Chapter 1:

Everybody on the Seirin basketball team knew Furihata Kouki was a struggling student. His family wasn't wealthy, and his mother wasn't healthy either. So in addition to school and basketball, he also had a side job. The team pitied the poor boy-it was a awful lot for a freshman in high school to face, and they were very considerate towards his needs. Sometimes when the pressure caught up to the first year, Riko would actually break her rigid rules and let him skip practice once in a while to catch up with himself.

Nobody ever asked the Freshman what this "side job" was. Even his closest friends, Kawahara and Fukuda, only know that it's not a very physically demanding job, has relatively flexible times, and pays fairly well. Does that sound suspicious? Of course it does. But no one wants to ask more, in case they might hurt the poor boy, as if he wasn't already skittish enough.

And Furihata was never more glad for that. You see, he is a part-time manga artist, and not just any manga artist.

Furihata Kouki draws Yaoi Manga as a side job, and has been since he joined the Basketball team. Most of them focused on romance, but almost every single one of them had a full-blown sex scene which he described in such lurid detail that sometimes surprised even himself.

You see, as a child he was always good at expressing himself and capturing life's moments with pencil and paper, and his whole family decided he definitely had talent. Of course, like any Japanese youth, the most prevalent form of art available to the brown-haired boy was manga, and when he was in Fourth grade of elementary school he drew a manga-style picture of a couple he saw in a movie his mother liked. The teacher was very impressed with his lines and choices of color, and decided to convince her husband, a shounen manga artist, to give him extra lessons on drawing manga.

Under his guidance, Furihata's skills improved. By the time he graduated elementary school, he could already help his sensei finish a couple of his backgrounds, and by the time he finished Middle school, Furihata Kouki can help finish his sensei's mangas and have completed a couple of independent works, though none of them were published. He'd gotten especially good at drawing muscles and the male body, thanks to the genre of manga his sensei drew.

It's thanks to his skills that Furihata managed to not be completely useless. When his mother fell ill and father was coming back home famished just to keep the family together, Kouki knew he had to do something. He tried a couple physical jobs, but soon he decided that he would put this talent in art to good use.

His sensei managed to get him an interview with a manga publishing company, and that's how he got this part time job. But even after he had gotten a position as a part-time manga artist, he still didn't know which genre to pursue-he definitely didn't want to be in the same genre as his sensei, because one, he doesn't want to become his sensei's competitor, and two, both his sensei and the agent had remarked that his style was a bit too delicate and pretty for a shounen artist.

So, of course, Furihata had to sit in his class while thinking about all the roads he could take: Shoujo? No, he can't possibly draw such cheesy situations, plus the competition was rough and the demographic hard to please; Mystery? No, he'd pee himself while thinking up plots; Slice of life? Nah...

The idea of drawing something in the R18 genre came to him after a glorious wank. It wasn't easy, the first time: drawing these things in your bedroom while your ill mother occasionally popped in to gently smile and bring you snacks was surprisingly...difficult, to avoid being like Izuki-sempai. But Furihata managed to bite his tongue and drew it.

When he sent his first hentai draft to his editor, Seto Momoko-chan, she shook her head (without so much as a blush) and said to Furihata: "I'm sorry, Furi, but you are awful at drawing female bodies-the girl wasn't cute at all, her boobs were flying in unnatural directions, and during the sex scenes the girl looked more like a guy that grew a pair of mammalian glands. The men were lovely, though" she looked at him with a leery smile, "They had well-defined, but not gorilla-like bodies, and their faces-gosh, they were so sexy yet elegant-looking even though this is a porno. The penises were well and realistically drawn, too."

And then, she said the sentence that eventually sent him to the dark side: "I kind of wish that this was a Yaoi, Furi."

After some awkward moments, Furihata Kouki figured out what "Yaoi" is, and he had blushed and thrashed around for half an hour. He didn't want to draw two guys having sex! He likes girls, for god's sake! Where did Seto-chan get the idea that he would be good at this?! Yet, when he heard his mother cough again, his heart welled in guilt and his resolve hardened, and, after some very heavy research and experimenting with himself, he drew his first Yaoi manuscript.

Seto-chan's face when she read that manuscript was one of entire strange enjoyment (complete with nosebleeds and intense blushing), and soon, with a few minor edits and fixes, Furihata Kouki's first yaoi manga was published under the name Furiha Kou. And he became incredibly popular, partly due to his unique, elegant, and realistic style of drawing and narration, and partly due to the fact that he's a guy-not many guys are in this business, you see.

He's pretty popular (contrary to him in real life), and makes good money. This made his family, as well as Furihata himself happy. It's just that, well, whenever his mother or his sibling asked to read one of his mangas, he has to nervously laugh and think of a way to not let them do that.

It's not a bad job, not at all, but it came with its side effects.

First, Furihata Kouki now had a strange ability to see hints of male homosexuality everywhere he went. He always awkwardly blushes whenever Kise visited Seirin and screamed "Kurokocchi"; he grinned to himself when Takao wrapped his arms around Midorima and called him "Shin-chan"; he nearly freaked out when Murasakibara rubbed Kuroko's head and called him "Kuro-chin" ("Don't let him do this Kuroko you belong to Kagami" he mentally screamed); and he always found the light and shadow thing going on between Kagami and Kuroko (and apparently went on between Aomine and Kuroko, which is kind of ironic since Aomine looked more like a black mass than Kuroko did) the most blatant form of flirting. I mean, come on, is that something you just randomly say to your friend? "I will be the shadow to your light"? These two apparently had a vow about this, too-are they, like, married?

His first real manga series was based on the "sexual tension" between Kagami and Kuroko, and man, was it well-received. Every volume after the first was sold out the day it came out, and it somewhat became an overnight sensation. He could literally walk into a classroom and hear his female classmates talk about his work: the quiet, polite, yet blunt seme who has a low sense of presence and the innocently passionate uke who pretends to be tough but is just a tiger-shaped kitten in the end (because Furihata honestly felt that Kuroko would be the one more in charge of the relationship if he wasn't so dang short compared to Kagami) meet each other in a dark alleyway after school and fell in love after the first meeting, with the uke declaring that he wants to defeat the gang that rules Tokyo, the Generation oh Assholes, and the seme proclaiming that he will become the uke's shadow and follow him wherever he will be.

He didn't put THAT much of his experiences in there-he only borrowed Kuroko and Kagami's personalities and kind of their names, but hearing his work so...fangirled over filled him with a strange mix of pride and guilt. Some of his fans get curious and send him lots of fan letters asking whether or not the light and shadow were based on actual people, for they feel that the interactions are too real to be purely fictional, to which Furihata can only chuckle nervously and reply in half-truths.

After the success of "Shadow and light", Furihata had picked up a horrible habit of finding inspiration for his manga among his basketball acquaintances. Perhaps it's the adrenaline, but he always felt that there were more "homoerotic" moments in sport clubs, and he knew he wasn't the only one who thought so. So he went down the dark road and is now using his teammates and the Generation of Miracles for inspiration (The GoMs were definitely all gay-their hair colors make up the gay pride flag for god's sake, and Furihata so far hasn't seen a single interaction among them that would refute this theory).

Speaking of the GoMs, here comes his second side effect:

He now took a strange interest in men. He would now look at some men and think: "Man that guy looks so good in bed", and one such man is Akashi Seijuurou, captain of the Rakuzan basketball team. There was something regal and elegant in his bright red hair, pale skin, and his cat-like eyes that seemed to be able to command all living beings. Not to mention his red and golden irises that would make anyone's heart skip a beat-in fear or in love-and knees weak.

The problem is...Furihata only met Akashi once, and not under pleasant circumstances-Furihata was scared crapless on the stairs, and fell butt first when he had to go up against him. Not to mention their great difference in status, both on-court and off-court: the Akashi family is one of he most prestigious in Japan, and is famous (or perhaps infamous) for their emotionlessly strict and traditional upbring. Akashi Seijuurou himself, as he heard from Kuroko, excelled in everything he did, not only basketball, but in school, student council, business dealings, and...you get the point.

Furihata's beginning to think that he is seriously masochistic, obsessing so much over a male he only saw for no more than 3 hours and know for a fact that he is not worthy of (and his love interest-well, let's say he doesn't have the most loveliest of tempers and personalities). The concept of them ever being together sounds like something that can only come out of an overimaginative fangirl's mind, but Furihata is not a man who has complete rein of his emotions, and he now finds himself pining over the redhead everyday, even though nothing could ever lead them to each other.

Furihata Kouki is not a smart man.

I don't really have a plot for this in my mind, so I think I'll be making it up as the story goes along. Thanks for reading, and if you have any criticisms, comments, or suggestions please don't be afraid to drop one! Now that I'm posting this this sounds an awful lot like a shoujo manga...