Chapter Text
Akaashi stared at his mother, Gina, with a carefully-cultivated lack of expression. However, his facial expression had very little in common with the volcano of dread about to explode inside his gut. Up until that moment, the idea of his grandparents’ anniversary party hadn’t frightened him at all; in fact, he had looked forward to seeing Nona Alessandra.
But the instruction of ‘bring your girlfriend’ made him want to change his name and leave the country. He had been subjected to his nosy relatives’ attempts at matchmaking during various family functions since he was twelve, and it got more embarrassing every time.
“Mom, I think we need to talk about something,” Akaashi started warily, watching intently for any sign of suspicion or disgust. When he found nothing but curiosity, he added, “And you might want to sit down for this.”
Guiding his mother to the kotatsu, Akaashi fluffed up one of the floor cushions and offered it before sitting cross-legged facing her. This was a conversation he had planned in his head for the past two years, ever since he had counted himself definitively certain of his sexuality, but the idea of saying out loud was a far different form of reality than self-clarity.
“Um, this is really difficult to say and will probably shock you, so please let me finish before saying anything. Okay?” When Gina nodded, he took a deep breath and closed his eyes. He reached out and covered one of her hands with his slightly larger one and said, “Mom, I like girls fine, but I don’t have or want a girlfriend because I like boys.”
Gina’s brow scrunched as she chewed her bottom lip. After a solid minute of silence that made Akaashi want to set himself on fire, she asked hesitantly, “Are you saying you don’t want to date anyone because you want to hang out with your friends, or are you saying that you don’t want to date girls because you’d rather date a guy?”
Akaashi blinked rapidly, unsure how he had erred in his admission. He had avoided using the ‘g’ word because he wasn’t sure how she — or the rest of his family, for that matter — felt about the issue. However, that left a question he had not planned on answering. It wasn’t even that he didn’t know the answer; he just didn’t know what to say to her. Or to anyone.
“I’m gay, mother,” he finally said, opting for bluntness rather than obfuscation. “I can’t bring a girlfriend to Ojiisan’s and Nona’s party because I don’t and won’t ever have one. If I bring a date, that person will most likely be a male I am sexually and romantically attracted to. Please let me know if this is a problem so I can adjust my RSVP accordingly.”
It was Gina’s turn to gape at her son. Akaashi felt oddly light after getting all of that out at once, but the prolonged attention and lack of response made him wish he could rewind the conversation and bribe a girl from school to be his fake girlfriend for an evening. Ten-thousand yen and doing someone else’s homework for a month probably could have adequately bought him out of this situation, but that was all moot now.
“Please, say something,” Akaashi murmured, looking pointedly away from his mother’s face. He wasn’t sure he could deal with any further explanation or, worse, the possibility of her disgust.
He really wasn’t expecting a smack to the side of his head. Jerking his gaze back towards Gina, Akaashi was not sure how to interpret her lazy half-smile. “Boys are so stupid sometimes,” she sighed before swatting Akaashi again. “I expected you to know better than that, Keiji.”
“Ossu,” he muttered before hugging his knees. He was pretty sure he wanted to melt through the floorboards and into the earth’s molten core. The thing he had feared the most was rejection, yet he was fairly certain at that moment that it would have been preferable to this strange derision.
But Gina’s hands tugged his chin upwards so he could see her . . . grin? “So, who’s the lucky guy, then?”
Akaashi could almost see black spots from the breath lodged in his chest that he hadn’t been aware of holding until right then. Exhaling heavily and with immeasurable relief, he said, “No one, Mom. I’m just waiting for the right one before I out myself at school.”
Gina nodded at this. “That’s probably best. High school can be rough for people who are different. Does anyone on the team know?”
Shaking his head, Akaashi replied, “No. I don’t want them feeling weird changing around me. I don’t think they would, but you never know.”
“How about your friends?”
At this, Akaashi gulped. He didn’t know how to answer without earning some sort of pitying response from his mother. How was he supposed to tell her that the guys on the volleyball team were basically his only friends? It wasn’t that he was disliked at school; inversely, girls flirted with him a lot despite his utter lack of participation in the practice.
If he were to put it simply, he hung around only with his teammates because they never pressured him into their discussions about girls or cars or whatever filthy hentai one of them had stumbled upon recently.
“No,” he answers vaguely. “No one knows except you.”
Gina shook her head at this. “You need to find someone to share your feelings with, Keiji. By all means, be careful about who you pick, but you can’t keep stuff like this to yourself too long or you’ll never be able to tell anyone without giving me the face you just did a few minutes ago.”
Akaashi ducked into his shoulders as his cheeks colored. “I guess that didn’t come out very well, did it?”
Ruffling his hair, Gina chuckled. “Not so much. You were a little direct there at the end, and not direct enough in the beginning. What you need is practice.” Her eyes lit up with an idea Akaashi was sure he wouldn’t like. “We could always road test it on my family.”
Shaking his head, Akaashi said, “No, Mom. No. That is a terrible idea.”
But the sparkle in her eyes couldn’t be stopped. “You could find someone to bring as your boyfriend, and you could practice introducing him until it’s just another casual thing like ‘my shoes are white’ and ‘the sky is blue.’”
Akaashi narrowed his eyes. “You do know I have to see them all for the rest of my life, right?”
“Are you planning on staying closeted that long?”
Her words burned away a lot of Akaashi’s resolve. As much as it felt devious to pretend he had a boyfriend around his family, the idea of spending the rest of his life pretending he was straight left a rotten taste in his mouth. It smacked of being the worse lie by far. And she was right; they would find out eventually.
Gina grasped Akaashi’s shoulder and gave it a gentle squeeze. “You don’t have to do anything you don’t want to, but if you do this and it goes wrong, I will send your regrets to any family function you don’t want to attend without question. You could go the rest of your life without seeing any of them again, and I’ll always support you.”
At this, the idea of finally being out began to take shape as a reality rather than a far-off fantasy. It might have been an utterly mad idea, but Akaashi figured that it had to happen at some point and he had at least one person on his side.
“Okay, I’ll do it,” Akaashi said finally with a hesitant smile. “I’ll find someone to bring, and we can just get this over with.” She beamed at him, and her smile only grew wider when he asked, “Does that mean I have to tell Dad?”
“Leave him to me.” Gina shot to her feet and dragged him with her. “Now, don’t you have a boyfriend to shop for?”
This was a terrible idea. Awful. Absolutely, undeniably ill-advised. Foolishness.
Akaashi had long run out of words in Japanese for the utter lunacy of this plan he had hatched with his mother, which led him to be suitably impressed by the number of similar words his Japanese-English dictionary turned up. Then again, any language with over a million words had to have a flotilla of words to describe how dumb something was, if only as a form of irony.
In short, he had eyeballed every guy at Fukurodani Academy not on the volleyball team as a prospective boyfriend and had come away with a sense of dread rather than resolve. The truth was that he had attended this school for a year and a half and knew most of the student body by name; that being said, that was about all he knew about his classmates.
The realization began to sink in that he would eventually have to consider asking one of his teammates. They were the ones who knew him the best, about whom he cared the most, and the ones least likely to reject or spurn him.
Practice that day was weird.
He dismissed the idea of asking any of the first or second years. As the vice-captain, he could not ask any of them to do him a favor like this when he outranked them on the team. It seemed like an abuse of his status. That left the third years.
Sarukui-san was a decent possibility, as he seemed to have a smile pasted on his face no matter what he did. Konoha-san was out mainly due to his utter lack of ability to take things seriously outside of volleyball. Washio-san would be a last ditch effort because he just looked angry all the time and didn’t seem like faking being in love with Akaashi would change that. Komi-san wasn’t a terrible option, as his boisterous nature would probably attract the Italian half of his family and earn him a place in their hearts. They might even ignore Akaashi entirely.
There was also Bokuto-san. If Akaashi had to assign the title of best friend to anyone, it would be his moody ace and team captain. He could not imagine Bokuto being the type of person to judge him based on his sexuality, but one could never know when it came to being around a guy who has seen one naked more than once.
But this was the relationship he worried about ruining the most. Not only did the team rely on a steady camaraderie between its captains, Akaashi could not imagine a day without seeing Bokuto smiling at him, begging him for extra practice, inquiring after his day, asking for calculus help. Always something. Bokuto always seemed excited to see him, and whether or not he wanted to admit it, Akaashi felt the same (if in a less animated fashion).
Which was exactly why Bokuto should have been the last person Akaashi asked. And it was, of course, the reason why he was tucking a typed note into Bokuto’s shoe locker the next day, asking to meet him in the park twenty minutes after practice was scheduled to end. No signature, no handwriting to give him away. Just a vague hope that Bokuto might actually consider not taking an extra two hours of spiking practice for once.
Washio actually noticed the plain white paper before Bokuto did. Plucking it out of the crevice it had occupied, he unfolded it and said, “Oi, Bokuto! You got another one.”
Akaashi tensed beside Bokuto, who was obliviously playing Words With Friends on his phone while walking. “Huh?” Bokuto asked without looking up.
Waving the paper in the narrow passage between Bokuto’s face and his phone screen, Washio grumbled, “A confession, genius.” He looked at the letter again. “Not a very heartfelt one, really. Kind of generic.”
Konoha scrambled out of the gym and snatched it. “Ooh, Bokuto’s got a girlfriend.”
Sarukui snorted before yanking the paper out of Konoha’s grasp. “Which is four-thousand percent none of your business, dumbass.” He folded the paper without reading it and put it in the breast pocket of Bokuto’s school blazer. “For your consideration.”
Bokuto finally looked up from his game to see Akaashi cringing while looking on at Washio and Konoha play-fighting over who got more confessions that year. Shaking his head, he laughed his boisterous, golden laugh, which put Akaashi at ease for the first time since this debacle had started.
“None have yet won the heart of the totally awesome Bokuto-san,” he said, jabbing a thumb at his chest. “But I will entertain any and all contestants equally.”
Akaashi rolled his eyes. “That’s just silly, Bokuto-san. Wouldn’t you favor someone you know well over someone you don’t?”
Shrugging, Bokuto replied, “Isn’t a stranger a new friend you haven’t made yet?” He patted Akaashi on the back with a little more force than strictly necessary and added, “You’d be happier guy if you tried it, Akaashi.”
It was all Akaashi could do to not chortle at the joke to which he was uniquely qualified to understand the punch line. “If you say so, Bokuto-san.”
Practice proceeded as usual, and as they were changing out of their sweat-soaked workout gear, Akaashi ventured to ask, “So, are you going to meet them?”
Bokuto paused while untying his shoes and glanced at Akaashi. “Them?”
Akaashi realized his gaffe and gave a flippant wave that belied his desire to hide in the showers. “Well, it doesn’t necessarily have to be a girl, and not everyone who isn’t a girl has to be a ‘him’, right?”
“Way to make it weird, Akaashi,” Konoha remarked, tossing a towel over Akaashi’s head. “Don’t make him blow a fuse or he’ll chicken out.”
Sarukui smacked Konoha on the back of the head. “Shut your hole, Bakaha. There isn’t anything weird about genderless pronouns, and you make it weird, so help me I will brain you.”
Konoha shot Sarukui a smirk before tugging off his shorts and heading towards the shower. “Just saying that there’s no reason to overthink things here. If Bokuto likes this person, there’s no reason to get bent out of shape over trivialities.”
Akaashi debated the pros and cons of sneaking into the showers to turn Konoha’s water cold, but Washio beat him to it. Dumping the vat of liquid soap over Konoha’s head, the gruff third year grumbled, “Don’t be a tool, Aki.”
Meanwhile, Bokuto watched this entire scene unfold with a frown growing in intensity until Akaashi feared that he might implode. “Bokuto-san, is everything all right?”
“Yeah,” Bokuto said blankly, not tearing his eyes from Konoha’s sudsy sputtering. “I just never thought about it before. I’ve never been confessed to by a guy before. I wonder what it’s like.”
“Does that mean you’re going to go?” Akaashi refused to get his hopes up, but his stomach did somersaults when Bokuto said, “Yeah, I’ll go.”
It didn’t matter that it wasn’t a real confession; Akaashi felt a surge of victory that Bokuto would even entertain the idea of dating a guy. If he could do that, then fake-dating might not be out of the question.
Bokuto and Akaashi left the locker room at the same time and absently headed to the park. Akaashi didn’t think anything was amiss until Bokuto stopped in his tracks and said, “Wait, where are we going?”
Akaashi frowned. “To the park, like the note said.”
“I didn’t get a chance to read it,” Bokuto said with a flush. “I got distracted with all the other stuff going on, and I forgot.” Looking around, Bokuto itched a spot on the back of his neck and mused, “Honestly, I don’t even know what it says. And come to think of it, I don’t remember you reading it, either.”
With a sigh, Akaashi recited the contents of the note verbatim. “It’s because I wrote it, Bokuto-san.”
Brows shooting up in surprise, Bokuto blinked at Akaashi. “Y-you’re confessing to me?”
Groaning, Akaashi said, “It’s not what you think. I have something very important to talk to you about, and I didn’t want other people around when I say it.”
“Okay,” Bokuto said with an enthusiastic nod. “Let’s hear it.”
His courage rapidly dwindling, Akaashi decided that being forthright would probably garner the best results. “I have a secret that I’ve only told my mother, and that wasn’t even a week ago. I’m telling you because I trust you more than anyone else, and I need your help.
“I’m, um, gay, Bokuto-san, and I need a fake boyfriend to come out to my family with so they’ll stop trying to find me girlfriends.”
Bokuto gawked at Akaashi for far too long before waving his hand in front of his own face. “This is real, right? I didn’t run into the net post again and knock myself out, did I?” When Akaashi’s response was to cast his eyes down and look away, Bokuto hurriedly said, “No, no, no, that isn’t what I meant!”
Grumbling, Bokuto said, “What I meant to say was: you really trust me more than anyone else on the planet besides your mom? And you’re cool with the idea of being my boyfriend, even if it’s not for real?”
“Yes, Bokuto-san,” Akaashi said wearily. “That is exactly what I’m saying.”
Vice-like arms crushed the air out of Akaashi as Bokuto enveloped him in a hug. “I’ll totally be your fake boyfriend, Akaashi! Just tell me what I have to do.”