Timeskip — Entrance Season, Seirin High School
When Joshua left, he left no farewell.
No note. No confrontation. No dramatic exit across a rain-slicked courtyard. He simply ceased to be a presence the way one moment ceases to be the echo of a footstep if the body that made it stops moving.
One morning the gym breathed, pulsing with the same rhythm that had guided them for months. The next morning it inhaled and did not exhale in the same way. Teiko's perfect machine kept turning, trophies stacked and banners hung, schedules followed with religious devotion, but the gears had lost a tooth. It was small, almost invisible to an outsider—perhaps only the craftsman of the machine could feel it—but to those who'd been welded so close to one another it was an absence that made the light tilt.
The Generation of Miracles did not speak of him.
They did not speak because to speak of Joshua was to name that empty tooth, and the machine whispered that no one should pry. They all coped in their ways. Aomine swaggered through practices too fast and too hot; his body attempted to make up for the thing he could not. Kise copied without ceasing, as if mirroring could replace what had left. Midorima kept his rituals tighter, convinced that strict sequence could hold the world steady. Murasakibara, for a time, lost the small pleasures of his appetite; the amusement that had once fed him dimmed. Akashi—Akashi broke differently: not outward, but inward, quietly.
Akashi, the one who calculated paths and patterns and probabilities, could not compute the variable that had simply disappeared. He measured his teammates' arcs against a ghost that no longer existed and found them wanting. That irritation grew into something else: the brittle anger of someone who recognized his own limitations in the reflection of talent he could not control. Later, when he would frame his plans and his iron will into the Emperor Eye, there would always be a gap in his confidence where Joshua's absence lived.
And Kuroko—Kuroko felt like a room whose doors had been sealed. He walked the halls of Teiko with the same measured silence he always had, but that silence grew heavier, layered with a new density. He moved as if there were a second body he had to share every movement with, a heartbeat to which he had learned to tie his own. Without Joshua, his misdirection was a single instrument rather than a duet. He learned to play it alone—learned to make shadows pass—but the harmony that had made his playing effortless was gone. It was like learning to speak after having once sung with another voice.
Joshua had left because of one thing and a thousand smaller things.
There had been a game late one winter. The opponent was aggressive, not out of hate but due to youthful arrogance, a senior who pushed, shoved, taunted. He wanted to break Teiko to make his name, to write his own headline. The way he went after Kuroko that day—hands rough, words harsher—triggered something in Joshua that did not belong to polite restraint. When he moved to interpose, the gym changed temperature. The strings of rhythm Joshua carried tightened like a snare. Players who had never felt his presence before experienced vertigo; a guard stumbled and cracked a tooth on the rim of a basket. Not because Joshua hit anyone—instead it was the displacement of everyone else's tempo; they collided with one another like boats misread by the tide.
The coach, the school, the parents—people who lived in the matrix of reputations—saw danger. The Miracles realized, privately, that Teiko had almost been forced to depend on a resonance that made them better but which could as easily become a weight. Joshua watched the aftermath: the senior's humiliation, the school's whispered concern, the way people looked to Akashi's measured face for explanation and found none. He felt the rippling responsibility of being a center of gravity and understood that gravity can crush as well as bind.
So he left.
He did not think the leaving would become legend. He thought he was saving them. He thought he could vanish and let the team learn to breathe on its own. In the quiet of his decision, he told himself that distance would be protection—for Kuroko and for the others. He told himself he would find a way to return without crushing the tender shoots of talent he loved.
And then he found Kuroko's choices.
Kuroko did not choose to follow the path of the Miracles. His gaze did not want the trophies stacked to the rafters or the roar of an arena. He wanted small, precise things: a court where he could move, a team that would not crush his softness, a place where his difference would be a gift and not a weapon. He chose Seirin—not because it was obvious or powerful, but because of a quiet coach, a team that played with hungry sincerity, and a boy from America who dribbled like someone trying to outrun his own orbit.
Kuroko's hope anchored Joshua's footsteps.
It was not immediate. The first time Kuroko wrote of Seirin—careless, tentative—Joshua dismissed it with a shake of his head. He had sworn to leave; returning felt like the slow erosion of that promise. But every report Kuroko shared, every small message between them, lit a single filament of belonging in Joshua's otherwise dark plan. Eventually the filament braided into rope and Joshua felt the pull of it; he could not help it. The world could wait while he went to find his brother again.
So the move that surprised Teiko did not surprise Kuroko. Where Joshua had been absence, he became a shadow returning with a purpose. When Seirin's new school year began, a different kind of wind blew through the gym: it was not the gust of an overcrowded fandom, nor the stale draft of ancient trophies. It was the clean, sharp air of possibility.
The doors slid open that morning like an act of fate. Riko's whistle hammered the gym into motion; new players shuffled between cones. Kagami ran drills with the concentrated burn of someone who had just discovered his hunger; his shoulders were broad like a fortress and his movements were raw force polished in overseas sunlight. Hyuga barked calls; the first years pushed until their muscles matched the tempo of the gym.
And then he stepped in.
White hair, casually messy. Galaxy-red eyes that were not gaudy but contained the impression of constellations—small, sparkling fractals beneath a calm glaze. He moved like someone who had measured every breath and decided the world could fit neatly between them.
Kuroko saw him first. A soundless intake; the steadying of a body. It was a tiny thing, but for Kuroko it contained all the relief of the sea swallowing a cliff. "Joshua… nii-san?" he said, voice thin as paper.
Nobody heard the syllables like he did.
The entire gym did.
Heads turned. Conversations died. Riko's pen halted, hovering above her clipboard in a way that made the air feel fragile. Hyuga had one knee bent, ready to call a play, yet he looked as if the future had bent toward a new axis. Kagami stopped mid-exhale, eyes narrowing like a wolf sniffing the direction of wind. He had never seen a presence like this, and instinct told him it was not something to be dismissed.
"Joshua heard Seirin needed players," Kuroko said, answering a question none had asked.
Riko's training instincts kicked in before her surprise. She scanned Joshua as if taking his vitals with her eyes: posture, balance, the way his shoulders relaxed and his toes curled under his sneakers. Everything about him broadcasted the discipline of someone raised in a different language of motion. "We can do evaluations," she said, voice tipping into professional calm. "Show us what you can do."
Kagami's mouth twisted. "I'll be the judge," he said instantly, the American bluntness shaped into challenge. He moved where a challenge lived. Joshua's silence was not arrogance—only a confidence that refused to justify itself. He stepped onto the court.
The ball felt like a foreign object under Kagami's hands at first, then familiar again as he forced himself into motion. He had a style that was direct and fierce: the kind of player who attacked with the conviction of someone with something to prove. He dribbled, feinted, exploded—everything he had learned across oceans was poured into movement. He worked to find the moment where Joshua's shadow would fall, where the twin could be read and outmaneuvered.
Joshua's first touch on the ball was a whisper of intent. He did not send Kagami flying or embarrass him with a fluke. He moved with the economy of someone who understood how to remove options from another's mind without striking. Kagami felt the ball peel from him like a thought slipping away mid-sentence. He spun, tried to recover, but Joshua's footwork—that slight misplacement, that fraction of delay—unraveled Kagami's angle. Not with pyrotechnics, but the kind of precision that gets inside you and rearranges how you breathe.
Kagami bit at his lip. "How did you—"
"You left an opening." Joshua's voice was soft, and when he spoke Kuroko's shoulders relaxed in a way that made the room breathe easier.
The tryout lasted the length of three plays, but in those plays a thousand unspoken tests took place. Riko played observer, making notes in tiny, disciplined characters. Hyuga and Izuki watched like sentinels: Hyuga seeing potential traps, Izuki recording sequence and timing in the attic of his mind. Mitobe and Koganei—with their patient curiosity—watched the interplay of two boys with a twin rhythm. Kuroko's eyes shone with an internal light that matched Joshua's in a quiet mirror—he did not have to speak to tell the story of a past patched back together.
When it was over the gym felt lighter and heavier all at once. Lightness because something whole had settled; heaviness because everyone knew the presence that had landed among them had consequence. "You're on the regulars," Riko said with a single breath of decision. It was not a question and it was not an order; it was a placement. It was destiny, for lack of a more tempered word.
The players muttered. Hyuga protested. "He hasn't even—"
Riko did not raise her eyes, though she heard the retort. "Do you want to take his spot?" she asked, voice plain.
Silence answered.
From that day, Joshua's routines folded neatly into the small geometry of Seirin's practices. He did not show off. He did not crush. He taught by presence: standing in the corner, tapping the tempo of a drill with his foot; watching a player's release until it fit his inner metronome, then pointing out the tiny micro-adjustment that corrected a lifetime of bad habits. He had the patience of someone who had seen many seasons and decided to prune, not uproot. Kuroko followed him like a shadow that remembered the light. Their connection in the gym was silent and exact: a glance, a shift in angle, a brief nod.
Kagami, unsettled at first, found his surprise turning into a dangerous curiosity. Joshua moved differently to Kagami; it was not that Joshua was faster—Kagami was fast in a way that made other boys seem still—but Joshua's movement read the space in vectors and harmonics. Kagami's aggression was a blunt instrument; Joshua's corrections were chisels. Kagami liked to hit, to force a machine to bend. Joshua preferred to coax it into singing.
On a late afternoon they worked one-on-one again: Kagami wanted to understand Joshua's restraint. He wanted to see where the limits lay—he wanted to light the fuse of rivalry that he assumed would make both of them better. They played in the heat that settles on the court after practice, when light through high windows draws dusty lines across the floor. Sweat slicked foreheads; breath puffed small clouds in the chilled air of early spring.
Kagami charged, a bull with a plan. Joshua stepped aside like a reed bending to wind and guided Kagami's inertia with a fingertip. Not once did Joshua counter with crushing force; he subtly corrected, redirected, and then left space for Kagami to punish himself. The simplest of moves—a hop to the left, a step that left Kagami a beat too late—made Kagami hit air. The humiliation stung, but it also instructed. Kagami's jaw worked.
"You're holding back," Kagami said between breaths. "You could destroy me if you wanted."
Joshua looked at him. In Joshua's gaze was something neither pity nor cruelty, but a small, precise sorrow. "And if I destroy you, then what? You'd stop becoming yourself. You'd only ever be a broken thing fixed by me."
Kagami frowned. "That's—kinda noble."
"It's practical," Joshua said. "I left Teiko because I saw what I was doing. Teiko needed to learn to breathe without me. Seirin needs Kuroko to grow. I'm not here to make them dependent."
Kagami looked away, thinking, teeth at the inside of his cheek. His own hunger had always been for improvement through combat, for the purity of being tested and tempered. Joshua's restraint challenged Kagami more than sheer strength ever had. The idea of someone with such control existing not to dominate but to teach was foreign; it made Kagami respect him in a way quieter than admiration—something more like a cautionary pact.
Outside practices, Seirin's first years watched the new duo with awe. Izuki found patterns to log. Hyuga tested small bets against Joshua in layups and drills and lost with annoyed laughter. Mitobe asked about their mother—some inherited trait that might explain the galaxy-red eyes—and Kuroko and Joshua both deflected with the small private joke of family. It was in those small moments, away from whistles and ref calls, that Joshua's layers showed: the older brother who fussed over Kuroko's coat; the man who made sure Kuroko ate enough; the sentinel who would not make a spectacle.
Yet Joshua's shadows had edges. Late one night, when the team had long gone and the gym lights hummed like a tired insect, Joshua stayed behind. He sat alone on the bleachers, watching the emptiness as if mapping the contours with his mind. Kuroko approached and sat beside him without announcing himself. There was no awkwardness, only two bodies finding familiar coordinates.
"Why come back?" Kuroko asked, voice a careful thread.
Joshua's reply was honest and small. "I thought leaving would heal them. But a wound that learns to hide isn't healed. I thought distance would be enough. Then I saw how you chose Seirin—how you smiled when you said their play felt warm. I didn't want to take that away."
Kuroko's hand found Joshua's. It was a childish gesture and infinitely brave. "You didn't take it away."
Joshua closed his eyes. "I hope not. But there are nights I think I should have stayed gone. I could have avoided… everything."
"You did what you thought was right," Kuroko said. "You protected us."
Joshua's shoulders hunched, not from weakness but from carrying the weight of decision. "Sometimes protecting is deciding not to be the tool they reach for. I wanted to teach them to be their own hearts."
Kuroko smiled—a small, luminous thing that made the air around them feel like summer. "Then stay," he said simply.
Joshua's fingers curled to hold Kuroko's hand lightly, a promise without fanfare. "I will."
Far from the intimacy of that touch, other engines revved. Across the country, at Teiko, the rumor of Joshua's return filtered into locker rooms and practiced faces. Some players clenched teeth; some watched tapes and tried to recompose their strategies to account for a heart that had rejoined the game. Akashi, quieter than most, folded the data into himself and began to plan with a new variable: Joshua.
Seirin, for all its modesty, had landed something improbable. The boys on that team would not yet know the full consequence of what it meant to have a second monster in their training rotation. They would learn the weight and the mercy of it over seasons that followed. They would falter. They would adapt. They would grow teeth where they needed them and wings where they desired them.
As for Joshua, his return kept him honest. There were nights he would close his eyes and see the rim where he had once stood at Teiko, the senior's jeer carved in memory. There were times when the scope of his vision thinned and everything collapsed into a single pressure; then he would breathe and Kuroko's quiet presence would thread through the fog, reminding him that he had reasons to be kind. He would not be the hammer that forced change; he would be the scaffold that allowed other people to climb.
When the entrance season settled into the first weeks and the new players had learned one another's names, Seirin's court had become, in Joshua's careful shaping, an organism. Joshua's heartbeat was a metronome that didn't dominate so much as align. Opponents occasionally fell into his rhythm, losing will as if being both seen and mirrored were too much. Sometimes Joshua felt the strain of holding multiple hearts in one steady tide. His galaxy-red eyes would glow tiredly after a long week as if they had watched too many constellations move in a single night.
But he never regretted crossing the line of the court to stand beside Kuroko again.
He had promised, in a different silence years earlier, that he would guard his brother. Seirin was a soft place, yes, and a place of trials. If the world was going to teach Kuroko hard lessons, Joshua decided he would absorb the sharpest edges.
And as the sun sank behind the school and the last of the students walked away with backpacks slung and shoes scuffed, Joshua stood in the center of the hardwood for a long moment, feeling its echoes. He heard not only his own heartbeat but the faint, inexact drum of the future—they were not synchronized yet, but they would be.
Kuroko, as always, was beside him, tethered by more than blood. "We are home," he said.
Joshua looked at him—at the small face that had once been tucked under his arm in a world that had been kinder—then at the empty court, then back at the boy who had chosen a new life. He smiled, a thin, private line that did not announce itself to the world.
"Home," he repeated.
Outside, somewhere between the brick and the sky, Teiko kept turning. Inside Seirin, a new rhythm started to pulse. The world had changed a variable and the equations had begun to rewrite themselves.
There would be tests, of course. There would be games that pushed the boys to banners and exhaustion. There would be opponents whose hunger would force Joshua to his own edge—moments where the weight of being a heart would almost snap the line he'd been walking. He knew it. He had seen the fracture points. But for now, in the quiet of beginning, his presence felt like a promise kept.
And in the warm, complicated hush that settled over the gym, Kuroko and Joshua let themselves be ordinary brothers for an hour longer: sharing a silence that was both peaceful and purposeful, hands finding one another, two heartbeats learning to measure the space between them again.
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End of Chapter 3