Kantoku Means I Love You
Some possible reasons Kiyoshi calls Aida "Riko" while Hyuuga calls her "Kantoku". Unabashed Fluff, I-2
"Besides, if you’re our coach, now, the whole team should be calling you Kantoku."
Tag: Aida Riko
Bellflowers Ring Silently
Aomine is straying. Kagami is enthusiastic. Momoi has a plan. And Riko is going to make this all come out right, no matter how many basketball idiots of either gender she has to wrangle to do it.
Riko rubbed her forehead. “Both of you shut up!” she barked. “Kagami, get back to work or I’ll triple your training drills! And you,” she rounded on Aomine, who had the good sense to look just a little uneasy as she marched towards him. “If you want a match with any of my players, you can just get your coach to set it up with me. Now out!” She body-checked him out the door, ignoring his squawk of protest. “You have your own practice to be at.”
Anemone In Sunlight
Kiyoshi is recovering from surgery and now comes the hard part: making him take it slow. In the process, Riko decides it’s time to deal with the things she and Kiyoshi and Hyuuga haven’t been talking about.
Almost two months after the Winter Cup, Riko gathered her club around her at the end of practice, grim and serious. “All right, everyone, listen up. We have a problem.”
A Good, Free, and Unconstrained Will
Kuroko wants a tangible marker of his committment to Kagami and Aomine, and of how they belong to him, and that’s when other people start noticing what’s going on.
It was Daiki who mentioned it first, stroking his thumb along the line of Taiga’s collarbone one afternoon when they were all tangled together in Tetsuya’s bed, still a little sticky but catching their breaths again.
“You’ve stopped wearing that necklace all the time.”
This Moment to Arise – Departures and Arrivals
Kuroko hauls Aomine to Seirin, and Momoi comes with them. The team is delighted, if a little taken aback by Kuroko’s unnoticeability and Aomine’s lack of condition. Kuroko is all the more convinced he’s brought them to the right place after he meets Kagami, and sees the challenge he has the potential to offer Aomine.
The door of Tetsuya’s classroom slammed open and Aomine stood glowering in the doorway. “Tetsu!”
Ah. He’d finally heard. Tetsuya put down his sandwich and waited while Aomine stalked through his scattering classmates to slam a piece of paper down on Tetsuya’s desk. The header, as much of it as was visible under Aomine’s hand, said Sei. “What the hell is this?” Aomine demanded.
“A letter,” he observed, just to get things rolling properly.
This Moment to Arise – Introductions
Aomine is increasingly annoyed by the attention Kuroko is paying Kagami, and for that matter everyone else on the team, and annoyed by the restraints Aida puts on him, but Kagami does pique his interest a little.
Daiki had thought he’d gotten used to just how ridiculous it was that Tetsu had dragged him to this no-name school and dropped him into a basketball club that apparently had nothing going for it but enthusiasm. But this was where he put his foot down. The very idea of ‘announcing his intentions’ during morning assembly in order to ‘prove’ himself for this new team was laughable. He was the ace of Teikou, he didn’t have a damn thing to prove to a team that couldn’t even get to the Interhigh.
This Moment to Arise – Clarifications
Kagami is pleased with his new team and his new challenge, though puzzled by the tension between Kuroko and Aomine. A practice match against Kaijou tells him at least a little of what the tension is over, and also gives him his first taste of working with Kuroko in a real game.
Taiga swatted his alarm clock into silence, rolled over, and smiled up at the ceiling. He woke up with a smile a lot, lately.
Okay, so his strongest teammate was a total jerk, and he honestly thought Kuroko liked scaring the liver out of people by popping up out of nowhere, and their coach was clearly some kind of demon. He could deal with all of that and more, because basketball was interesting again. A challenge again, and more than a challenge. A bone-cracking, tendon-snapping, nerve-burning hurdle to get over, like it hadn’t been for over a year since he came back to this country.
This Moment to Arise – Preparations
Momoi knows that the problems between Aomine and Kuroko and Kagami have to be ironed out before they start the Interhigh preliminaries, and she has a plan. That doesn’t make it easy, though.
Momoi Satsuki liked Seirin. They were a challenge, and she liked a challenge to her skills just as much as any of the boys did.
This Moment to Arise – Revelations
Aomine plays against Seihou, and the team that surprises him the most is his own. He watches Kagami and Kuroko play against Shuutoku, and understands some of what went wrong the previous year.
On the second day of the Tokyo preliminary finals, Daiki’s heartfelt comment was, “About damn time.” He shrugged off Satsuki’s admonishing look. “Oh, come on, I’ve been bored out of my mind. Shinsenkan was pathetic, and even those Touou guys weren’t exactly a challenge.” Which had been a great disappointment, after he’d hauled himself through the whole month of A-block matches on the hope that the ‘Kings of the West’ would be at least a bit of fun. Or at least that their first match in the final block would be. But no, not so you’d notice. If it hadn’t been ridiculous to imagine, he’d actually have thought Touou was holding back against him.
This Moment to Arise – Stumbles
Kuroko gets a chance to play the way he wants to, again, with Aomine against Kaijou. When he has to play without his partners against Touou, though, he finds himself hitting a wall.
“All right,” Hyuuga-san called, waving them to gather close. “We’ve played Kaijou once, but don’t let that make you overconfident. I doubt they were going all out, not in a practice match, and Kasamatsu knows what we can do, now. Stay sharp.” He nodded as everyone chorused agreement, and then reached up to wrap a hand around the back of Aomine’s neck. “Except for you,” he added. “You need to calm down.” He shook Aomine a little, holding his rather startled gaze. “Kaijou isn’t running away, and you don’t need to hunt them down for pity’s sake. Breathe.”
Tetsuya was actually the one who followed that order, breathing out as one thread of tension uncoiled down his back. He had been right, so right, to bring Aomine to Seirin.