Late spring — a week after the regional pre-season victory
Sometimes the loudest changes begin with small sounds.
Aomine's laugh that echoed off concrete could be one of those sounds.
He didn't call it an invite. He didn't text with a time stamped by polite convention. He dropped in on Seirin late the night the team returned from the regional semi-finals. The gym was dark but for one buzzing emergency light; the school lot smelled like damp asphalt and the kind of heat that sits under the city's skin. Aomine stood at the open doorway like an island in the shade, one hand hooked in his jacket pocket, a grin that said he had come to settle something he'd been carrying like a pebble in his throat.
Kuroko's phone vibrated—one short line of text—and he glanced at it with that same blank calm he always wore. He showed Joshua. Joshua read the single line:
Street game. Midnight. Your old court? Interested? —Daiki
Joshua's eyes were unreadable. He pinched the bridge of his nose for the briefest moment and then set his jaw. "I'll go," he said.
Kuroko's fingers twined in his. "You must be careful."
Joshua's smile was small and private. "I will be."
That night, Seirin's bus idled like a heartbeat in a wider rhythm. The team dispersed quietly—some players to houses or to chat in groups about the playbook—while Joshua and Kuroko took a longer route through the city, walking past shuttered shops and the smell of night yakitori. The old street court waited under an overpass, its chain-link fence turned to shadows, the backboard nicked and the paint worn thin by years of feet. This was where Aomine had once existed as a force without neighbor; this was where some of the old scorching pride lived.
Word had spread before they arrived. Aomine's name was a rumor that grew like fire in dry grass: people came with cameras, with skateboards, with the bored hunger that only night can feed. They had come to see whether a boy with white hair—rumored to be a second miracle—would stand against the man who had once burned through every opponent with the rawness of an animal.
Aomine was already there. He was barefoot—an old affectation—and he warmed up with lazy arcs of a ball that looked like a held thought. He glanced up when Joshua and Kuroko entered and his grin sharpened into a knife that didn't cut; it glared with the kind of honest amusement men show one another when they are trying to see if their old scars will sting again.
"You came back," he said as greeting.
"I promised Kuroko I would not disappear again," Joshua replied. His voice matched the night: low and steady. "You wanted a game."
Aomine shrugged. "Yeah. I wanted to see what leaving did to you."
Joshua inhaled. The air in the court was different from the gym: there were fewer rules, less polite distance. Everyone here played at their nerve's edge. Joshua knew—knew in the way a clock knows the slow approach of midnight—that this would be less about winning and more about something that had to be said with knees and lungs and angles.
Kagami had begged to come, of course. He stood at the edge of the crowd, hands jammed in pockets, jaw set like a cast. "Don't pull any of that 'I'll hold back' nonsense," he told Joshua before they left the bus. "If you got something to show, show it."
Joshua looked at him and then to Kuroko. "This is not your fight."
Kagami bristled and stepped closer. "It is if you're on my team."
Joshua's eyes flicked like a bird measuring distance. "Then watch."
Kagami's stance softened into something between a challenge and a plea. He chose to be the audience.
The street court vibrated with the buzz of anticipation. The game was informal—one-on-one, no ref, first to twenty, win by two. Aomine's style was a storm and a muscle: the kind of brand of basketball that demanded the court submit. Joshua's was a tide: it didn't smash; it redirected. The crowd pressed close, breathing the same air as the players, the fluorescence above the court throwing stark shadows and the white of the ball looking like an exposed iris.
They began.
Aomine's first move was an assault—not a tactical probing but a physical threat: sudden step-backs, stutter dribbles, a burst of speed intended to see how Joshua's body would answer. Joshua responded in a way that made people forget to breathe: he moved with the soft economy of one who could afford every motion and yet chose only the ones that altered the game's weight. He didn't block Aomine so much as diffuse him. He took Aomine's timeline and bent it into a new beat.
The early points were traded in a kind of liturgy. Aomine would drive, Joshua would slip a foot, the ball would catch rim and fall or not. Aomine grinned often, breath fogging in the night. He liked being tested; he liked the scent of a challenge. Joshua rarely smiled. He watched.
It changed when Aomine found the Zone—not fully, not the heavy state of awe that would later swallow him, but a pulse within himself that crackled like static. He moved with a different certainty, as though the court remembered a path he'd burned into it earlier in his life. Joshua read the shift like someone reading a page; the boy bent but did not break. He adapted.
For a while the game became a conversation. Aomine spoke in violent, brash syllables: moves meant to assert dominance, to prove that leaving had not dulled him. Joshua answered in clean, long lines, in an insistence that was not about proving who was stronger but about testing who could hold their center.
The crowd leaned forward as the point count climbed. Aomine's breaths grew shorter, his eyes sharper; the joy on his face looked like a storm. Joshua's galaxy-red irises seemed to catch each spark and turn it into a diagram. He began to push back—not to destroy but to show control. He used heart-sync on the court that night in a way that surprised even Joshua: rather than synchronizing a whole team, he synchronized the crowd's breath to a metronome of his own making. The rhythm changed, the court's collective inhalation shifted, and Aomine had to adjust his internal drum to match.
Aomine laughed, the sound almost elated. "You're annoying," he said, more fond than angry. "You're like… a broken beat I can't figure out."
Joshua's reply was a single, effortless movement: a pivot, a feint, a pass that wasn't meant to find hands but to carve open space. He scored. The ball slapped the ground and the crowd erupted, a small animal of sound.
But it wasn't all dominance. Aomine pushed back hard. Twice he hit a string of points that nearly unstuck Joshua's rhythm. The game was not about spectacle as much as it was about honesty: Aomine's pure joy in showing up, Joshua's cool curiosity in how far he could be stretched without snapping, and the mutual recognition that both of them were shapes cut by similar knives.
Kuroko watched like someone looking at a delicate mechanism. He noticed the micro-steps Joshua made—how he ever so slightly altered his hips to change the ball's sweet spot; how he let his peripheral vision take in the passer's micro-tell while his body narrated something else. Kuroko could see his brother's heartbeat not in the chest but in the timing of feet on linoleum.
When Aomine flashed a grin that was not taunting but open, it was as if he had remembered something he had been missing. He moved with a freedom Joshua had not expected. For a breath the game was not a test but pure, ridiculous fun. He plunged into a move, body folding into a sudden acceleration that made the chain-link fence seem too small for his ambition. He scored a flurry of points. The crowd's whisper swelled into a roar of delight.
Joshua matched that with a quiet flourish, not ferocious but precise. He found a micro-gap in Aomine's defense and exploited it: a pass that curled around a defender, a shot that used the board in an angle no one had taught the younger players in gym class. The score kept ticking and it kept being close.
In the thick of it, something happened that made the crowd fall into a hush: Aomine misjudged one step, his ankle turned slightly, and he faltered. For a moment the game hung on his breath. Everyone expected a flare of anger—Aomine's rough charisma had always included a flash of fury at mistakes—but instead he smiled, small and somewhat startled. He stood, testing the joint, and then continued, lighter somehow.
Joshua noticed. He did not move to capitalize on the hesitation in the way a predator might. Instead he slowed the game down by letting a point go. He played with the margin, with the small space between winning and creating memory. He let Aomine feel the rebound of himself.
That decision—subtle and almost invisible—was the real point of the night.
They finished without a clear victor: the score read like a conversation with no full stop. People called it a draw. Others declared Aomine had won because of the way he walked after the game, chest proud and grin wide. A few whispered that Joshua had shown restraint of a strange kind—that he could have run Aomine over if he'd wanted, and chose not to.
Aomine sat on the rim afterward, dangling his feet like a boy letting the world float below. "You left for a reason," he said at last.
Joshua sat across from him, knees tucked, and looked at the man who had become for so many a story in body. "I did."
Aomine snorted softly. "Good reason. But you can't keep being the world's policeman forever."
Joshua's eyes softened just a touch. "I'm not the policeman. I'm the brother."
Aomine considered that. He barked a laugh. "Whatever you are—don't go thinking you're too noble."
They sat in the dark, the crowd dissipating into the city's night. For all the noise they had made, the two boys left a different kind of impression: a recognition that rivalry did not have to be a blade at the throat. It could be a mirror.
---
In the wings, hands at work
While the street court witnessed a larger conversation, other actors moved their pieces.
Akashi had not come in person. He did not need to. His network was a fine web of watchers and recorders. Aomine's scrimmage footage was in Akashi's inbox within an hour—multiple angles, audio snippets, trajectory analysis. Akashi watched with a kind of pleasant interest, his fingers tracing possible vectors and counters. In his notes he wrote:
Joshua's control is less about unpredictability and more about creating constraining rhythm. Not an issue to break instruments, but to realign them. Watch Kagami's reactions—they may form an amplifying agent.
Akashi's calculus was not a cold dismissal; it was a plan being drafted in a single mind. He would not confront Joshua personally yet. He preferred to prepare the board.
---
Aftermath & appetite
Seirin returned to its routines with the night still ringing like an echo in its ear. The team discussed the street game with the heat of boys who had tasted something rare. Kagami, who had watched from the fringes, came away shaken with a new hunger. "You held back," he told Joshua the next day in the gym as they warmed up. The accusation had tone but no anger; it was a challenge, an admission that Joshua had a power he wanted to test against.
Joshua only said, "I did not think the night needed more harshness."
Kagami's jaw worked. "Good answer. But next time—don't be so polite."
Kagami's voice hid something like relief. The young power in his chest wanted to be pushed to its limits. Joshua's restraint had been a bruise and a salve—he wanted to be the kind of player who could withstand both.
On other fronts, the media—small-time and social—did what it does best: make spectacle and myth out of two boys playing under the moon. Clips circulated of Aomine's laugh, of Joshua's stillness, of the way Kuroko seemed to fold himself into the night. Fans drew fan art of the white-haired boy in constellation-lined jackets, of the flash of Kagami's teal-lined jersey, of Aomine's bare feet. Seirin's drip—those matching warmups and the subtle constellation seams—were suddenly not just buzz but brand.
But brands rarely care about choices. Fans clamor, and scouts plan. Akashi's notes shifted from curiosity to design. He arranged to have more footage pulled, more drills scouted. The Generation of Miracles had always been a series of variables; Joshua's return made the equation more interesting.
---
A quiet promise
That night in the gym, when the rest of the team had gone, Joshua sat at halfcourt and watched the hardwood soak up their passing lights. Kuroko came and sat beside him, folding a small foam cup of tea between his hands. The hum of the building was warm and human.
"You were very careful," Kuroko said, thumb tracing the rim. He watched Joshua's face like it was a familiar map.
"I was careful because Aomine needed to feel the game," Joshua replied. "And because I was testing myself."
Kuroko looked up. "Then what did you learn?"
Joshua's eyes drifted to the high windows. The city's lights were like a scatter map of choices. "That restraint is a tool," he said after a moment. "And that protection is not the same as absence. I will defend you, Tetsu, but I will not be the only hand that holds you."
Kuroko's smile was small, strong, linked to the kind of faith that only family gives. "We will learn together," he murmured.
Joshua nodded. "We will."
Outside, the night court dissolved into the city's noise. Inside, two brothers shared a silence that contained both peace and the iron of things-to-come. There would be games where their rhythms would be broken, where they would have to hold together even as the world tried to pry them apart. There would be opponents like Akashi who would analyze and prepare, and opponents like Aomine who would test with heat and joy. There would be seasons where the heartbeat Joshua set would both guide and strain.
For now, though, the two of them sat and let the court remember their footprints. The future could wait for its turn; in the hush between breaths they had a small reclaiming of time.
And when the morning came, the team would return to practice renewed, with the taste of night grit in their teeth and an appetite for what came next.
Chapter end