Hi! So this is my first venture into this fandom and it says a lot about how much I adore this manga/anima that I've actually gotten off my ass to write something for it. I hope you all enjoy it and I apologise in advance if there are any spelling or grammatical errors!

Disclaimer: Not mine, although I would love to own a Kise plushie

Chapter 1

It had hurt. Hell, it still hurt. His partner, best friend, his shadow had abandoned him with no notice or warning. Aomine had become so detached from his team and so determined to remove basketball from his life that it had taken a week for him to realise that Tetsu was gone. Once the shock had worn off, Aomine was left to find that his world had shattered. To rub, no pour, salt on the wound, the only person who could even begin to pick up the pieces and glue them together again was nowhere to be found. Damn Akashi wouldn't even tell them whether Tetsu was still in the country.

And so, the end of their Teiko career was inundated with Kise's wails and grief stricken sobs, Midorima's mutterings that were laced with poorly hidden worry, Murasakibara's addiction to heart attack inducing snacks rocketing off the charts and Akashi's piercing glares and shiver inducing snide commands. Aomine himself fled to the rooftops, avoiding everything and everyone. So after seeing all his teammates fall apart as an aftermath of Tetsu's vanishing act, it had been a slap in the face to see he had found himself a new light; that he was happy with that deranged, double-eyebrowed red hair idiot and that weak, weak team.

Back in Teiko, arrogance was always present in Aomine's play, sometimes cheekiness and pure joy would leak through and on the rare times he and Tetsu would fight, pain from those fearsome Ignite Passes – God, did those hurt like a bitch! Multiple times he had had to soak his hands in an ice bucket after matches – but mostly Aomine wasn't affected greatly by emotions during games. The match against Seirin in the Interhigh though, watching Tetsu and Kagami interact had caused something cold and ugly to claw from his chest and up into his throat. It made Aomine want to rip Bakagami away from his Tetsu, his shadow, and hold him in his arms and make damn certain Tetsu knew exactly whom he belonged to.

Aomine's bitterness, frustration and damn it, that was not jealousy, because no matter how many inappropriate thoughts he had entertained back in the Teiko locker rooms or the infinite amount of dreams in which Tetsu undisputedly held the leading role, prostate before him in suggestive positions and looking up at Aomine with those big blue eyes, begging him to fu- damn it! Aomine was not gay. He was not in lo-, correction, he did not have a crush on the blunette, he had never harboured any feelings more than the strictly platonic ones he felt towards his other friends and he most certainly did not want to engage in extremely homosexual, gay, guy-on-guy, sweaty, hot intercourse with Tetsu.

So as the match went on, all the aforementioned feelings shouldn't have flooded Aomine's play but the aggressive, nasty and downright mean way he was playing suggested otherwise. He wanted to humiliate that red headed asshole and he wanted Tetsu to admit defeat, acknowledge that he, Aomine Daiki, was the better player, partner, friend and the brightest damn light Tetsu would ever find and so, through such logic and deduction, Tetsu would choose him this time, for good.

Of course, it all went to hell and whilst Aomine won the match, the already tentative – read non-existent – hold on Tetsu slipped even further from his grasp. All the while, the little 'tiger' got closer with his shadow. Hell, he could practically see the bonds the two were forming, the thick steel chains of friendship and camaraderie tying the phantom player and the wild savage together. And Aomine knew he wasn't imagining things, it wasn't all in his head, Murisakibara of all people commented on the Seirin aces' relationship after seeing the two play.

By this point Aomine had given up on ever getting the quiet boy back by his side; to fill up that raw, jagged, Tetsu-shaped hole that ached constantly in his heart. So to say – that whilst Aomine was sulking and moping over his first loss in a basketball game in years meanwhile trying his hardest to ignore and hide the bubble of joy that was developing in his throat because dude, he had just lost a basketball game! – Tetsu asking him to bump fists again, and looking up at him with those baby blues that screamed it was Aomine's fault that they had parted ways, was a shock would be the greatest understatement in the histories of understatements. Aomine, being Aomine, promptly squashed, stomped, trampled and just for good measure, crumpled up and tossed the hopeful feeling that had blossomed in his stomach, in the trashcan which he then sent careening down into the dark abyss of the 'back of his mind', this was all after he had set the bloody thing on fire, of course.

He had blinked owlishly down at the light haired boy and opened his mouth several times to say something, anything really. It was hard to form words when his brain had just exploded both at the injustice of Tetsu's silent accusation and the improbability of what was happening; what Tetsu seemed to be offering. Eventually he managed to mouth off a comeback that vaguely resembled his usual asshole self and when his body finally responded to the frantic shouts of his fragmented mind, he raised his fist shakily and finally met Tetsu's for the first time in close to a year.

Aomine was not prepared for the responding rush of warmth, ecstasy, giddiness and adoring affection that started in the general area of his heart and spread throughout his torso, into his limbs to the tips of his fingers and toes. It was like immersing himself in a warm bath after running home in a cold winter snowstorm; it was like coming home. And then it hit him. Well, it was more like a freight train had steamrolled over him multiple times. Aomine Daiki had a giant freaking man crush on Kuroko Tetsuya.

That realisation left his legs trembling, knees knocking and his heart seeming to pound right out of his ribcage. While Aomine's mind was exploding and imploding this time round, he watched Tetsu head back to the Seirin players. His team greeted him with proud beaming grins, warm brotherly thumps on the back that threatened to topple the exhausted specialist player, who in turn, flashed a rare, genuine smile back. The following fist bump and look shared between Kagami and Tetsu sent all the warm, fuzzy, hopeful feelings building up in Aomine come crashing down with less grace than Kise's fangirls during a signing event.

For the rest of the day Aomine walked around in a haze and it wasn't until later that night that he realised he had promised Momoi that he would attend practice from then on. Boy, did he regret that one.

So thank you for taking the time to read my work! Let me know what you think; whether I should continue this at all, haha. I hope you enjoyed it as much as I enjoyed writing it!