Saturdays at Café L'Amour (Kuroko no Basket - Kuroko Tetsuya Fan Fiction)

aprιl 18тн

a/n: i edited the author's note, by the way

~~~

“I’m okay. Don’t worry about me. Have fun!” she quickly typed into her phone and pressed the send button with a trembling thumb, gigantic tears rolling down her cheeks. As she placed the phone into the secure pocket of her messenger bag, she pursed her quivering lips and forced herself to steady her breathing, all in a futile effort to keep herself from letting out the slightest sob in the public area, containing five people at most, she was currently in.

Her blurry tear-filled eyes giving the laptop screen in front of her one last heart-wrenching glance, all her hopeful thoughts were shattered into shards by the finality of the heavy words held by the email she received that day. She could still feel the sharpness of the remaining fragments of her ambitious thinking painfully piercing her chest.

Her dreams’ death by rejection has unexpectedly felt so devastatingly tragic, along with the freezing harsh reality dousing her empty being.

An uncontrollable sniffle left her system, followed by a series of quick but silent sobs she could no longer restrain. She buried her pitiful crying face into her hands, the ends of her fingers pressing and rubbing her closed eyes, merely smearing the wetness on her eyes’ area. All her self-restraint was drowned by the dejection in her chest that was quickly spreading out through her entire body.

“Customer-san, your order’s here.”

She nearly jumped away from the flat courteous voice, carelessly forgetting about her current predicament for a moment as her sea-green eyes met those ocean-like ones of a taller male with a naturally pale complexion and hair which reminded her of the serene sky. She immediately turned away, her cheeks growing warm due to embarrassment, and bowed down to let her long curly tresses hide her tear-ridden face. How long had he been there? She never heard the slightest sound of footsteps coming her way nor did she sense someone else’s presence in her two-meter radius!

Really, coffee picked the right time to get to her. Note the sarcasm.

“Thank you,” she answered under her breath as her fingers fidgeted on her lap and her shoulder rose and fell with each involuntary whimper, still minding unnecessary courteousness. All she wanted was to melt in the spot for having important details, such as crying, being in a public place, and ordering something she should’ve expected to arrive shortly, to carelessly slip out of her mind.

The waiter remained on his place after he set the cup of hot coffee and other necessary items on her table, his inexpressive stare still on her downcast figure. “Is there anything else I could help you with?” he asked politely, his monotonous voice almost sounding sympathetic.

Violently shaking her head as if to drive him away, she still answered firmly and almost bitterly, “No, I’m fine.” As her voice’s wavering near the end begged to differ, she raised her hand and waved him away. “Thank you.”

The presence-less male hummed a short low-pitched note and soon turned away after a few seconds with an audible and respect-filled “I understand”, most probably sensing her current desire to be left alone.

A few minutes were all it took for her to calm down, but not to stop dwelling in what seemed to be an abyss of anguish. Heck, she doubted that she’d even be strong enough to move on in a week; she poured so much effort on her work that it looked impossible. The coffee will get cold, she reminded herself as she wiped the afternoon’s last tears away with her bare hands. Her gaze falling on the table’s area where the server placed the articles she ordered, curiosity immediately made way in her. They were what one would find typical in a typical café, but something was different.

There was an uncharacteristically large number of tissues stacked together just beside the coffee’s saucer, with something written in blue on the top tissue. Before she knew it, her hand was already holding on to the tissues and was in front of her to get a better view of the words.

“Tomorrow is another day,” it said. Though, at first glance, it looked as if it was typed then printed, she knew it was handwritten by the way the letters were inscribed and the way they gave the soft surface a different texture. Her eyebrows rose as she held on the top tissue and placed the rest on her laptop’s keyboard, only to reveal another tissue with something else written on it.

“Fall seven times, rise eight.”

She took it, revealing another tissue with a quote.

“We know what we are, but not know what we may be.”

Another.

“The pain you feel today is the strength you feel tomorrow.”

And another.

“Never let the fear of striking out keep you from playing the game.”

And a lot more.

Half of the stack had something written in them while the other half was completely blank—probably the ones given to actually dry her tears.

Most of the phrases and sentences were already familiar to her, while the others she had never read conveyed the same message in general. But just the thought that a random stranger wrote everything for someone he also didn’t know lifted a large part of the heavy sensation in her chest, and that brought a small unconscious smile to her lips as she skimmed through the soft thin papers in her hand.

Her earlier thoughts of not being good enough, of just letting go of what she had always wanted to do, and of surrendering to what she believed to be her fate started to evaporate from her mind, replaced by the words held by the tissue papers.

Maybe, just maybe, she wouldn’t give up after all. That would put the tissues’ giver’s effort to waste, right?

As she gave the person in charge with the cash register and the phantom-like male, who were both idly standing by the counter, a quick look, she finally confirmed that it was indeed the waiter who wrote the quotes. The good-looking male at the cashier busily talking to the waiter had his hair set up in a style that obviously took a long period of time to accomplish, had pierces on his earlobe, and had a slightly disheveled collar—basically showing his high regard for appearances which meant that he either wanted to give the attractive bad boy impression to the opposite gender or was simply metrosexual. Since, for her, the former was more likely, he would’ve been the type to come to her table instead of writing on tissues. Also, the waiter had a blue pen on his top’s pocket and a pocketbook, a likely source of his words, in his blue waist apron (she could tell by the way it made a mark on the pocket and its familiar size).

The bluenet’s head turned ever so slightly in her direction, instantly meeting her eyes. She immediately broke the gaze they shared, her cheeks growing warm out of sudden consciousness.

Next week, she promised to herself as she brought the cup of coffee to her lips and took a cautious sip, I’ll talk to him next week.