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i.
When he was five years old, all scraped up knees and bugs eaten on the playground, he came home with a torn skirt three times a week. His mother would click her tongue at him from ruining perfectly good clothes, but spent careful minutes re-sewing hemlines so he could wear them again the next day.
He thought this was the dumbest thing ever, because he didn’t even like dresses.
They tripped him up when he ran, got muddy too easily, and he was always getting in trouble with the teacher because when he sat with them on, his underwear showed. He was the only boy in the class that wore them, and most of the girls didn’t wear them either. They were hard to play in.
One morning over breakfast, he explained this to his parents. His mother smiled at him over her rice. “Ah, but Tsubasa-chan looks so cute in dresses!”
“Dad doesn’t wear dresses.” He frowned, crossing his arms with all the righteousness a kindergartener could muster. His mother and father shared a funny look.
“Yes, well, your father isn’t a little girl, Tsubasa-chan, though I suppose I wouldn’t mind it either way if he wore dresses or not.”
“I’m not a little girl, though.” And he stuck his chin up nice and high and said, “I’m a boy.”
Another funny look. His parents’ indulgent smiles slipped away. “What?”
“I’m a boy.” He said, though it was more of a question. Now he felt about as thrown as his parents looked. It was a bit silly for them to not know that, of all things, wasn’t it?
The following conversation was a bit of an eye opener for everybody because, as it turned out, his parents had thought he was a girl, and he had thought that they knew he was a boy. His father was delighted by this piece of news and though his mother was a little more confused, she offered to buy him new clothes and pack away the dresses if it made him happy.
He was late for school that day, but that was okay. When recess came, he was wearing pants.
ii.
“Shouyou, could you come here for a second?”
He glanced up from his homework, which was half done and still as impressively boring as always, to peak at his open door. At six, he was just beginning his first year of elementary school and had real assignments to do, and they cut into his playtime. It was already becoming apparent that he was hopeless at nearly every subject besides physical education, but his mother was determined to chain him to his desk as long as it took to get something to stick to his brain.
Two out of ten addition questions were done and he’d been there for half an hour. He had sort of been hoping that his mother had been calling him to give him a break, but there was no one named Shouyou in their house, so they must have a visitor. His mother appeared in the doorframe, alone and frowning. “Didn’t you hear me?”
“Eh? But you didn’t call me.” He said. “You called someone named Shouyou.”
“O-Oh!” She stepped into his room tentatively, the faint smell of cookies following her in. She gnawed on her bottom lip. “Well, that’s you.”
Um. “What? No, it’s not.”
“Yes, it is- I mean-” His mother’s cheeks pinked and she wrung the dishrag in her hands. “Well, Tsubasa’s traditionally a girl’s name, isn’t it? So, I just thought that maybe you should have a boy’s name instead. Unless you prefer Tsubasa! Or something else. But Shouyou means something similar so I thought it fit.”
He hadn’t ever considered something like changing his name before- he was more concerned with getting outside and proving to Ryuu that he could totally climb that tree outside of Subaru’s house, no problem. He didn’t particularly mind being called Tsubasa, he just never really thought of himself by it. But-
He said it out loud. “Shouyou.” Something fluttered in his chest, and it was like watching his mother pack away all his old dresses all over again. Better. “What’s it mean?”
His mother looked pleased. “Tsubasa means ‘wings’. Shouyou means ‘to soar’.”
iii.
Later that day, when he was finally set free from his homework, he reintroduced himself to his friends as Hinata Shouyou.
Ryuu, Suburu, and Haru looked at each other, shrugged, told him alright then, Shouyou, we still don’t think you can climb that tree.
Evidently, he could, but he twisted his ankle and sprained his wrist on the dismount. His father thought it was hilarious. His mother did not.
iv.
Shouyou only really realized how much his father did for him after he died.
His mother spent a solid week just wandering around the house, her footsteps quiet and sad-sounding. She stared at things a lot, picked up picture frames and traced the edges of them for what seemed like hours, but she never cried in front of him, never, even though he knew she had to. Sometimes when he cried and she held him through it, he wanted to ask her how she could still breathe when her heart felt as tight as his, when it was splintering into pieces with slow, deliberate cracks that bled so, so much, when it felt like it would just stop beating on some days, just because it would be easier to.
Sometimes, though, he was able to see his mother’s heartbreak in her eyes. These were the days she stayed in her room and Shouyou handled the endless phone calls from relatives. A lot of them were people he’d never met. His short phone conversations with them told him exactly why.
He hadn’t heard his birth name in four years- not even his teachers called him by it- but nearly every single stranger cooed it like some sickly apology, an “Oh, Tsubasa-chan, I heard about your father, I’m so, so sorry, how’s your mother?” It didn’t take him long to figure out that the fact that he didn’t know these people was no coincidence. His parents had made sure to keep them away.
At first he tried to correct them. Some listened, politely called him Shouyou even though their tongues stumbled over the name clumsily, like they had to make effort to say it. With the others, he could feel their sad, pitiful smiles over the line as they continued to call him Tsubasa, Tsubasa, Tsubasa, as if saying it enough would remind him that that was his name all along. That he was a girl all along.
He started hanging up on them when they greeted him with the wrong name. He felt better that way. He imagined his father doing the same thing, over and over and over again, closing one door after another so that the people who refused to understand knew that they weren’t welcome in their home. He imagined his father protecting him. And then he didn’t really have to imagine it, not really, because that was what his father had been doing the entire time.
But without the phone ringing the house grew silent. Lonely. His mother started to go back to work and he went back to school and they could smile and laugh together, but his father’s absence was felt in the chair that was never touched and in the way that he sometimes set three plates on the table before remembering and putting one back in the cupboard before his mother saw. Shouyou figured it’d be alright soon, but whenever he went to his father’s grave alone, he asked him to stop making Mom sad. It never worked.
One morning, though, he woke up to a loud thud from the bathroom next to his room. He jumped out of bed and found his mother splashing water on her face, looking pale and woozy and very confused.
“A-Are you sick, Kaa-san?”
Her eyebrows knitted together. “I don’t think so.”
She wasn’t. He came home from school that afternoon to her crying over a little stick. When he asked her what was wrong, she gave him the biggest, happiest smile and said, “Hey, Shouyou, what do you think of being a big brother?”
And he’d be damned if he didn’t hear his father laughing.
v.
Hinata Natsu came into the world kicking and screaming when Shouyou was 11. He himself had kicked and screamed his way into the labor room in order to watch her being born. It was a decision he found that he regretted. A lot.
He was glad he wasn’t a woman. Also, his mother was terrifying. He came to both conclusions simultaneously.
Natsu, once she was clean and quiet, proved to be the most wonderful thing Shouyou had ever seen in his life. She had a tuft of orange hair that tickled her forehead and big brown eyes that fluttered open and closed as she fought sleep. His mother offered her to him, her own smile tired and warm, and he sat on the edge of the bed and held his little sister for the first time.
When her tiny fingers curled around his pinky he might’ve cried. But, only a little bit.
vi.
In the middle of his last year of elementary school, Shouyou rode a bike up the hill to the sports grounds, a baseball bat heavy on his shoulder and the fall air crisp around him. Haru was a little slower than him, so he had to stop and wait a lot. He didn’t mind, though, because Haru was the one who actually knew the way to the grounds, which meant Shouyou was relying on him. His mother said that when he was relying on someone, it was important to be kind to them.
Shouyou liked the sports grounds. They played a different sport every weekend. For Shouyou, who had so much energy that his body couldn’t keep it all in sometimes, it was the best place in the world. His mother constantly called him “impulsive” or “impatient” but he didn’t think so. His feet just went ahead of his brain sometimes. If he was sitting and he felt the need to run, he’d run. If he wanted to play soccer or baseball or basketball, he’d bike to the sports grounds to see if there was someone there. If there was no one to play with, he’d go back home and bounce a ball against the wall of his house. When he burned enough energy that he didn’t feel like he was going to pop anymore, he’d go back inside and help take care of Natsu.
His mother said she wished he put that much effort into his studies. It wasn’t his fault that schoolwork was so boring.
Shouyou only noticed that he lost Haru when he was halfway up the hill. He slowed down when he did, half because he was going to get lost without his help, and half because he was in the market and last time he biked too fast in the market he almost hit an old man. He decided to just go slower, though, not wait, because Haru’d catch up eventually and then scold him because they were in a hurry, Shou-chan, come on we have to go!
He played with absently with the baseball bat, rolling it between his palms and making the wood warm. Baseball was fun, and so were the other sports they played, but he was conscious of their looming middle school years and the fact that soon, his friends wouldn’t be going to the sports grounds anymore. They’d be joining sports clubs. And he’d have to choose whether or not he would, too.
Shouyou loved sports more than anything, but he was small and wouldn’t be growing much more, either, if his parents were any indication. His peers would get bigger and bigger and he wouldn’t. Even though he was pretty good at sports- could play basically any if he was told the rules and given the chance to practice a little- he knew that instinct and stamina weren’t going to win in contests against height and strength. Sure, there were the “small giants” who were short and proved that they could play on the same level, but in what sport could he do that? He was fast, but he got knocked down by the defense too easily in soccer. He could hit a good baseball, but he’d never have the strength to get a homerun. And forget about dunking- he could weave between all the players he wanted, but that didn’t matter if he couldn’t reach the basket.
Maybe he’d join the track and field club, where fast guys were appreciated and there were no real teams. Sure, it wouldn’t be as fulfilling as duking it out with teammates, but, hey, he’d actually have a chance at being good at it and-
“He surely is a small giant!”
-and he turned his head just in time to watch another boy fly. The loud slap of the ball hitting the other side of the court rattled his bones. He came to a full stop next to the video store and watched the boy, who jumped and jumped and jumped, no matter how tall the wall. He watched as the final set closed down, as 170 cm proved greater than 190 cm again and again, as the points were racked up under the number 10, cloaked in black and flying like the crow emblazoned on his uniform. He watched the boy bound across the court and swore he saw feathers.
His chest was tight. He watched the game unfold as if in a trance, and his mother’s words from years and years ago came to mind.
“Shouyou means ‘to soar’.”
vii.
“I’m the only… member?”
The teacher he was talking to- a friendly balding guy in a track suit- smiled at him easily. “Yup. The number of members has been decreasing year by year. Ah, boys’ volleyball isn’t a “club” but an “appreciation group”. That’s why you don’t need many people.”
“Okay.” Shouyou nodded. Even if it wasn’t okay at all. And it wasn’t. It really wasn’t. This was supposed to be it, his big moment, his chance to be on a team and prove how super awesome he was, to prove that the six months of training he’d done alone had been worth it. He’d be on a time, and then he’d be the ace, and he’d have allies, teammates, and it’d be the best thing ever. Except now it wasn’t. Because he didn’t.
The man smiled again. He seemed to do that a lot. “What will you do? Switch to a different club? Or play with the girls?”
And it wasn’t that Shouyou had anything against the girls, but the thought of playing on a girls’ team reminded him of the name Tsubasa and the itchiness of dress skirts. It felt wrong. “Th- That’s a little… I-I’ll do it, even if I’m alone!”
“Oh?”
“I’ll become a “small giant”!”
“Eh? Become what?”
viii.
According to his mother, he was what you called “stubborn as a boar.” She said it was his dad’s genes, had to be, because she wouldn’t have made the mistake of passing them on if she was going to have to deal with them in the future. His father, on the other hand, may have found it funny to.
Shouyou found that he liked his Boar Genes a lot. They stopped him from moping around when he found out about the condition of the volleyball club and made him throw himself into practice even more.
It was a lot… funner than it probably should have been.
He practiced in the corner of the gymnasium against the wall while the girls used the court. When the school gym closed, he could be found off to the side of the sports grounds, working on receives in between getting hit by soccer balls. Even at lunch, he’d rope a classmate into tossing the ball to him in the hallway- he was energetic and obstinate, and through all the failures, each individual success made it more fun.
“It- It bounced straight up! Aachan, didya see?”
“Hey, isn’t that enough?” Aachan, his partner for the day, complained. “My arms hurt and the ball doesn’t go flying like I thought it would. I don’t wanna do this anymore!”
He clapped his hands together. “Please, just one more set!”
Aachan shifted the ball in his hands and pushed his glasses up with his forearm. He looked annoyed, but Shouyou knew that he wouldn’t be helping if he really hated it that much. “You already said “just one more set” a while ago! This is really the last one, got it?”
“Asazu!”
His classmates were always willing to help him, even if they whined a little. The only real downside was that a lot of them thought he was playing for the girls’ team, which he wasn’t, even if there is a gorgeous senpai there, shut up, that’s not it, I’m in the boys’ volleyball club!
The girls were nice to him, though, and let him use the court when they left to do strength conditioning. The only downside is that he never had anyone to toss to him. He sometimes asked Izumin, but he was in the basketball club and always nervous around his senpai- he always said no when Shouyou asked. Said it was impossible.
The word “impossible” made Shouyou’s heart thrum, made him want to run hundreds of kilometers, made him want to climb mountains. The word “impossible” was what made him stand on that court alone again and again and again, practice receives against the wall, spend his evenings jumping over railings to train his legs, pester his classmates to toss for him, just one more time, please, one more time.
“Stubborn as a boar.” His mother often shook her head and said. “Just like your father.”
ix.
He met Kageyama Tobio outside a bathroom right before his first match during his third year in middle school and learned several things about him instantaneously:
1. Kageyama Tobio had dark hair and blue eyes.
2. Kageyama Tobio was tall in away that Shouyou would never be.
3. Kageyama Tobio was a major fucking douche.
Okay, so maybe Kageyama Tobio defended him. Sort of. But he was totally about to tell those kids off before, too, anyway-
“Guys who can’t even manage their bodies shouldn’t say such self-important things,” said the bastard, ignoring Shouyou’s cry of “what’d you say?” “That’s why you get ridiculed. It’s only natural to be completely prepared for a match. Just what did you come here to do? “Make memories” or something?”
And let it be known that Hinata Shouyou could put up with- had put up with- a lot, but he’d never, ever stand for someone mocking someone else’s dream.
“I came here to win, of course!”
Kageyama Tobio turned back to look at him. His eyes were bored, but there was something under the surface that made Shouyou pause. He was suddenly reminded of the river near the woods in his town that always flooded when it rained, of the way it tore up the dirt and dislodged the stones around it, how it raged on for days, even when the rain stopped. “You’re saying that as if it’s extremely easy to do. You’re saying that, despite knowing that height is something essential to volleyball?”
Oh, hell. He played that card.
But, where any other person might have felt anger- a sort of, you don’t know what I’ve been through don’t talk to me as if you do I’ve worked so hard for this so so hard you’ll never understand it- Shouyou only felt calm. To him, the sky was blue and the grass was green. Kageyama Tobio was a bastard, a bonafide King of the Court, and Shouyou was going to dethrone him.
“It’s true that I’m not very tall. However!” Fingers curled into tight fists to keep the energy that was thrumming through his chest inside. He met Kageyama Tobio’s eyes and said, “I can jump!”
And he was going to keep jumping. He was going to jump until he won and wiped that stupid kingly expression right off of stupid Kageyama Tobio’s face.
x.
A whistle blew and Hinata Shouyou’s first game of his middle school career began.
xi.
“What have you been doing the past three years?”
He lost.
xii.
Shouyou spent his last year of middle school training like crazy. It didn’t matter who it was with, whether it was men or women or people in between, whether they were kids or old ladies or teenagers- he trained and trained and learned as much as he could from them. That was the important part, he found. Not sex or gender or age or height. It was learning.
“If you want to win and advance, try growing stronger!”
There wasn’t much he could say about Kageyama Tobio, having known him for only an hour, but he was a good motivator. Those tears of his had gotten their chance to fall proudly, and now Shouyou was going to stand twice as proud. He was going to get strong and jump even higher.
And this time he wouldn’t refuse the guidance of someone who knew better. He pushed aside thoughts of the name Tsubasa and bowed to the girls’ volleyball team and to the neighborhood mothers, because he knew from watching Kageyama Tobio that you couldn’t win volleyball alone. You could never do it alone.
It was funny, though. That entire year, not once did he think of dresses.
xiii.
Shouyou honestly had no idea how he got to this point. This point being standing next to Kageyama Tobio in a locker room, side-by-side, as Karasuno hopefuls.
Okay, maybe a slight idea. His year of training and studying (read: cramming at the last minute for the entrance exam) paid off and he got into Karasuno High- which, admittedly, wasn’t so hard for the average student, but for Shouyou, who preferred to badger his classmates for tosses rather than notes, it was quite a feat. His mother had even thrown him a small party when they’d gotten the acceptance letter.
After another break spent training, he’d jogged into the Karasuno gym on the first day of school to find someone practicing there. And. Well.
What happened next was a complete shitstorm no matter how you looked at it. After a long scolding for knocking off the vice principal’s wig, a very passionate exchange of words with Kageyama fucking Tobio, and a kick in the ass by his new scary senpai, Shouyou found his chances of actually playing volleyball hinging on a douchebag and a 3-on-3 practice match. Which wouldn’t have been so bad, except for the fact that the douchebag refused to toss to him.
So, here they were at 4 in the morning on their first day of unofficial (that is, unsanctioned) morning practice. Tanaka-senpai was luckily a nice guy with a thing for underdogs, because he unlocked the gym and the locker room for them with the promise that he’d be back later- at a more godly hour- to help them out.
Shouyou had no clue how they were supposed to practice together when Kageyama refused to set a ball in his direction, but he wasn’t adverse to extra strength training. Besides, when they were finally on the team, he’d play with that nice looking Suga-senpai instead. He’d probably toss to him.
He tugged off his school shirt- which, in hindsight, was dumb to wear when he was just going to change out of it, but if Kageyama’s lack of dress was any indication, he’d made the same mistake- and tossed it in a corner. When he shucked of his pants and did the same with them, he noticed that Kageyama fucking Tobio was staring at him.
Well, more specifically, at his chest.
Shouyou glanced down, for the first time remembering his binder. It had been something of a birthday present from his mother last year, something she thought he might like. He’d gotten questions about it when he came back from summer break and had to change for gym class, but once he explained that he just had to wear it, no one asked again.
To Shouyou, Kageyama Tobio’s stare had a sound. It sounded like the shrill whining of phones and a chorus of wrong wrong wrong names. It’d been five years since he’d been so uncomfortable in his own skin, and he wouldn’t stand for it.
He puffed his chest out. Loudly, he announced. “I’m a boy.”
Kageyama Tobio lifted his gaze from his chest and squinted at him like he was the dumbest person he’d ever met.
“Well, duh. This is the boys’ volleyball team.”
And, it seemed, that was that.
xiv.
Somewhere tucked between summer and fall, Shouyou’s heart sold an expanse of itself to Kageyama. Kageyama didn’t know of this transaction. Shouyou didn’t really know of it either.
Volleyball was the most important thing to Shouyou, aside from his family- it had been for years, and probably would be for years go come, if he and Kageyama’s ‘on top of the world’ agreement was to be trusted. Practice and games took up most of his time, playing video games and with Natsu took up the other bulk. However much his mother wished that schoolwork occupied a part, it was becoming apparent that Shouyou had a good chance of being scouted as a third year by some university, regardless of grades.
It was actually thinking about stuff like that that made Shouyou realize something was wrong. See, whenever he pictured the future, he slipped into a frame of mind that always included Kageyama in it.
In university, Kageyama was always in his lectures, falling asleep next to him and getting scolded by the teacher. When he imagined what his first apartment would look like, Kageyama was automatically his roommate, just around the corner, burning toast and being totally useless in the kitchen like the dumb only child he was. Volleyball-wise- this one was the kicker, the one that really flashed the warning signs- he could see himself spiking the final point in the Olympics, landing on unsteady feet in the middle of a roaring stadium, and when he turned to his left in awe, Kageyama was always there, amazement and happiness and adrenaline sketched on his face like incomplete renditions of emotion, until his expression softened into something warm that made Shouyou’s heart squeeze, that made him want to cry because, they did it, they finally-
He always stopped those delusions once they got to that point because he had a hunch that what came next was something he wouldn’t be able to un-picture. And that scared him.
The clear, stirring thought that Kageyama was beautiful came to Shouyou sometime in October. He didn’t know when, exactly, but he remembered noticing that Kageyama had long eyelashes that dipped towards his cheekbones, had blue, blue eyes that lit up and smiled even when his lips didn’t do the same, had strong legs that held him steady and strong arms that gave Shouyou the power to soar. Sure, he’d always known that Kageyama was attractive- the number of girls that had whispered about confessing to him was a clear indication- but he supposed he didn’t really apply the knowledge anywhere. When he finally did, it was like a blow. Kageyama was beautiful. He was the most beautiful person Shouyou had ever seen.
One day he let his brain run with the fantasy. In the middle of the Olympic stadium, Shouyou jumped on Kageyama and kissed him, kissed him amidst the confetti and the roaring of the crowd and the cheers of their teammates. Kissed him because what he had seen in Kageyama’s eyes- that soft emotion- had been love.
xv.
Shouyou’s mother kept all the pictures of him as a little boy in an album. Sometimes she would leaf through it in that slow, nostalgic way parents always did and he’d peak over her shoulder to look at it. It was an old album, one that had been put together back when he still wore those torn up dresses, but apparently his mother had gone back into it afterwards and crossed out the name ‘Tsubasa’ each time it was mentioned to read ‘Shouyou’ instead.
He had a good mom.
That very same photo album was now in Kageyama’s lap, and his mother was looking over his shoulder while Shouyou busied himself with trying to sink into the couch cushions. Evidently, it wasn’t really working out.
“Oh, and this is Shouyou when he was just three- he really didn’t like his outfit that day and spilled ice cream all over it on purpose. It took me three hours to wash it out- by hand, too, that rotten boy-”
That startled a snort out of Kageyama, who looked between Shouyou and the book and pointed and laughed.
“Oi, shut up, idiot Kageyama-”
“Shouyou, be kind to our guest!”
“But our guest is being a jerk, Mom!”
“Well, I think that Tobio-kun is a very well-mannered young man. It’d do well for you to learn from him.” As Shouyou gaped at her, she straightened and made for the kitchen. “I’ll get us all tea.”
Kageyama continued to page through the album, snickering to himself and glancing at Shouyou sometimes. He didn’t linger too long on any one picture, so he finished long before his mother returned with the tea. When he closed it, he looked up.
“You looked weird.” Kageyama said thoughtfully, palms gliding over the back cover. He didn’t quite meet Shouyou’s eyes. “You’re better like this.”
And something warm tickled in his stomach because maybe he was a little in love with this stupid, beautiful boy and maybe that was okay.
He smiled the biggest, proudest smile. “That’s what I’ve been saying this whole time!”