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A generation of monsters, they call them.
Tendou looks at Ushijima and thinks that he’d make a beautiful monster. Olive hair, muscled frame, and eyes of the same shade, to match with brute force, an otherworldly form, his inevitability. It’s no wonder then, that on the last day of the summer interhigh, Sakusa Kiyoomi walks up to Ushijima with a letter in his hands.
The entire team erupts into chaos. Semi and Kawanishi peer over the captain’s shoulder, while Shirabu looks thoroughly disturbed. There’s also Goshiki, who’s trying very hard to appear uninterested and failing terribly at it. Tendou decides to look amused, even though he’s feeling anything but.
The envelope is crisp and clean, a pristine white, signed off with Sakusa’s elegant black penmanship. Tendou’s heart ricochets around his chest, swelling with an indiscernible current. It effervesces through his bloodstream, spreading convulsions to his fingertips. He doesn’t know what to make of it.
“Dear Wakatoshi,” Semi reads out from where he’s looking over Ushijima’s shoulder, “We have seen each other in competitions and training camps. I have admired you for a long time.”
Growing up, the other kids had called Tendou a monster too. The kind that lurks under your bed, in the shadows—ugly, sinister, and undesirable. When Tendou looks in the mirror, he sees his gangly limbs, bending and contorting into disfigured shapes. The stunning red of his hair, which should fall gracefully around his head, spikes up haphazardly instead.
But Tendou sees the things on the inside too—thoughts strung together, manifested into speech and song, only to unravel like eccentricities in other people’s ears. Tendou, you’re so strange. Tendou, you’re a monster.
“You’ve once told me that we’re the lucky ones. I think about it a lot, up till this day. Ooh. ”
“You’re being very rude, Semi-san,” chides Shirabu.
Once, Tendou learnt from Ushijima that Sakusa had done a thousand receiving drills. He thinks of the way Ushijima sprints ahead of everyone else during team runs, of the way he takes it upon himself to do a hundred serves, a hundred spikes, after each and every gruelling practice. And then, a singular, devastating piece of knowledge settles itself into the crevices of Tendou’s brain: Ushijima and Sakusa are the same .
“Tokyo and Miyagi are four hundred kilometres apart but I would like to get to know you better. There’s a specialty store near Itachiyama that sells the best umeboshi onigiri. Otherwise, I’ve always wanted to taste the zunda sweets of Miyagi. Here’s my number— ow! ” Shirabu smacks Semi on the head, team hierarchy be damned.
Tendou thinks that Sakusa Kiyoomi could be a beautiful monster too. Dark eyes, chiseled face, embellished with beauty marks, framed by luscious black curls. His flexible wrists, which have received Ushijima’s spikes one too many times, made his eyes light up.
“Itachiyama’s Sakusa Kiyoomi, huh. He’s hot,” quips Soekawa. Ohira eyes Tendou with what looks like concern and Tendou’s heart stutters even more rapidly. He still doesn’t know what to make of it. So instead, his body moves quicker than his mind does—arms outstretched in dramatics, the corners of his lips pulling up into a sardonic grin, as he sings, “ Young love, young love, Wakatoshi-kun. Don’t be a heartbreaker, you should most definitely go to see him.”
Ushijima pauses in his step and speaks for the first time since he’d opened the letter, “Tendou, do you really think so?”
There’s a lump in Tendou’s throat. He tries to swallow around it, but it wouldn’t go down.
—
Tendou has imagined the texture of Ushijima’s lips, wondered about the salt on his neck, what it would taste like. The dip of his clavicle, skin stretched taut over it, if it would give to press. He has imagined Ushijima tough and ragged as stone, soft and plush like the insides of a fruit. But in his visions, the hands that have pushed into Ushijima’s skin were always shapeless, belonging to faceless figures.
Now, he sees Sakusa in all of them. A pair of beautiful monsters, brushing skin and holding hands and connecting lips. It makes complete sense to Tendou.
“You should be the one to go to Tokyo, Wakatoshi-kun,” he drawls. Ushijima still has Tendou’s Jump magazine in his hands but instead of the latest chapter of One Piece, he has his eyes fixated on the salon advertisement, of all things.
“Why? Sakusa is the one who asked me out.”
“How foolish, Wakatoshi-kun. You’re the senpai . Imagine if a second year from Tokyo asked Goshiki out and made our poor kouhai travel all the way there! Heartbreaking, don’t you think?”
“Goshiki shouldn’t go. The time travelling could be spent on practice,” Ushijima deadpans. It is such a Wakatoshi thing to say, and Tendou wonders how the solidity of his voice could settle so softly inside his chest, warm and abstract around the edges.
“Well, Wakatoshi-kun. You asked me if I really think you should go see that Itachiyama boy and I’m telling you, yes, you should.”
Ushijima finally puts the magazine down. Tendou briefly wonders if the other is having thoughts about doing his hair. It’s a detail he holds firmly to his chest, subconscious promises of unpacking for later, like all the other facts he has learned about Ushijima Wakatoshi along the years.
“Why, Tendou?”
“What a simple question to answer, Wakatoshi-kun!” Tendou clasps his hands together, fingers fluttering from an unidentifiable emotion, something between excitement and dread. “He’s crazy as you are about volleyball, Wakatoshi. Miracle boy one and miracle boy two! And Jin-kun is right, he is handsome. Two handsome boys, Wakatoshi, always make for good news.”
“You think I’m handsome?” asks Ushijima. Tendou coughs, a light flush searing across his cheeks. “A lot of people do, Wakatoshi-kun! Have you seen the amount of chocolates and letters you receive on Valentine’s day?”
“I never know what to do with them. Chocolates are not good for my diet.”
Tendou thinks of glittery, heart-shaped cards, decorated in shades of red and pink, the colours of love. He thinks of chocolates in every flavour—white, milk, dark, accented by citrus, strawberries, even sweet potato sometimes. He exhales a sigh. “You give them all to me, Wakatoshi-kun.”
“You like chocolates, Tendou,” Ushijima says like he’s stating a fact, plain and simple. It makes Tendou’s heart do a little somersault in his chest. There’s a beat of silence and then, Ushijima asks again, “Do you really think it’s a good choice for me?”
“I think he’s the best for you, Wakatoshi-kun,” Tendou answers with so much finality, because he genuinely believes in them. Two beautiful monsters. It’s a conviction that runs deep into his bones.
—
The letter from Sakusa sparks off discussions about love and relationships amongst the team. It’s amusing, the way Goshiki fights to list all of the confessions he’s ever received through middle school, and then some, here at Shiratorizawa. Like love is something he could be an ace at, too, another rally he doesn’t want to lose to the inevitability of Ushijima. Like love is a competition, all the beautiful people coming together to create something beautiful of their own. Something more beautiful than the other, the other, and the other. It dawns upon Tendou once more, that love only has a place for beautiful people. That if this thought is true, then maybe he isn’t capable of love at all.
“I had a thing with a girl once. But she moved up to the city and we haven’t spoken since,” mentions Yamagata.
“I used to have a crush on my childhood friend. Sometimes, I think I won’t ever know how to stop liking them,” adds Yunohama.
“That’s very poetic,” teases Semi.
There’s a furrow in Goshiki’s brows as he huffs out a breath, displeased about something that’s beyond his seniors’ understanding, and also, probably very irrational. “What about you, Tendou-san? Have you ever been in love?”
Tendou stretches out his arms, making a big circle. His fingertips shake and graze the air, as if the motion could spill all his sentiments from them, draining from his skin into the real world, the one with all the other beautiful people in it, where they belong.
“Love is beyond me, Tsutomu,” he answers, tapping a crooked finger on the bridge of his kouhai’s nose, who scrunches it in response, “I know no such paradise.”
Because if Tendou had any love left inside of him, he would cleave his heart in two, and wish it all upon Ushijima and Sakusa. Together, their beauty would transcend everything and everyone else—mortal beings, ugly monsters. Himself.
Later, Shirabu tugs at the hem of Tendou’s shirt, eyes pointedly looking elsewhere, like it’s taking everything out of him to say something nice. Still, he tells him, “Tendou-san, you deserve to be happy too.”
—
Tendou helps Ushijima pick out an outfit the day he travels down to Tokyo to meet Sakusa Kiyoomi. He’s never been good with dressing for himself, always opting for hoodies and sweaters to hide the gangliness of his limbs. The scrawny frame, despite his height. With Ushijima, it’s easier. You can’t hide the ugliness of a person with beautiful clothing, but you can accentuate a beautiful person with it. For his best friend, Tendou chooses a white turtleneck that stretches nicely over his chest, and layers it with a green parka jacket, its colour so close to the olive shade of his eyes. Finishes the outfit with cuffed jeans and sneakers, because Ushijima doesn’t own any dress shoes.
“There, there, Wakatoshi-kun. Now go out there and steal Sakusa Kiyoomi’s heart.”
He hands him a paper bag with zunda sweets. The entire team had pooled their money together to buy these. “He mentioned that he wanted to try these. You bring them to him, Wakatoshi-kun.”
As an afterthought, Tendou adds, “Also, remember to order the umeboshi onigiri! Umeboshi is his favourite food, he said it in Volleyball Monthly.”
“I want to eat the one with beef though.”
Tendou barks out a laugh. It’s a cracked sound. Once he starts, he doesn’t stop, and there are tears filling up in the corners of his eyes. He blames it all on the effortless ways Ushijima is being funny.
“You can order both , Wakatoshi-kun! God!”
—
Shirabu had tugged at the hem of Tendou’s shirt and said, “Tendou-san, you deserve to be happy too.”
Tendou looked at his teammates around him, people whom he had trained and played and laughed with for close to three years. Beautiful monsters who had taken him as their own. And he thought, what more could he ask for? What more could he deserve?
He threw an arm around Goshiki, squeezing him close, their cheeks pressed to each other, against his junior’s protests. “I am happy, Kenjirou-kun.”
The words he had managed to swallow, the lump he could not dislodge.
—
There’s a knock on his door. Tendou opens it and finds Ushijima standing there, hair slightly disheveled from the long journey home.
“Did I disturb you?” Ushijima asks. Curt, polite, and thoughtful. Always thoughtful. Tendou shoots pointy fingers towards the manga on his table. “Not everybody sleeps at appropriate hours like you, Wakatoshi-kun! I was just rereading the final volume of Dragonball.”
Ushijima takes off his jacket and drapes it over the bed stand. There’s a paper bag in his hands.
“How was it, Wakatoshi-kun?” Tendou asks, voice shivery with that indiscernible sentiment again.
“I ordered one umeboshi and one beef, just like you said. They were very good.”
“Details, details , Wakatoshi-kun!” he sing-songs, ignoring the pitter-patter of his heart.
“I gave Sakusa the zunda sweets. He thanked me for them, told me I was strong. I thanked him and told him he was strong too. He said he noticed that I fold my handkerchief with the damp side in.”
Tendou catalogues that detail for later. “What about the hand-holding!” Clasps his hands. “The hugging!” Raises them to the air. “The kissing!” Purses his lips. Dramatics.
Ushijima stays quiet for a long while before saying, “It’s late, Tendou.” Then he takes out a package from the paper bag, all gleaming black and gold trimmings, glossy under the fluorescents of Tendou’s room. “These are chocolate truffles. Sakusa said you could only get them in Tokyo. They’re for you.”
Tendou’s breath hitches in his throat. “Why?” he asks.
“Because you like chocolates,” Ushijima simply replies, like he had done the other day. He places the box on Tendou’s table, next to the comic, and turns for the door.
Something dangerous fills Tendou’s chest. Something new and foreign, fluttery on the edges. He represses it, shaking his fingers at the air again, hoping it would seep out through his skin. The image of Sakusa pressing his hands into Ushijima floods his brain. But here, Ushijima is standing right before Tendou too, and he could lean in, meet skin with lips. Blasphemous, repulsive. He retracts from the thought before it could grow even bigger, impossibly bigger.
“How did you- how did you feel about him, Wakatoshi-kun?” Because if hope was what filled Tendou’s chest, he would pin it all on them, this pair of beautiful monsters.
“I feel nothing,” Ushijima admits, stopping in his tracks.
Tendou could take a step forward, sink his hands into epidermis. But even now, the shapeless figure in his head alternates between Sakusa and turning up without a face. Even now, his ugliness feels so stark against Ushijima’s beauty.
“Then why did you go?” he croaks out. And Ushijima turns around, eyes resolute. Their fieriness makes Tendou shiver.
“Because you said it was good for me.”
When Tendou first met Ushijima, he’d expected to be met with some resistance. Here had been a volleyball prodigy, one whom people might have looked towards with fear, but even so, there was always a reverence behind it. Meanwhile, the fear directed towards Tendou was pure, transparent, born out of monsters and demons that existed in nightmares. Tendou would laugh, and they’d see the fangs baring behind his teeth. Tendou would go up for a block, and they’d run for their lives. Chilling, unnerving. Like this, he decided that beautiful monsters like Ushijima who had only known love all his life, could never possibly learn to like someone such as Tendou.
But fifteen year old Ushijima had tapped Tendou on the shoulder, and asked, could you practise spikes with me?
Ushijima speaks again, “Why don’t you ever ask how I feel about you?”
Tendou is made hyper aware of the lump in his throat. He stammers around it, “Y-You’re my best friend, Wakatoshi-kun.”
Ushijima takes one step closer and Tendou wants to scream that you don’t walk towards monsters. You run from them.
“That’s what I am to you. What about you, to me?”
Another step. Tendou sees the ruptured image of Ushijima and Sakusa, and tries to replace the faceless figure with somebody else. That pretty setter from Seijoh or Inarizaki’s number four. It could be anyone else, anyone but—
Ushijima curls his hand around Tendou’s wrist, steady and warm. So many times he has imagined this sensation, and never would have thought that it’d be on his own skin, in real time.
“You’re shaking,” says Ushijima and Tendou looks down at his fingers, belatedly watching them quiver. He wishes it would stop.
Tendou bites down on his lip, scanning through the archive of his mind, in hopes that he could pull something—anything, out to say. To cut this moment, dispel the hope that blooms dangerously in his chest, bubbling up his throat. But all he can focus on is the heat of Ushijima’s skin, seared into his wrist. It burns and burns.
After what feels like forever, Tendou admits, “I’m not good enough for you, Wakatoshi-kun. People like you should be with people like Sakusa Kiyoomi.”
“Ask me, Tendou. What I feel about you,” Ushijima commands, quiet but authoritative, as if they’re on the court. Another shiver runs through Tendou’s skin.
“What do you feel about me, Wakatoshi-kun?”
Ushijima pauses for a second, and then exhales a breath. It grazes the skin under Tendou’s nose.
“I like you, Tendou. More than as a friend.” Tendou is struck once again at how the firmness of his best friend’s voice eases so gently into his chest.
In an alternate universe, Tendou would be elated, paste on his widest grin, pearly whites in full show. Picture perfect, like the models he sees on advertisements, like Ushijima when he smiles. Not the crooked one he usually has on, what makes people turn away from. In an alternate universe, Tendou is beautiful, too. But in this universe, he looks in the mirror, feels and hears the thoughts ricocheting around his head, and thinks—every ugly, monstrous thing the others have said about him is true. He’s grown into his skin, he has to live with this his entire life.
So, in this universe, Tendou says, “A beautiful monster like you, Wakatoshi-kun, shouldn’t be with an ugly one like me.”
Ushijima drops Tendou’s hand and he instantly mourns the loss of contact, but fingers come up again, cupping Tendou’s face, brushing across the plane of his cheek. “My father once said that beauty is in the eye of the beholder.”
Tendou thinks of Ushijima’s olive hair, muscled frame, eyes of the same shade. His power, his form, his inevitability. And then he thinks of Ushijima zeroing in on salon advertisements amidst full pages of vibrant manga panels. He thinks of Ushijima being teased for having the emotional capacity of a piece of cardboard. He thinks of Ushijima handing him chocolates, and thinks that all these little bits make him just as, if not, even more beautiful.
The figure in his visions finally takes shape—gangly limbs, bending and distorting. A crown of red hair, spiking up haphazardly. Tendou sees himself, sees his crooked fingers pressing into Ushijima’s skin. In a world full of beautiful people, of beautiful monsters, Tendou finds his face next to Ushijima Wakatoshi.
Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Tendou understands now, that his spindly frame, his misshapen hair, his thoughts and speeches and mannerisms—these are the bits that Ushijima finds beauty in, strange as it is. They’re both really strange people, he decides. Strange, beautiful monsters.
“I’ll take some time to believe that,” Tendou confesses, because you can’t unlearn everything you’ve known and believed about yourself, everything others have believed about you, overnight, “but until then, can you kiss me, Wakatoshi-kun?”
“So does that mean you like me too?” Ushijima asks, always so straight to the point. It makes Tendou cackle. “The lines, Wakatoshi-kun! Learn to read between the lines!”
Ushijima leans in, crashing his lips against Tendou’s, and for a brief moment, amidst the salt, the heat, and the moisture, Tendou believes he can be beautiful too.