deep in his head that he misses most of their conversation, surfacing just in time to see Kuroko shake his head softly and say.

“Very sorry. I don’t swing that way.”

Candace makes a little ‘mou’ noise of disappointment. Taiga does not make a single sound. At all.

Class starts. On pain of awful, fiery, basketball-less death Taiga could not remember what that class was about.

“It is refreshing.” Kuroko says after the bell rings, flat and quiet, like he’s just thinking out loud. “To be direct, about these things.”

So Taiga’s gay and his new best friend is gay and.

And that’s fine.

Totally fine.

Oh look, they have a game coming up in a week, better call Alex to see if she has their updated training schedule.

Day 49 - checkmate

The Santa Monica High School Vikings never know what hit them.

They go out for pizza with the team, some fancy place by the Promenade and though Kuroko still struggles a little talking to some of the guys he seems to be having a good time.

Afterwards Taiga’s still full of energy and drags him to the arcade on the Pier, where Kuroko sneaky bastard that he is, gets his second wind and proceeds to kick his ass at air hockey. Taiga accepts his loss sorta-gracefully and buys him boardwalk fries.

Kuroko only eats like a quarter of them and lets Taiga have the rest. But seriously, the vendors put way too much salt on those things because by the end of the night they’re both dying of thirst but they’ve spent all their cash on the game machines and there’s only enough loose quarters at the bottom of Taiga’s backpack for one lousy, tiny bottle of orange Gatorade.

They end up passing it back and forth, kind of instinctively, without saying anything about it. (hey it’s no big deal, he’s let Kuroko drink from his can of soda before, it’s really no big deal.)

At the end of the night Taiga has this totally crazy urge to keep the empty bottle.

When he lays down to sleep, the phrase ‘Indirect Kiss’ flashes neon at the front of his brain. Two months ago he wouldn’t have even known what that was.

Day 60 - old truck/beach day

Late November, something interesting floats up on Craigslist and Taiga ends up dropping all his summer job money and a chunk of his savings on an old white Toyota truck.

His dad looks at him like he’s crazy.

“Sure hope it lives through the winter, kiddo” he says skeptically, but his dad’s a strictly Beamers kind of guy.

Sure Taiga’s dad worked hard and technically their tiny family’s pretty loaded but Taiga never wanted to be one of those those 'oh here's the Lexus I got for my sweet sixteen!' spoiled rich kids.

This way he can proudly park the Toyota at school and go 'yeah, that's my car' and not be lying.

Anyway Taiga thinks it's cool looking. In a hardscrabble, retro way and all his surfboards can fit in the back. (hell, a whole double tent can fit in the back. Stargazing with Kuroko is is gonna be so awesome this summer) and there's plenty of room in the cab for a guy his size.

So what if it doesn't have power steering? It's like an extra arm workout, right? All good.

When he picks Kuroko up in it to go to school he gets a flat, unimpressed stare. But Kuroko’s still at that stage of being reluctantly impressed with ‘needlessly large American cars’ so he’s pretty eager to climb up into it when Taiga opens the door for him.

"This is like a very budget Gundam." Kuroko says meditatively, after looking around, and instead of feeling insulted Taiga cracks up.

It gets to be a habit. The blink-and-you-miss-it rainy season creeps up on them and he stops by Kuroko's house in the mornings if the weather sucks. It's nice and peaceful - the two of them in the cab with the old red seats and the rare torrential SoCal shower making squiggles across the windshield.

After a week of that, there’s suddenly a crazy-warm weekend and Taiga picks up Kuroko and takes the truck on the PCH, down to Point Dume. The suspension squeaks and bounces a little on the hills but he can tell Kuroko is having fun. His face lights up as he’s he's looking out the windows, sitting up high over the traffic and the bluffs.

Taiga gets a little too fired up himself and probably talks too much. Like 'Oh there's Topanga Canyon’, ‘ and ‘there's Solstice Canyon’ and ‘Zuma beach is ahead we're gonna have to go there some time.’

While Taiga’s unloading his board Kuroko wanders down the path, the top of the cliff above the beach is covered with cacti and weed/flowers.

"This is very beautiful!" he calls back, unselfconscious, still a little liquidy on his 'r's.

Taiga wishes he was the kind of guy who took a zillion pictures of everything because he wants to remember Kuroko right then - his blue hair against the green cacti and the yellow flowers and the red dirt of the cliff.

Surrounded by all of those bright colors, it looks like he belongs there - in Cali, in that moment. You could paint him and hang him up in the Getty museum. He is so. So...

Taiga gets all his gear squared and arrives just in time to nudge Kuroko away from the edge of the cliff, with his shoulder.

"Come on, the beach is better."

They clamber down the rusted Indiana Jones-esque staircase and walk on the sand a little to get away from of the sparse pack of other beachgoers. The water is cold but doable, and they snorkel a little, before the waves get choppy. Then Kuroko catches him eyeing the cluster of surfers haunting the little inlet back by the staircase and gives him a knowing look, along with a ‘shoo, shoo’ motion.

"Go on, I have a book."

He’d gotten Kuroko to stand up on the board a few times before the rain started but this was a strictly Intermediate spot.

“Next time, you’re coming with me!” Taiga shouts back over his shoulder, and goes.

It is wild out there but he likes it that way, he’s missed it. This is something that belongs only to him right now, even though he can’t wait to share it.

Every time he catches a wave and stands up he can see Kuroko on the shore.

When his arms feel ready to fall off from paddling and it’s probably not safe to try for another run he goes back in.

His fingers barely work as he peels the top of the wetsuit off and he doesn’t even notice Kuroko sneaking up on him until he sees him standing at the high water mark.

“Hello. You’re cold?”

Taiga grins.

“Freezing.”

And then there’s warmth all along his front. Kuroko is hugging him, cheek tucked against his collarbone, arms around him like limpets and he can’t help it, Taiga leans into it.

He wraps his arms around Kuroko and puts his palms on his shoulder blades. With the temperature difference between air and water, the skin of his back feels on fire. It’s like Taiga is holding his own small, perfect sun and the two of them feel fused together, and he can’t just let go after the ‘right’ or the ‘proper’ amount of time. He can’t.

I mean, Kuroko’s hair is right there against his mouth. Taiga’s lips are touching it. His lungs are breathing him in. All plausible deniability is pretty much sunk.

Kuroko’s hand makes its way up his naked back, cups the back of his neck, pulls his head down.

His best friend’s lips are salty and soft.

----

“**I never thought my first kiss would happen by the ocean in America.** Although, I’m very happy here.” Kuroko says to him, later.

“You are SO embarrassing, why do I like you?”

They’re going back up the staircase, to the parking lot. It’s a little tricky with his surfboard in his left hand and Kuroko’s hand in the other.

“-but I’m happy that you’re happy.” Taiga mumbles. He’s going to be the best friend and boyfriend he can be, dammit. Even with really limited experience.

Though when they’re driving home he can’t help but push it a little.

“**I gotta say though, I feel kind of let down. Traditionally isn’t there supposed to be like, a confession? With cherry blossoms? ‘I like you, Kagami-kun’ or whatever?**”

Kuroko scoots closer to him on the seat, looks at him through his eyelashes.

“I like you, Taiga.”

“Oh my God, stop that! I will drive us right into the ocean!” Taiga says, his knuckles clenched on the steering wheel.

There is a blue California sky above them, and a blazing line of fire from his thoughts, to his cheeks, to his heart.

-end-

Epilog:

Day 61 - everyone else thought they got together ages ago, actually

Just before Algebra 2 starts, Jenny leans over across the aisle and whispers “Hey Taiga, bonfire party at Dockweiler Beach on Friday. Bring your guitar and your boyfriend.”

It makes for a pretty good second date.