Nothing compares to this moment. Not even the first day of camp, being away from home all by yourself. Not even a performance with an audience of fifty thousand, because there may be fifty thousand watching your every move but those fifty thousand are people you couldn’t care less about. Nothing compares to the moment when you’re face-to-face with the love of your life. Nothing compares to this moment, when she’s about to tell him how he holds her world in the palm of his hand.
“Kuroko, I like you.”
But that’s an understatement, she wanted to add. What stopped her was the readable expression of distaste, of discomfort in his frosty eyes. She shouldn’t have done this, shouldn’t have contemplated doing this, shouldn’t have even crossed her mind. But it did and a push from Riko (and Kagami as well, maybe) was to blame for the shaky knees and the tension in the air.
He stands there for a while, not once looking into her flaring eyes fueled by false hope and innocent faith.
“Sorry,” he says and the awful feeling crawls from his chest and latches onto hers as she looks down and sees hypothetical crushed dreams and hearts, stomped on by the phantom himself. “You’re not my type,” he adds, driving knives into the hypothetical heart on the ground.
Desolation dampens her burning spirit and she looks up to see him walking away. She wipes at her eyes furiously, making a futile attempt to get rid of the weakness. She beams at her friend who’s hiding behind a tree, Riko, and sees the look of sympathy, of pity and apologies on her face.
“I think he likes you,” Riko says. [Y/N] laughs and puts her arms around her friend’s waist, finding warmth and comfort in the strong shoulder of the Seirin basketball coach. “I think he made it clear that he doesn’t,” she says, words muffled by cotton and distorted by sobs.
Riko fiddles with the ends of her childhood friend’s hair as the sleeve of her blouse gets soaked in tears. “Hey, [Y/N], it’s alright. It’s not the end of the world or whatever. You’re better off with someone else, anyway.”
[Y/N] breathes in the vanilla on Riko’s sleeve and thinks of a punch line but her words are her world and he’s still holding it in his hands taking it farther, impossibly, unreachably away from her grasp.
