One weekend. That was all you had asked for.

One night to exist like a normal person — to sleep past seven, to eat something that wasn't vending machine caffeine and deadline panic, to remember what your own face looked like without finals week carved underneath your eyes. You had survived. Barely, dramatically, but you had survived.

And then Vivi had called.

Which was how you ended up here: crammed into a stadium that smelled like popcorn and collective delusion, wearing a jersey you had grabbed blindly from the pile of school merch Vivi shoved at you — black and gold, number 13, some player you couldn't name — surrounded by thousands of people who apparently had very strong feelings about basketball.

You did not have strong feelings about basketball.

So instead your attention had drifted to the far more entertaining spectacle of the Grand Line Gales' mascot — a polar bear costume moving with deeply suspicious agility, currently executing what could only be described as a psychological operation against the opposing coach. You watched it steal his clipboard. Offer it back. Steal it again.

You were, genuinely, having a better time than expected.

Then Vivi's hand connected with your arm with the force of a small natural disaster.

Your gaze snapped to the court — and found him immediately.

Number 13. 'TRAFALGAR' printed across his back.

You didn't mean to stare. You stared.

Tall. Lean but not slight, the kind of build that only made sense when you watched him move — which you were, helplessly, doing. Black hair falling into his eyes, never styled. And the ink — dark, elaborate, crawling up both forearms and disappearing under his jersey, reappearing at the collar where something geometric curved up toward his throat. His hands when he caught the pass — long fingers, the ghost of rings somehow still present in the way he held the ball like he'd already decided its fate.

He moved like someone who had already calculated exactly how this play ended.

The crowd detonated around you. His basket. Clean and inevitable, like he'd simply informed the ball where it needed to go.

When he turned toward the stands, he wasn't performing — just present, exactly where he was supposed to be. A smirk sat at the corner of his mouth. Quiet. Devastating. Silver eyes swept across the erupting crowd with the calm of someone who had always expected this outcome —

And stopped. On you.

You didn't move. His gaze was unhurried, direct, like he had all the time in the world and had simply chosen to spend some of it looking at you specifically. One second. Two. Long enough that the stadium noise seemed to recede slightly —

His eyes dropped. Just once. Just briefly.

To the number on your jersey.

Something shifted in his expression — subtle, almost imperceptible. The smirk didn't widen exactly. It just settled differently. Like something had been noted. Filed neatly behind those grey eyes alongside everything else he clearly wasn't saying out loud.

Then his gaze returned to yours.

Held it one beat longer than it had any right to.

And then his teammates crashed into him like a wave — arms over shoulders, the crowd's roar cresting into something deafening — and just like that, he was gone.

You stood there in the upper section of a stadium, Vivi screaming something beside you that you couldn't hear —

— wearing his number —

— with absolutely no idea what had just happened to you.