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Kageyama Tobio’s birth was a rather uneventful affair. It was during a cold December morning and when Tomiko’s water broke, she didn’t panic like most first time mothers would've. Instead, she waddled to the car while calling out for her husband to take the bag they had prepared days beforehand so they could just head on over to the hospital. The rest was pretty smooth sailing.
When she held Tobio for the first time in her arms, she felt nothing but love, and promised that she would do everything it took to protect him.
Tobio reached all of his growth milestones at a normal rate. While she certainly adored when little Tobio babbled his first “ma-ma!” or tumbled over after trying to walk on his own for the first time, there wasn’t anything particularly extraordinary about it from an outsider’s point of view. Every mother went through that.
As a child, Tobio liked ordinary things. He liked action figures, running around in the park, and being lifted onto his father’s shoulders. When the amount of things he liked began to decrease, Tomiko didn’t think too hard about it because Tobio was a growing boy, and growing boys all learned to develop their own interests.
When he was in first grade, Tobio ran up to her while she was doing the laundry and claimed that he wanted to play volleyball. Volleyball was somewhat unexpected, but only because while other kids his age liked sports such as baseball or soccer, Tobio chose volleyball. Tomiko didn’t really know where it came from; her husband was rarely home due to business trips and Tomiko herself didn’t watch any particular sport. When she asked her son, he looked up at her with those big blue eyes and began to babble something about seeing some older kids play it and how cool they were and how everything about it was just really cool. Tomiko didn’t really get it—she supposed that was part of being a mother and someone without athletic ability—but she liked the bright glow that seemed to surround Tobio whenever he talked about volleyball, so she gave in.
On Tobio’s seventh birthday, she and her husband (whose initial response to Tobio’s passion was at least it’s a sport) gave him a volleyball, and she had no regrets about it. She had never seen Tobio so happy.
The first time Tomiko saw Tobio play, he was eight-years-old and it was a friendly game with the neighborhood kids at the park near their house. Even then she knew that there was something amazing about her boy and volleyball, but she dismissed it as rose-tinted parenting glasses. After all, what mother didn’t see their child as special?
It was only when she was watching him another time that a spectator (who happened to be a volleyball coach) confirmed her initial thoughts—his exact words after she said Tobio was her son were, “your boy is a genius.”
Upon learning what a genius was, Tobio was nothing but curious and excited.
Instead, the statement made her uneasy. Most mothers would have been ecstatic to have their son called a genius, but Kageyama Tomiko wasn’t. In fact, it probably made her more upset than it should have for any parent. To her, Tobio wasn’t a genius. Tobio was just Tobio.
( It turned out her gut feeling was right, and Tobio never came home talking about people at school, save for some stories about a classmate or teammate. Those were rare and few, and Tobio never mentioned someone more than once.
Tobio didn’t really understand it and therefore didn’t care as much as he should have, as young and passionate about volleyball as he was. One of Tobio’s shortcomings was that he was always shortsighted when it came to things he cared for, and he was so stubborn about volleyball that Tomiko could do nothing but watch. )
One day, Tobio returned from middle school with a wide-eyed expression and barely sealed lips like he had heard some very important secret and wanted so badly to share it. Tomiko was all ears, turning to her boy with a smile on her lips as he went on and on about an “Oikawa-san” who was an “amazing setter, the best he’d ever seen!” She didn’t really know what a setter was—volleyball terms always went over her head because Tobio was usually so caught up in talking that he never explained—but this was the first time that she had ever heard him speak so passionately about someone else, and she allowed herself some hope that Tobio had finally found a friend.
But the more she heard about this Oikawa-san, the more she disliked him.
Tobio didn’t really seem to care much for the constant rejections for help from Oikawa-san, but she knew it was because he was so focused on trying to improve that he didn’t really care what he had to go through to achieve it (though he did mention one or twice that Oikawa-san’s personality was ‘terrible’). Tomiko’s perspective was not as fogged or narrow as her son’s and once she received more background information about Oikawa-san, she understood why he was so intent on keeping Tobio at a distance.
It was because Kageyama Tobio was a genius.
She knew this was one of the worst things that could happen to Tobio. She knew it when her stomach flipped after talking to that coach at the park when Tobio was in elementary school. She knew, even back then, that being a genius would do more harm than good and that Tobio had been (still was) too naïve to understand it. In the back of her mind, she hoped he never would.
The most painful part of Tomiko’s life began one year later, when Tobio abruptly went from perpetually bright-eyed to forever scowling.
Tobio didn’t speak much these days (which was fine, she repeatedly told herself), but it wasn’t as if she was completely clueless. It had begun sometime in the new school year, after Oikawa-san graduated and Tobio became the new 'setter' for Kitagawa Daiichi. He stopped talking to her—he stopped talking in general, really. His conversational skills were not the greatest, but he would always try at home whenever Tomiko asked. Now, whenever Tomiko called out for him or asked him about his day, he would always mumble something or ignore her all together before heading to his room.
She knew Tobio well enough to say that it was so much more than just hormones, even if her husband had blamed it on “a kid growing up” when she voiced the concern. Tobio woke up earlier and came home later than he did during his first year, and his hands were littered with more calluses and bruises than she'd seen before.
One day, while she was cleaning the house, she found their medicine drawer empty of band-aids and painkillers.
After that, Tobio became significantly more unfriendly. He had always been tall, but that didn’t matter too much before; now that it was paired with mean eyes and a short temper, Tomiko could see why others were scared to approach Tobio.
She watched him throughout the entirety of his first tournament as a ‘starting player’ as Tobio put it once, and she was torn between wanting to cheer for him and wince. It wasn’t that Tobio was playing badly—not at all, because his form was absolutely stunning and had everyone whispering to each other in awe—but because she took a look at his teammates and saw the way they walked around Tobio instead of to him.
Whenever Tobio barked an order, they took it without looking at him. Whenever Tobio cussed and stomped his foot after losing a point, the closest teammate stayed half a meter away. It was only when Tobio wasn’t facing their general reaction that they glanced at him before muttering something to one another, and she could imagine the hateful words coming out of their mouth—things like that genius is annoying or what an arrogant prick.
Only when she saw Kitagawa Daiichi walk out did she realize that Tobio was trailing significantly behind with unmistakable anger on his features, and that her worst fear had become reality.
His temper inevitably worsened following the loss, and that was the first time Tobio and his father had really argued. Tomiko had stood on the sidelines, staring on ahead without knowing what to do as the two screamed obscenities at each other in endless tirades of “schoolwork coming first” versus “you don’t understand what volleyball means."
It was also the first time that Tomiko seriously fought with her husband after Tobio was born.
Of course she wanted Tobio to do well in school. Of course she wanted a bright future for him. Of course she was worried about how obsessed Tobio was with ‘that damn sport,’ but she was his mother and she knew more than anyone that it was impossible to separate Tobio from volleyball. Even if they found a way, she couldn’t do it—not when she knew that it would practically kill Tobio.
But she didn’t know what to say when her husband said this could’ve been the worst thing to happen their son. She stood there shaking with her mouth open to yell words back, only to close it after nothing came out for a few seconds. She thought of Tobio when he was a gurgling baby, when he was a young boy excited by the prospect of zoo trips and ice cream, when he was always going on and on about a TV show he watched while she chopped vegetables in the kitchen. When he was happy.
That night, she went to bed alone and quietly wept.
She didn’t know how to help him. It was every parent’s wish to help their child whenever they could, but Tobio had grown up to the point where he could block her out without doing so physically. She couldn’t fix him either, no matter how much she pried and prodded, because he didn’t want to be fixed. She knew he could see it, his descent into isolation, but she hated knowing that he would stay lost without figuring out what to do about it because the only path he knew was volleyball.
In Tobio’s third year of middle school, Tomiko made frequent trips to the library and used the internet more often. The books about volleyball were stacking up on her bedside table and her bookmarks list was filled up to the brim with volleyball videos. Sometimes, she even snuck into Tobio’s room to take a magazine or two while he was out.
While Kageyama Tobio was a genius, Kageyama Tomiko was not. She found it difficult to wrap her head around everything she was trying to learn, unlike Tobio who picked it up so fast it was like he had always been playing volleyball. Even when she did learn, asking him specific questions like what do middle blockers do, Tobio-chan earned her a flinch or a glare, so she stopped touching on the subject.
She really didn’t know how to help him. She was his mother, but she could only watch how being a genius destroyed Tobio—and it was probably that helplessness which hurt the most.
When high school began for Tobio, Tomiko kept her expectations to a minimum. His last year of middle school had taken such a toll on the boy that she deemed that period of time his worst so far, and she could only wonder if it would get any deeper. The only good thing, she supposed, was that Tobio never ended up losing his fervor for volleyball despite all the hardships.
She was so genuinely surprised when one day, he slammed the door open and started ranting about some ‘damn short, orange-haired dumbass’ that she nearly spilled some water. It was the first time in a while that she had heard him talk so strongly about someone when his last few years were marked by his silences, but she couldn’t let herself get her hopes up—after all, this new person could very well turn out to be another ‘Oikawa-san.’ After the next two or three impassioned speeches about how annoying this orange-haired fellow was, she couldn’t help the good feeling that was beginning to grow about Karasuno.
Her patience was rewarded when a few weeks later, she overheard Tobio actually having a conversation with someone on the phone as she passed his room. Then she witnessed him texting someone at the dinner table and when she pointed it out, she received a mumbled apology and red cheeks. She saw more calluses and bruises on his hands, but not the same tense air that he carried back in middle school. Somehow, it seemed like a weight had been pulled off his shoulders and he was able to finally breathe.
( She also let out the breath that she had been holding for so long. )
There was a small part of her that felt bitter and useless for not being the one able to help Tobio, but she was more relieved than anything.
For once, it didn’t seem like Kageyama Tobio was “a genius.” He was finally just Kageyama Tobio, the baby who had cried in her arms the day he was born, the child who had always asked his father for rides on his shoulders, the boy who had bright eyes whenever he talked about volleyball.
He was finally just Kageyama Tobio.