happy aokise day!
title: long since sailed rating: t word count: 2036 summary: ao3
Aomine’s used to doing things before he thinks of them. He moves to the basket before he sees the route; his legs take him up to the school roof before he thinks of going there; he rips words out of his own mouth before he can realize how much he’ll regret the thought. It’s not always an advantage, but he always comes out even, despite having to take a detour or two sometimes. Aomine still gets there. It’s compensation, maybe, for all that’s come easy to him.
He can show restraint, when he thinks, when everything isn’t going at two hundred kilometers an hour all around him and he has to go that speed or faster himself. He doesn’t always have to, but he does sometimes, and he’ll bite the worst things off his tongue before he says them, or even the harmless retorts. When he lets himself be, he’s conscious of his impulses (or, perhaps more often, when he can’t help it).
His right hand twitches, and he knows he wants to lift it up and put it on Kise’s shoulder, or reach out and touch Kise’s hand, but he knows he’s stopping himself, too. What’s wrong with just doing it? Kise could use the consolation, and he wouldn’t take it as pity. He’d know that Aomine knows how unfair this last game is, after the shitty unfair result of the last game when Kise had given his all (even more than he’d been able to do against Aomine in perfect health, just a month ago). Kise knows it, and so do his teammates, and so do all the Shutoku guys.
Basketball is a fickle game. The two of them know this better than most people. By the time Aomine resolves to just reach out and touch Kise’s shoulder, the moment is past, and Kise’s off on his crutches, headed toward the section with his teammates to watch Seirin and Rakuzan, and Aomine drops his hand into his pocket.
It was supposed to be there in the first place.
*
They’re drafted ten and eleven in the first round, Aomine first and Kise right behind him. It’s not something Aomine was expecting. Kise can kick his ass one-on-one now, when he’s healthy--and yes, he’s not always healthy, and he doesn’t always win, and the NBA is not a one-on-one league, but still Aomine would have picked Kise first.
He doesn’t tell Kise, but he tells Satsuki, later, when they’re back in the hotel suite and Aomine’s parents are asleep in the other bedroom.
“Your bias is showing,” says Satsuki, giving him that smile she gives him when she thinks he’s being particularly dense.
“What bias? It’s not like I’m going to tell him that. I don’t want his head to swell up even more.”
“Okay,” says Satsuki.
She’s still looking at him like she can read his fucking mind, which despite her claims, she can’t. They can both read each other pretty damn well, and that’s never not been true, but there are still uncrossed lines and things one of them wouldn’t dare voice or even skirt around. Like the smile on Kise’s face when he’d been picked, the hat hair he’d complained about as he fussed in the mirror that looked so damn cute on him and had made Aomine want to sweep him off his feet and kiss him right there. He’d been looking at Kise the whole time, okay, but that’s just because Kise had been there and had been bugging him about who’d be the first to get a championship and who’d win Rookie of the Year. That’s all. He can be excused a stray thought or two of this kind anyway, on the night he’s drafted into the fucking NBA.
And even if she does know, there’s nothing more than that.
*
Words can be unthought as much as they can be unsaid, which is not at all. Aomine can’t take back all the things he’s said that have hurt Satsuki or Tetsu or someone else or himself, and he can’t take back the scattered thoughts about how much he’d like to touch Kise’s smooth skin, kiss his pretty lips, tuck a lock of hair behind Kise’s ear, anything that gets through the hand he’s put up in his mind to block it out, the drain cover under the pressure of water. There are more dangerous thoughts than those, deeper and more concrete; he dreams about fucking Kise once and at that point he should maybe just give it up. (The scars on Kise’s knee from surgery, the arch of his back, his heavy-lidded eyes and the tone he says Aomine’s name in--Aomine can’t think of anything else when he jerks off, no matter how much he tries, for a month.)
No one, he decides, would accuse him of having feelings for Kise (except for Satsuki, and they’ve reached an unspoken agreement not to talk about it). He is a remarkable beacon of self-control. He takes Kise out for dinner when they play each other, knocks his knee against Kise’s under the table by accident, needles him about the mistakes he’d made (and takes Kise’s barbed remarks right back). They play in the FIBA Worlds together on team Japan, and sure, the press is making a big deal about the two of them as a combination, but that’s what they’re supposed to do.
(He gets to watch Kise, healthy and fresh from a summer of training hard, sink gorgeous Js and break through defenders like a knife until he explodes into a decisive dunk that shakes the backboard, feel the ball land in his hands from Kise’s pass because Kise always knows where he is, and dunk it himself, harder and louder and better, as a challenge. This should be enough; this should be more than enough.)
Aomine maybe shouldn’t be drinking this much at the celebration, thinking as much as he is about Kise, Kise’s hands on hsi drink and Kise’s hair in the dim lights, Kise’s laugh, the way he’d squeezed Aomine in his arms after they’d won. Someone had brought up Teikou, and Akashi had changed the subject away, but all Aomine can think of his how Kise used to chase him for a one-on-one, how Kise used to see him alone on the top of the mountain, and how Aomine hated being there, but Kise’s admiration used to make him feel--not better, about it, but different. He likes being on a level plane with Kise, and he wouldn’t trade that for any of the good parts of their middle school days, but he wishes, sometimes, that Kise would look at him like that again.
“Hm? Aominecchi?”
(And Kise still calls him that, but he says it differently now.)
“I didn’t say anything,” Aomine says, swallowing more of his drink.
Kise leans in closer, about to press him harder--and then thank fuck for Nebuya, who belches loudly next to them, breaking the moment.
*
Kise misses the road trip to Cleveland with a nagging wrist injury, and it’s a great excuse for Aomine to keep avoiding him. He’s been replying to texts, tagging Kise with dumb shit on social media, but every time he reads and rereads his words and hits backspace and watches it all disappear before he retypes the whole damn thing. He needs to get over this crush, stop living in the past, a ship that’s already long since sailed if it would ever.
Is it the past when their best basketball is probably ahead of them, when the past always catches up with them, when their social circles now are slightly distorted versions of the social circles they’d had when they were fourteen? Is it the past if these feelings are persistent, when they won’t release Aomine from his grip? He’d try to fixate on someone else, but his gaze just slides past, and he’d sleep with someone else but there’s no one else he really wants to sleep with.
He can avoid seeing Kise when Kise misses a road trip, but he can’t miss the giant billboard lit up before the sun’s up in the morning, on his commute into the practice facility, emblazoned with Kise’s face and the name of a cologne. He’s pretty enough, known enough, to move products in a town far from where he plays that has sports stars of its own. His hand twitches, like it had back at the Winter Cup all those years ago and before this all felt like a real, comprehensible possibility. He’d wanted to reach out and touch Kise, even then, maybe before.
A voice in his head that sounds quite a bit like Satsuki’s says that he should just do something. He should tell Kise, so that Kise can reject him and maybe that will finally push him toward getting over it. Kise’s dealt with this before; he knows how to do it without wrecking a friendship. But would he pity Aomine for having this stupid crush for so damn long?
He can live with it. He’s an adult.
*
“It’s my win,” says Kise, twirling his keychain around his finger.
“Your team win,” says Aomine. “I scored the most points.”
“Not enough to win,” says Kise. “And you did pay for dinner.”
“So you should be nice to me.” Aomine scowls, pushing his hands deeper into the pockets of his hoodie.
It’s not really cold out, but he needs something to do other than looking at Kise’s ass in those jeans or listening too hard to the cadences of Kise’s voice, different from the way he speaks to the press or teammates, or, maybe, anyone else. Aomine’s imagining something; he has to be. (If delusions are the way he gets to say it, then it’s worth the embarrassment and stupidity; he knows he’s done stupider things--even recently).
In the dark, Kise’s apartment looks smaller. The shadows of his large ferns block enough of the window that the city outside seems closer, distracts from the length of the matching leather furniture and the clean carpet, free of dust.
Aomine pours himself a glass of water from the tap in the kitchen before Kise can preempt him and offer him a bottle of expensive mineral water. Neither of them is hurting for money, but the tap water tastes better. There, they’re incompatible; he can give this crush up.
“Aominecchi?”
Aomine turns around. Kise stands in front of the open refrigerator, a bottle of water in his hand.
“Don’t you want anything else?”
Aomine shakes his head, and halfway through he thinks he should have just fucking told Kise, even if that wasn’t what he was asking about.
He falls asleep on the stiff leather couch, still thinking about what he should have done.
*
Aomine wakes up first in the morning as the sun streams in the floor-to-ceiling living room windows, in time to water the plants (and Kise will grumble about the drops of water spilled on the floor, but maybe they’ll evaporate first). He hates sleeping in his clothes, but he won’t sleep in Kise’s--maybe when he says something about the stupid crush, Kise will stop offering. Or maybe he’ll keep it up just to bother Aomine.
When he gets out of the bathroom, Kise’s already in the kitchen.
“Hey,” Aomine says, raising a hand to half-wave even though he’s less than a meter away.
Kise’s hair is a little rumpled and his shirt is a little twisted (he always moves around when he sleeps) and he’s squinting at the coffee maker as if its existence doesn’t make sense.
“Something the matter?”
Kise looks at him, and oh, fuck. Aomine can’t stop his face from contorting.
“Why does your face look like that?”
Aomine reaches up to rub it, too late, but whatever. “Like what?”
“Like, I don’t know,” says Kise.
Aomine leans in and kisses him. Kise’s morning breath is rancid, and Aomine’s own mouth is too dry. He pulls back.
Kise doesn’t look angry or annoyed, or even fake-annoyed. He opens his mouth as if he’s going to say something, but then closes it again. He reaches for Aomine’s hands, then pulls Aomine in closer.
“Me too.”
