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1. Vanilla
Tetsu-kun always orders a vanilla milkshake at Maji.
It’s something that Momoi’s conclusion had come to after joining him in his post-practice hangouts at the restaurant. Most of the times they were accompanied by Aomine, and then Kise, before they all graduated and scattered around the country in broken pieces of a team they once were. She knows he brings the habit to Seirin, though, and along with it the buried memories of Teikou. He’d never been the type to brush off the past that easily. They both hadn’t.
Old habits die hard, and Momoi knows because the first time she returned to Maji Burger in her freshman year, she was hit by nostalgia so strong that it seemed like nothing ever really changed. She always lets him goes first, because she’s experimental and spontaneous and there’s hardly a day when she sticks to one thing only, whereas Kuroko orders the same treat every time.
It goes somewhat like this:
Tetsu-kun will ask for a vanilla shake, medium-sized, no change whatsoever because the sweetness is perfectly adjusted and he wishes Kagami could get his hand on the recipe so he doesn’t have to buy it all the time. The drink will be the only thing he gets, because whenever the power ace-duo is around it’s always guaranteed that one of them will throw a burger (out of the mountain they’ve gotten) at the phantom player, all while launching into a speech on how slender he is and how he needs to eat more.
Momoi is obliged to agree with them when it happens, of course – she would’ve taken the role herself if they weren’t around. Still, the fact remains that he always gets a milkshake, and not just any flavored shake, but vanilla. It’s always vanilla.
She understands liking something so much that you can’t stop having it even though there are plenty of other options on the menu, obviously (Aomine had the time of his life dealing with her “I can eat an entire loaf of bread” phase), but it shouldn’t last that long what with him constantly hanging out at Maji and all. It’s been years. She wonders if he would ever grow out of it, but her curiosity stays observational for the time being.
What is it about the drink that makes Tetsu-kun like it so much?
“Order number 311!”
Startled from her train of thoughts back to reality, Momoi snaps her attention back to the worker, who’s looking at her, expectant. In a flurry of apologies and thank yous, the pinkette takes hold of her takeaway and leaves the bustling restaurant’s familiar warmth.
The air is dusted with flecks of snowfall when she steps outside, the sudden change between temperature has her wincing sharply at the biting coldness. For a second, Momoi regrets her decision to get the vanilla shake: she could have opted for Maji’s famous hot chocolate instead, and probably should have, but what’s done is done. The drink weighs heavy in her hand, medium-sized — the way Kuroko likes it, the way she’s never had it. Momoi had grown up with strawberry shakes the color of her hair and on the occasions, chocolate, when Aomine discovered his obsession for the thing. But never a different flavor.
Well, here goes nothing.
Softly breathing out, the exhale sends a puff of warm air fanning over her face, Momoi tugs the knitted scarf that covers all the way up to her nose down, exposing chapped lips. Her mittens-clad hands wrap around the paper cup, holding it firmly, and bring the straw to her mouth. Lashes drift shut in anticipation as she takes a testing sip.
It tastes…ordinary.
By all means, it’s not bad, not bad at all — but perhaps she might’ve put her expectation up just a tad too high, because she was hoping for something more explosive. More impressive. Well, figures. It’s not like she’d never tasted anything vanilla-flavored in her life. Might as well finish it.
So she takes another sip — a bigger one, this time, allowing the liquid to fill her mouth as she savors the sweetness, then relishes in its cooling aftertaste in spite of the weather.
Is her brain just playing mind tricks, or does the drink get even better as she swallows it down?
Halfway through the shake, Momoi finally realizes its appeal.
Perhaps, Tetsu-kun has never thought about this kind of stuffs and she was just overanalyzing things, because really, he has no reason to and she does, but in Momoi’s defense one can hardly think properly when it comes to the person they love.
The drink she’s holding in her hands oddly resembles him.
Ordinary and invisible – those are the two words that describe her first opinion on the milkshake, and those are the two words that describe her first impression of him. Kuroko Tetsuya was modest, plain and simple, even with his electric blue hair and eyes so blue it was hard to think how someone like that never stood out against the crowd. It was such an established truth that everyone admitted — so, really, she’s not sure when exactly it had become unnatural for her to think so. The lines that distinguish memories between memories were blurred out and had been that way for such a long time, if she really had to think about it…
Was it the moment his invisibility no longer worked on her?
Was it the moment she was no longer frightened by his sudden appearances, and instead, just happy to see him?
Was it the moment she realized just how different he was on court, how bright he shone despite playing the role of a shadow, how kind and gentle he was to everyone?
Tetsu-kun was special.
And the milkshake reminds her of him, because vanilla is vanilla and it’s got a unique taste that is difficult to describe. The flavor is gentle in the beginning, soft and sweet and strange, but the more she drinks, the longer it lingers against her tongue. The taste becomes heavy, succulent; earthy scent of the vanilla beans swirling into rich dashes of milk and soft ice cream. It’s easily discarded but once you get used to it, it hits you like an addiction.
She just can’t get enough.
Momoi disposes the now empty paper cup in a nearby trashcan, tongue darting out to savor the aftertaste against her lips.
She likes it.
2. Glimpse
When she first started noticing Kuroko, after he’d given her that winner stick, Momoi would occasionally drop by the third string’s practices on purpose just to catch a glimpse of him.
She wasn’t obliged to do so — they had a separate manager for the third string, because three was too much for one girl to do alone — but somehow, Momoi had managed to persuade the coach into letting her stay for the extra practices as well, with an excuse of broadening her knowledge on how to adjust the training program for certain sets of skills. It was brilliant reason, of course, and she was allowed to sit on the bench for observation.
It was almost too perfect to be true.
She had yet to grow accustomed to Kuroko’s surprising lack of presence then, and still lost sights of him several times during the practices, but at least she was learning and picking up on all the right tricks how to not be affected by his natural invisibility then. She was a fast learner — either that, or her infatuation make it easier to focus on him alone. Momoi had to make it discreet, of course, balancing between watching the match and actually learning new things instead of just staring in awe at Kuroko Tetsuya alone, but that was fine by her.
Because those little glimpses she managed to sneak in time after time was so, so worth it.
3. Wind
“Woah, the weather sure is nice today!”
Momoi cried out gleefully as she threw the door to Teikou’s rooftop open, and was greeted by the sight of six different figures sprawling all over the cold tiles. A collective murmur of agreement came from them, to which she answered with a giggle — they were probably out of breath from their new, intensive training regime, so it was okay for her to indulge them just this once. She sat down beside Kuroko, her uniform jacket zipped tight over a white sweater. The wind was particularly feeling generous that day, gushes blowing all over the place much to Momoi’s annoyance. She’d worn her hair up in a ponytail, but her bangs were far too short to be pulled back while being far too long for her liking at the same time. Blossom tresses flew back and forth, hitting her in the face, the eyes, making her huff.
“Momoi-san,” Kuroko spoke up, successfully distracting her from the troublesome things. Before she could answer, however, he was already leaning forward.
“T-Tetsu-kun?!”
She stammered, face blush-ridden, mind frozen. What was he doing?! Was this how her first kiss would go?
Oh, Kami, what if her breath smelled bad?!
To her surprise (and relief with a tiny dash of disappointment), he merely extended a finger out and brushed the strands of hair aside, tucking them neatly behind her ears. “Your hair was annoying you.”
She pouted, turning away after murmuring her gratitude. “Maybe I should just cut it short, like Aomine-kun short!”
“Is that so?” He hummed, nonchalant, turning back to face the sky. “I think Momoi-san’s long hair is pretty.”
The next day, Momoi started wearing her hair down.
4. Dark
Life wasn’t always sunshine and innocent playdates with Dai-chan on the street court they grew up in.
Life was full of black and white streaks in no particular order at all: sometimes there’s one after another, sometimes it took three black stripes to get one white, sometimes they overlapped and melted into grey, sometimes they stood parallel to each other.
The sky could be bright and clear.
The sky could also be dark and foggy.
And when it was, Momoi found it hard to navigate around — she never really knew what the right direction was despite always putting up a façade that she did, so it turned into quite a pain because, well, people always believed that she was telling the truth.
When you got too deep into a lie, you started living it and it became the truth. She’d heard of that saying somewhere and was so awestruck by the idea that, instead of seeking help, she continued putting the strain onto herself in hope that if she really tried, maybe she could get it all under control.
Except that sometimes it was just so difficult and it really was too much for a middle schooler to deal with such stress, of broken friendships and arrogance and ugly, so, very ugly faces that never explained to her where they went wrong. They had left her alone with the thoughts, allowed them to eat her up from the inside as she blamed herself for the things that happened. Somewhere in her mind, she knew she wasn’t at fault — she was caught in the crossfire and she did nothing wrong, it wasn’t her fault, it wasn’t her fault — but there was no one else to blame and it was so exhausting to be nice and see the good in everyone, so easy to just blame it all on herself instead. She’d put a hand in helping them climb up so high only to plummet.
And because Momoi never got to the top with them, she couldn’t find the heart to tell them how cold, how dark it was at the bottom. That in spite of all those terrible adjectives, it wasn’t that scary.
Kuroko and her had always been in the dark.
5. Kill
While it’s true that Kuroko had given her the hope that one day, he would be able to bring Aomine back and everyone would return to how they once were, he first killed that hope.
“Ne, Tetsu-kun.”
A pause in her words, reluctant.
“Do you…remember what I said before?”
We’ll still all be together forever, right?
We can continue to be friends and play together forever, right?
“…I’m sorry, I don’t quite recall. What did you say?”
Huh?
“Ah, it’s nothing.”
Lies. Lies. Lies.
“It looks like we go different ways from here, right?”
She watched, smiling as he said goodbye and left, smiling as the image of everyone laughing and teasing each other turned into Kuroko’s lone, retreating back.
How mean of you, Tetsu-kun, to give me hope, then kill it with one single sentence.
6. Sky
Teikou had far too many bad memories that gave them both issues and traumatic experiences for years to come, so it had always been a silent agreement that they’d both never return to the school, not unless they absolutely had to for a reunion of some sort, but otherwise, never.
Still, it didn’t change the fact that Teikou had the best sky Momoi had ever seen.
Of course she meant the view from the school’s rooftop that Aomine dubbed as heaven — a peaceful getaway introduced to them by Kuroko himself. It was such a generous gift, she thought, priceless, as her hands found the railings and leaned onto them, head tilting backwards so she could gaze at the sky above. The clouds drifted by leisurely, unhurried, as though they had all the time in the world. The palette here was a whole different experience: shades of blue, purple and pink spilled onto each other, swirling and morphing, dotted by splashes of white.
The sky that had witnessed their days, their smiles, their tears.
Beside her, Kuroko whispered his farewell, lost into the wind.
Momoi closed her eyes and tried to imprint the vision of Teikou’s sky into her head one last time, just once more, before they had to turn their backs against it and never look back.
“Goodbye, my halcyon days.”
7. Hope
She thought about giving up before.
When things got dark and the only people she’d ever known her entire life started becoming someone else, Momoi realized, in naive horror, that changes were scary. Uncertainty was scary. One day they were all best friends, the next they were at each other’s throat, trying to claim dominance. Absoluteness. Why did they have to make such a big deal over it, anyways?! Wasn’t it better and so much healthier to play a sport without having to worry about defeats? They weren’t invincible.
Except they were, and by then things had already begun to plunge six feet deep with no way out.
It was suffocating. They were suffocating her. She felt like she was buried alive and slowly being choked to death, hopeless and in despair, screaming her throat hoarse but no one was there to help, no one was there to let her out. They were trapped and she shouldn’t but she felt so, so guilty about it. There were so many things she wished she could have done, thing she should have done, but she didn’t.
She’d graduated Teikou and brought those feelings along with her to Touou. Her best friend was neck-deep in self-pity, wallowing too much to see her pain, or he did but didn’t have the efforts to care. He didn’t even care for himself, so of course she had to do it for him. It didn’t leave any room for herself.
“I’ll bring him back.”
Kuroko appeared like the light at the end of tunnel, her knight in shining armor (except he was the sword or shield or the horse, because the actual knight here should be Kagami, but it’s weird to think she’d fall in love with a horse instead of the actual hero) and Momoi really disliked thinking of herself as a damsel in distress, but in this situation she was. It was okay, though, because she understood that she couldn’t do it herself. She couldn’t save everyone and fix everything on her own.
This time, she’d just have to rely her hope onto him.
“I believe in you, Tetsu-kun.”
8. Notes
Back in Teikou, when Momoi first came to about her feelings towards Kuroko, she’d had a full session of freaking out over how to approach him. They weren’t close at the time, their team hadn’t been properly formed yet, and they had minimal interaction with each other aside from basketball-related topics. She was fine talking to him until he gave her that damned popsicle stick.
Which, to be honest wasn’t his fault, really. The stick just acted as a trigger to all the emotions she had harbored and hid for a very long time, and gave her some sort of an encouragement to verbally express her feelings. Still, it didn’t really change that before she started feeling comfortable around him enough for physical contact, Momoi was shy.
Being the team’s manager, Momoi knew the boys’ schedule like the back of her hand, from first to third string and it really was impressive the way her memory worked to remember the most random of things. That said, she knew when the first members would start showing up to school, and when the boys’ locker room would be completely vacant.
When Kuroko was still in third string, she’d make sure to go extra early in the morning (much to Aomine’s protest, of course, but he hit the classroom to doze off as soon as they got to school) and drop by the locker room. With a little bribing and her incredible persuasion skills, it wasn’t hard to find out which one belonged to the blue-haired boy. Every day, without a miss, Momoi Satsuki would leave a little sticky note on the surface of his locker with words of encouragement. Sometimes, the message was short, other times it’s a bit longer, with doodles of smiley faces and cute emojis.
She signed it as an anonymous admirer.
“Tetsu-kun, let’s work hard again today!”
“Tetsu-kun, remember to stay hydrate between breaks!”
“Tetsu-kun, you’re almost there!”
Then he’d make it to first string, much to both their happiness, but by then the habit was already too hard to drop.
So she continued doing it, and she still did so even as they slowly drifted apart, until he stopped coming to the club altogether and his locker was left empty with no one to occupy.
She still had a stack of newly-bought sticky notes, unused.
Years later, on the graduation day of their highschool lives, Kuroko seeked Momoi out at Touou after Seirin's ceremony has finished.
He found her in the gym, of course, along with Aomine, crying her heart out to the members she’d grown so fond of and the team she’d made so strong. He waits, patiently, by the door for them to finish.
“Momoi-san,” he tells her as they finally find themselves alone in the club, the afternoon glow of the sun escaping through the door and spilling onto his back, casting his shadow over her form. Throughout the years he’d grown a little taller, enough for her to tilt her head back slightly now so she could look at him.
“Please give me your hand.” She peers at him curiously, but extending it towards him anyways. His fingers grasp hers, slender and gentle, as he presses a tiny object into her palm.
Her eyes widen.
“T-Tetsu-kun, this is—!”
“My second button,” he confirms, finishing the sentence for her and releasing her hand. It remains hovering mid-air, though, shaking ever so slightly, fingers slowly closing on the round thing as she then clutches it to her chest. The unshed tears glisten in her eyes when she looks up at him, with trembling lips and open mouth where no words come out. The corners of his own lift in a rare, genuine smile, hand brought up to pat her head.
“You’re the only one who deserves it. Thank you for being a part of the best six years in my life,” he pauses here, taking in the lone tear that has rolled down her already stained cheek before continuing. “…And for the notes.”
“You knew?!” Momoi gasps in mortification, pale skin aflame with pink as she quickly averts her gaze elsewhere, a finger flies up to rub against the side of her cheek nervously — he knows that habit all too well.
“It was such a long time ago…I didn’t know how to talk to you back then.”
He lets out a low, quiet chuckle in amusement at her reaction. “Well then, I suppose you do now, Momoi-san?”
She smiles, coy and timid, searching for his gaze with her own.
“Yes.”
9. Sweet
His hand travels from the top of her head down to the side of her silky cheek, dusted pink with embarrassment and painted in orange hues of the setting sun. Momoi is soft and pliant under his touch as he brushes the rebellious strands of hair away from obscuring her pretty face, cupping it in his palm. Obediently, she leans into the affection and inches just a little closer to relish in his warmth, eyes drifting shut while she trembles in anticipation. His gaze lowers, drinking in the way the afternoon glow drapes a filter over her, makes her look ethereal and fanciful, dreamlike. Momoi Satsuki is beautiful with long lashes fanning over the high points of her cheekbones, glistening with the tears she shed earlier, the corners of her eyes and the tip of her nose still reddened as the aftermath. He whispers her name as his thumb wipes the trail crystal droplets have left in their wake, and she softly exhales in reply.
Kuroko admires the way she easily adjusts to adapt everyone, the way she becomes such a good partner when it concerns teamwork. They make such a good team, he thinks, and is proven right once again when he leans down and she rises on the tip of her toes to meet him halfway in a sweet, sweet kiss. One of his hands sneaks around her waist, settling on the small of her back to keep her standing as she melts in his embrace, his hold, the gentle manner in which he tilts her head with his other hand at just the right angle so that it’d be comfortable for the both of them.
It’s a perfect, text-book kiss, deep and slow and sweet, and when they pull apart she is left breathless, a little disappointment expressed through her quiet sigh as she ducks and hides her reddened face in his left shoulder, small hands clutching at his back. He chuckles, tightening his hold around her petite frame, and rests his head against her own. Momoi smells like peach and sunshine, her scent washing over him, making him exhale in pleasure.
It takes him far too long to return her feeling, but they’re only just getting started.
10. Victory
She remembers one of their conversations that’s set around the first year of highschool.
“Tetsu-kun, it’s so cruel of you to give me these feelings and then not return them!”
He’d blinked then, with a deadpan expression that honestly would be concerning if wasn’t worn on his face.
“I’m sorry, Momoi-san.”
She whined, dragging out the honorific after his name in a long wail. “Mou, now you’re even apologizing for it! Don’t do that!”
Kuroko nodded, a little puzzled at how confusing she was behaving, but chose to keep his slight curiosity to himself. “I’m sorry for apologizing, Momoi-san.”
She blanked. He continued. “I’m not interested in a relationship at the moment. I want to play basketball.” Momoi pouted at this, then sighed in defeat, throwing her hands up.
“I can’t even hate you…What about the future then?”
The confusion was evident on his face.
“What about…in the future? Will you give me a chance?”
Kuroko was silent for the next minute. For some reasons, he was actually pondering over the question, with a serious look on his otherwise neutral face, and Momoi felt her heart leap in excitement at the thought. Finally, he answered.
“Sure, Momoi-san,” he promised, much to her happiness, before adding. “If I won’t be interested in anyone else then.”
Normally, that would’ve considered to be rude, but Momoi was far too overjoyed at the simple affirmation that she was willing to turn a blind eye on that.
“I’ll make you fall in love with me then, Tetsu-kun!”
And look where that had gotten them now.
“Victory is mine,” she says, triumphant, her voice muffled by the thick material of Seirin’s school uniform, but Kuroko swears he can still hear the mirth dripping in it. He remembers her challenge, of course, even though he never officially agreed to it, but it’s best not to point that out to Momoi. He hums, forfeiting, and curls an arm around her shoulders, pressing her closer to his warm embrace.
“You did well, Momoi-san.”