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Kiyoomi is shaking as they step inside the office, sterile white collapsing inward around him. The lights, fluorescent and sharp, stab into the softened points behind his irises, memories of past glares long since dissolved.
He squints and re-adjusts the mask settled across his nose bridge because old habits die hard and it’s easier than he’d ever admit to curl around anything comfortable, comfort ing in moments like these. It had taken him a minute, that morning, to find the mask in one of the many sets of drawers Atsumu enjoys keeping around their apartment, if only to clutter them with useless odd ends. He calls progress where he sees it, however small, and wonders when the programming in his brain changed, so fluidly he had failed to notice, from catastrophic into gracious.
At the moment, though, progress seems a distant thing; he feels as though he is fifteen again and lost in his own skin, in hatred and confusion and their pure, unfiltered, un livable states. His only tether point, ironically, are the fingers entwined with his, gentle grip contrasting to his own whitened knuckles.
He imagines his teenage self with someone else’s hand in his and the edge of his lip quirks upward beneath his mask. Something about that, the minute connection of two Kiyoomis a decade and some apart in reality but irreconcilable with each other, shifts something in him. Sparks a sudden, belated realization.
He’s doing this .
His mind wanders back to his fifteen-year-old self— to the younger versions, even, of a boy misplaced and assigned an uncaring identity, told to swallow it down and questioned when he choked.
Kiyoomi considers a nine-year-old version of himself, cheeks pinkened beneath a long and tangled mess of dark curls as he stared himself down in the mirror, eyes accusatory and unimpressed. Something defeated hidden in the curl of his shoulders, something ashamed .
He’d always been tall for his age, lithe and lean like all the other boys in class 2-C. Even as he squirmed into plaid skirts and flowing blouses each morning instead of khaki pants and stiff ironed button-downs, he felt a connection to them on an intrinsic level, knew we are the same, you and I , whispered it into his pillow each evening, held it in the empty spaces inside his mouth— but never attempted to breathe it aloud.
Never dared, for some unspoken, innate reason that caused him to shake, a full-bodied thing, at the thought of explicitly comparing himself, the boy they called girl , to them, the boys everyone knew were boys.
He wasn’t, before this point, dissatisfied with his appearance, with his body. He was more confused , failing to understand why he didn’t look exactly like the other boys, why he had to wear satin ribbons that made his curls frizz and skirts clad only by the girls in his class.
It was only when his body began to change that he took real notice for the first time, begrudging neutrality shifting into something sharper, something pointed. Something that tasted venomous on his tongue and swirled cotton, thick and heavy and cloying , around in his brain, preventing thought coherency to continue smoothly.
He noticed, nine years of unsure certainty banished and disproven, as his hips filled in more than his friends, as something different began changing around his chest. It crossed his mind, once, to ask his classmates if they were experiencing the same thing, but the way their eyes changed as they stared down at the girls twisted something in Kiyoomi’s gut, sent signals of wrongness, of danger, to his brain.
Google became his only source for information he considered clandestine, considered important , knowledge that felt wrong and dirty and real hidden between tabs in private mode on the family computer.
He learned how to make his chest look smaller with layers, heeding sharp warnings about how his sports tape could not suffice for fear of broken ribs. He practiced humming, voice low and caught somewhere in his throat, in the hopes that his voice would begin to drop like those of his friends. He bought new clothes for days when he was out of school uniform: long shorts and boxy tee-shirts, large sweatshirts in various shades of garish yellow. Anything to distract from him, from his body.
It felt like a cheap secret, all of this research, this experimentation hidden within deleted search histories, something about it tarnished inherently and irreparably, and, well.
Kiyoomi had always liked things clean. It only made sense that he could not tolerate his identity being anything but.
It was something he could not control, though, he knew somehow. Something deep in his subconscious, innate to his being, warned him that attempting to bury this feeling, to quiet it, would only result in more pain, in noise and chaos and a lifetime of feeling unclean.
He couldn’t control it, but there were many things he could control: his social circle, his demeanor. Kiyoomi could clean everything around him, in every sense of the term, could wash his face until his rare smiles flashed against raw skin and hope that it would be enough, for now.
(On some level, so deeply imbedded into his core, stabbed through the center of his heart to halt his blood flow, he knew that nothing , no level of cleanliness or perfection, would ease the prickling that ran across his skin at all times, would stop the cotton from spreading to his lungs, to the precious spaces beneath his ribcage and behind his eyes.
He could try, though, for that’s all he could do, really.)
So Kiyoomi raised his hands, rubbed red and raw, during classes to answer the questions he found interesting. He shuffled along with the girls when instructed and the boys when he was left unobserved. He gripped the hem of his plaid skirt with white-red fingers, clamped knuckles down until he could hear a seam snap, two.
He kept his expression carefully neutral, conscious to keep his features in check lest he reveal too much with a glare, a scowl, a smile. He sat and stared and learned what people wanted to see from him, twisted and knotted versions of the life he envisioned as the only possibility for himself, coddled with knee socks and hair pins and make up.
It wasn’t long afterwards that he made the decision to tell his parents, a subconscious and resigned shift in mindset that barely even startled him; he’d known this was inevitable, that someday he would have to, so it was best to make the decision on his own.
Until it wasn’t his decision to make, until his parents received an email from his elementary school commenting on his “strange behavior” and the name Kiyoomi scribbled across the backs of assignments, kanji penciled in, hurried and messy. Until the decision was ripped away from him, the theft blinding white and blinking, Arial 11 startling and foreboding.
Until he was standing in the genkan, one shoe tugged neatly off and one still stubbornly on his foot, laces halfway to untied, eyes red and watering, sniffling aggressively as if to keep the tears back, his lip twitching, swollen like the rest of his face. Until he was bared, split open — knife to the stomach — and vulnerable to the confused expressions of his parents as they shuffled his siblings into their respective rooms, back away from Kiyoomi, the mess; Kiyoomi, the boy .
His parents had stepped forward, faces stony and betraying absolutely nothing to their son, a newfound boy already nine years into life.
Their conversation had been a terse, unfriendly thing, as most went between them. The only difference was that Kiyoomi was crying, this time, instead of his mother. They accepted him, they said, and they did , most of the time, except for the ways that they didn’t. They accepted him, loved him , but the name on their lips was never truly his; they called for him as a sister, as a daughter, as a little girl .
“We hope you can understand that this is hard for us, too. We’ve known you this way for nine years now. It’s a lot to change, and it won’t happen overnight. Please be patient with us—” his mother’s voice did not falter, suffered no lilt or hitch as she spoke aloud a name he’d just told them was false, was not his, was not him , and he remembered suddenly that patience was a virtue he selectively possessed.
With a loud scrape of pen against paper, ink running low in the barrel, Kiyoomi’s father chimed in, “So, explain this to me again, dear, you don’t want to be our daughter anymore?”
The questions continued in a similar vein, spoken roughly and hastily into the air as if something about them was inherently wrong, was unspeakable:
“So, are you sure you’re—”
“But, dear, you’re our daughter , we can’t just—”
“What will your siblings think; they’ll be so confused —”
“Oh, honey, what about the aunties ? They won’t know what to—”
Then their spirits wore off, voices trailing off to hang as echoes in the tense silence stretching between them.
Kiyoomi, for his part, only responded with a curt nod. The sheer amount of words stuck in his throat, crowding up against his windpipe and pressing inward with steel-point edges, threatened to choke him. He swallowed them down, dry — a routine thing. Something that could easily become habitual.
His parents let him switch elementary schools for his final year, if only to test the waters, they maintained. He. . .well.
No one knew about him, initially. He was just Sakusa, the introverted new kid. The irritable new boy. Quiet, intolerable, insufferable, but a boy nonetheless.
He was Sakusa, family name burning into his back as teachers struggled over a name that didn’t belong to him and Kiyoomi lied, pretending the ledger had been misprinted.
It was this year, chest bound tightly beneath his shirt, that Kiyoomi discovered volleyball.
He found some of the boys from his class playing during lunch, the ball’s white worn into a fraying yellow that left a slight residue on Kiyoomi’s fingers, his jerking flinch backwards an instinctual response, easy as breathing.
It was easier, however, to notice their stares, to see the questions in their eyes sharpen into accusations as his cheeks flushed down his neck and his voice attempted to rise higher in panic. He shook himself, just slightly, and hoped they hadn’t noticed.
Clearing his throat roughly, Kiyoomi ground his teeth and sucked in a breath, stepping away to go eat his lunch with narrowed eyes peeking over the meticulous wrapping of his bento.
He was transfixed, unable to tear his eyes away for the barest second; he could barely manage to shovel his rice into his mouth before the bell rang to signal passing period.
That evening, after two horribly distracted final periods, Kiyoomi scrambled through the genkan, pausing only to straighten his shoes where they settled against the wall, and hurried to his spot at the computer.
The routine held an aching familiarity, and that same feeling of illicit excitement, that same rush coursed through his body as his fingers twitched against the thick plastic of the keyboard.
The following morning saw Kiyoomi scribbling frantic answers onto his homework sheets from the previous evening, kanji disastrous and surrounded by errant pencil strokes. The only words written neatly were his name, Sakusa Kiyoomi printed in the top corners of each paper.
Dark bags rimmed the undersides of his eyes, belying the evening he’d spent, hunched until his shoulders ached as he changed out of his makeshift binder and into his pajamas, at the computer, watching video upon video of professional volleyball players; scanning articles for jumping height and serve speed; reading about the different positions and how to practice, how to play .
He swallowed his pride that afternoon at lunch and asked the boys to teach him how to properly hit the ball.
Spiking was his favorite, he learned, which surprised him. He’d expected his pleasure to lie in the quiet dependability of a set and was startled to feel the adrenaline that shuddered through him after jumping, arm wound back, the calm before a storm.
Hanging suspended in the air, even if it was on an outdoor pavilion scattered with school bags and bento wrappings, felt ephemeral, felt like joy, like light pulled directly from the sun and bottled, pressure threatening to burst into a thousand starbursts. It felt euphoric , to Kiyoomi’s best description.
He leaped and swung and ran until every muscle in his body ached, until his button-down stuck to his undershirt and his skin, his curves, with such intensity that he felt overcome suddenly with the need to hide, to conceal himself. He resisted, though, because the bell hadn’t rung yet, it wasn’t over , he did not have to stop playing, not yet.
When Kiyoomi dropped to the ground from his final sloppy spike, form obviously lacking training and practice but rich in strength, in pure, thick-cut effort , the boys who’d agreed to lend him the volleyball for the second half of lunch were staring at him, wide-eyed. He wiped the sweat from his brow, immediately scrunching his nose in disgust at the sensation against his palm and reaching for the hand sanitizing gel he kept stored in his right pants pocket.
“Dude. Why are you not on our volleyball team, like, two months ago?”
Kiyoomi could only stare because, in all honesty, he did not know his elementary school had a volleyball club. His practice was to finish class work and leave the building as soon as the bell began ringing, rushing home to finish his assignments and engage in his hobbies (read: sleep). He had not attended the club fair at the beginning of the year, had in fact stood at the entrance to the gym with a packet of fresh masks clutched tightly in his shaking grip, before turning on his heel and stumbling away with hair falling forward to cover his eyes.
“. . .Or not?” The boy turned to his companion, muttering something in a rushed, low tone that Kiyoomi could no longer make out and had the polarizing sense he was not supposed to.
“Uh. . .” Eloquent, Kiyoomi; off to a great start. He slapped his forehead with his palm internally, resisting the urge to screw his eyes into a grimace. “When are the practice sessions?”
“Just every day after school for an hour! We don’t really compete, so this is mostly just practice for middle school.” A pause, hesitant. “With spikes like those, you’ve gotta try out!”
And while Kiyoomi did not exactly appreciate the assertion that he “ gotta ” do anything, he couldn’t resist the intrigue that was clouding his every thought, the clarity that had seemed to snap between his eyes and the typical grainy quality of the world when he’d managed his first sharp slap to the ball. So, he nodded, a stiff and unfriendly thing that to anyone else would signify their participation in the last thing they would ever want to engage in.
Kiyoomi half hoped the boys wouldn’t take it the wrong way, but he ultimately could not bring himself to care. He wasn’t joining the club for them, after all, he was joining to play .
At practice that afternoon, he clung to the shadows, stepping forward only when he needed to offer a brief introduction of himself ( Sakusa Kiyoomi, grade five, nine years old, potential spiker ) before returning to his secluded corner.
It was not that he particularly disliked people in general or held special contempt for his new club mates; at large, he was indifferent about his peers. He was bothered, instead, by the sweat already running in rivulets down their necks, by the way they grabbed towels at random and touched shared balls with sweaty palms.
He was grateful he had a mask on, but for the first time in a long time, he was unsure if it would offer enough control.
It was only when Kiyoomi was in the air that the whispers about him, about the new boy with the high voice who joined the club a few months late, died into a lethargic hush; only while he was suspended above them all, heavy gymnasium lights burning into the backs of his shoulders through his shirt, that he stopped thinking about the chaos around him, about the boys and the germs, and thought only of the future games in front of him, of the points to be scored.
He slammed his arm forward with a force unknown to even himself, and the ball landed on the other side of the court with a sound like a firecracker, like years of pent up anger transferred to a volleyball in midair. Later, it would begin to sound like the cheers of his teammates, of a crowd, but that would not be for many years.
For this place in time, breathing ladened by the wrappings around his chest and eyes bright behind his neutral expression, Kiyoomi heard only the sound of the ball against hardwood and the slowing of his thoughts, hundreds of them entwining in the most secret and hidden parts of his brain slowing, stopping, pausing .
He threw himself into the game like he’d never put effort into anything before, desperately chasing the quiet that came from landing a perfect spike, from acing a serve.
It felt easy, felt secret in the same way reading about his gender had— comfortable and unnerving because of it.
The boys on his team did not know about him and Kiyoomi’s parents were questioning constantly whether or not he would tell them, insisting each evening at dinner that it was wrong , on some moral level, to lie to them like he was.
Wouldn't it be easier , they argued, to just play on the girls’ team? If they were searching for an admission of Kiyoomi’s wrongdoing, of his misinterpretation of an identity and how it was solved over the course of a conversation, they would be sorely disappointed. Such a confession would have to wrench itself from Kiyoomi’s chest, from the space around his heart that was reserved for the fleeting doubts he shoved aside, pushed further away with each steady beat of blood.
There wasn’t a clatter when Kiyoomi heaved himself up from the table, no metallic clanging of a spoon sounded against a fork as he settled his chopsticks against his napkin gently. There wasn’t noise, really, only space consumed by a thickening, piercing silence as he shuffled towards his room on slippered feet, muttering flimsy, transparent excuses about having an extra assignment to do.
There wasn’t sound, even, because the cotton had spread from Kiyoomi’s brain to his ears, and it should have been quiet, according to all logic, but his eyes were sore and his mouth raw as if from screaming and he could almost hear it echoing in his ears, if he stopped focusing on his breathing.
He grabbed blindly for the landline phone as he walked, eyes averted, narrowed to prevent them from watering, and lacking much of his usual precision. He was overcome with the urge to grab something, anything , and spike it into the floor, just to see if it would make an impact, if it would leave a dent, if Kiyoomi’s actions were significant, if he was even real , anymore.
Instead, he shuffled into his room and dialed the scribbled number his cousin had left for him the last time they’d talked at a family gathering, frustrating himself with his own immutable hope that their house phone number had not changed in the past few months.
The line picked up after a ring and a half, Kiyoomi’s aunt’s voice sounding across the static after a silent pause. “Hello?”
“Um.”
“Oh, hello—” Kiyoomi flinched at the name, a practiced response, before registering the lack of edge to her tone. She doesn’t know , he had to remind himself. She isn’t like them. He shook himself, slightly, as a corrective measure, and instinctively pulled the hand sanitizer bottle from his pocket. He placed it on his bedside table to resist fidgeting with it, before moving it back to his pocket out of fear he’d forget it the next day.
“Is Motoya there?” And if his aunt minded the perfunctory, stiff nature of his tone, she did not comment on it, simply stating her assent and thanking him for calling before the sounds diminished into those of a device shifting between hands, from an adult’s practiced grip into Motoya’s childish, clumsy one.
“I’m so glad you still have my number!” To anyone else, Motoya’s words may have rung as snide, intended to bite first and sting later, but to Kiyoomi they were a statement of fact. He had almost lost the slip of paper Motoya had scrawled his number onto, but was. . .glad he hadn’t. It was a new, strange feeling to process.
“Hi. I started playing volleyball yesterday.” Short, abrupt, expressly Kiyoomi . Motoya did not seem to mind, which made sense. He was used to most of Kiyoomi’s quirks. Most.
“Woah, that’s so cool!” Kiyoomi braced himself, fearing the name that would inevitably follow and preparing defenses so that he would not fear Motoya for longer, reminding himself once more that people would not know unless he told them because his parents certainly wouldn’t. But the name never came. Instead: “Does your school have a club? Are you in the school club? How’re the other girls?”
Dead silence, lacking any of the previous content ease.
The other girls .
He doesn’t know , Kiyoomi knew — he knew , he swore, ground the information between his teeth, the taste bittersweet on his tongue, and resisted the urge to spit them into the receiver. It’s not his fault crowded against the backs of his teeth, fighting, but you haven’t told him, idiot sat heavily on his tongue, vile and acidic.
The silence continued, a dragging and weighted thing. Every few seconds, Kiyoomi was conscious of Motoya’s pitched breathing on the other end of the wire, sounding across the staticy speaker like he was being repeatedly given the Heimlich maneuver. Kiyoomi grimaced at the thought.
“Kiyo—”
“No.” The word, simultaneously monosyllabic and monumental, choked its way out of Kiyoomi’s mouth before he could stop it; he could not hear that name, not from the untarnished mouth of his cousin, not from anyone , ever again, if he could help it.
“. . .No? Kiyo, what?” Kiyoomi flinched in anticipation, braced once again for an impact that never comes. Motoya was being. . .careful, and Kiyoomi wondered if he’d been more obvious than he’d thought.
Kiyo . A balance, a compromise , his parents had said, words placid and empty from their mouths, their tongues. It didn’t feel as empty, coming from Motoya, but Kiyoomi still shivered at the memory.
He cleared his throat, rough and low. “It’s not— . . . it’s. . . it’s Kiyoomi. Sakusa Kiyoomi.”
“. . .Huh?” And, well. Of course Motoya didn’t understand. He wasn’t like Kiyoomi, he hadn’t had to teach himself these things, hadn’t had to learn that he could even be a boy. His family computer’s search history was probably full of coolmathgames or volleyball clips or something else equally as nerdy and dumb as what Kiyoomi’s cousin would obsess over.
“I, um.” He swallowed uneasily around the words before forcing them up to his lips, past his throat. “My name. It’s Kiyoomi. I’m a boy.” Now , he almost added, but halted himself because no, he’d always been a boy. He just hadn’t always known it. There was an important distinction there, he thought, something to remember.
“So, like, the doctors were wrong?” Motoya sounded confused and tired and genuine , and Kiyoomi felt something in his gut, something long buried and ignored, twist.
“Something like that.” The details could come later, when they weren’t nine years old and united, two boys against what felt like the world. They could wait until their reliance on their families’ communal computers diminished and their liberties increased, just slightly.
Some things could wait, Kiyoomi could breathe again because Motoya knew, his best friend knew, and that was all that really mattered.
Ultimately it was Motoya’s parents who helped Kiyoomi convince his own to let him start testosterone during his second year of junior high, Motoya by his side the entire time, understanding more at twelve than he could have at nine. It became something of a joke between the two of them — if Motoya even deemed Kiyoomi capable of making those — asking if the doctors had been wrong. It was. . .easy, all things considered.
Kiyoomi could handle injections, could handle the idea of a sterilized needle under his skin, as long as it was administered by his own gloved hands. It was involving anyone else that created a problem. But that had become a bridge to cross later.
He had the natural height, the natural strength; he was lucky for that.
He was able to go on hormones, to live in stealth; he was luckier for that.
But he had to bind every game. Locker rooms terrified him. Growing up, he was confined by his strength and height, by his curves and chest, despite how hard he tried to hide them, to ignore them.
Kiyoomi became the best youth spiker in the nation just to prove he could , that he was as good as them, was enough .
He spent hours in the gym after his Itachiyama classmates had headed home for the evening, pummeling ball after ball into the polished shine of the court. Each morning he was up before dawn to run, to lift, to get one more repetition in if it killed him.
He needed to be strong, he swore, clung onto it like a lifeline, uncaring of its potential to snap. He needed to be strong so they wouldn’t question him, so they wouldn’t know .
And it worked. Everyone — at Itachiyama, at Spring Nationals, at the All-Japan Youth Camp — knew him as Sakusa Kiyoomi, the boy with crazy flexible wrists, killer power serves, and a horrible personality.
It was easy and it was practiced, rehearsed to such a point that Kiyoomi felt confident he could perform it in his sleep, to some degree. It was. . .boring?
It was safe and thoughtless, and Kiyoomi likes to think.
He wishes, now, that he could regret his decisions, that he could long for the protected security of his high school years. But, honestly, he cannot fathom it.
As an adult, nearly everything terrifies him — playing with MSBY, meeting new people, reconciling with his parents. It only amplifies his contamination fears. But everything also exhilarates him — playing with the Jackals, meeting the friends and families of his teammates.
Watching Bokuto grip Akaashi’s hand under the table at the izakaya they frequent after home wins, hearing Hinata babble loudly on the phone each day after morning practice, muttering something about Bakageyama , closed with a quiet assurance of I love you, too . Feeling Atsumu’s arm over his torso as their alarm blares for the second time in a morning, Kiyoomi’s fingers only twisting around those laced with his.
Hearing his parents call him Kiyoomi and him and son over the scratch of a phone connection miles apart, however hesitant and unsure, because progress is progress. And patience is a virtue he now has the freedom and the security to possess, to protect .
He wishes, sometimes, that he could regret his decisions because hiding feels so much easier, so much safer .
But each morning, as he stands at their sink, one side cluttered helplessly and the other meticulously organized, with Atsumu standing in front of him, one hand settled easily on Kiyoomi’s hip as they brush their teeth in silence, Kiyoomi finds it harder and harder to convince himself that reaching for the mask, for the gloves or the hand sanitizer spray or the comfort of his old identity, is really the easier choice, after all.
His old motivators, his old behaviors would not have allowed him to be standing here now, hand tucked into Atsumu’s as they step into a pristine white waiting room. The lights don’t feel as blinding as when they first stepped in, and he considers, just for a moment, pulling the mask down.
For years, he’s desperately wanted top surgery, and it hasn’t been a financial concern as much as his terror of people touching him, of being knocked out, of not being able to see, to know . It shakes him awake, sometimes, in the middle of the night, the feeling of his skin crawling with legions of the germs his brain conjures, and he has to let himself shake, become a begrudgingly pliant thing in Atsumu’s arms and trust, for once, for brief, fleeting moments, that his brain is fallible, that it’s seeking out ways to trick him into falsified safety once more.
It’s logical, then, that it’s made better, just slightly, by Atsumu’s hand in his, by the lilting Kansai dialect of his charade of teasing. He punctuates every sentence with Omi or Omi - Omi and Kiyoomi feels protected.
He did not pick the name Sakusa, but he picked Kiyoomi. Picked it, in part, because it sounded similar enough to his old name that he thought it would help people adjust, would help him adjust. But he also picked it because it means something holy, something precious, and he used it to staunch any last wisps of the shame, of the guilt that crawled across his skin during his adolescence. He picked Kiyoomi as a show of comfort and defiance, as a demonstration of balance.
And now here’s Atsumu, speaking it with pride, with love , as they step into the office, as Kiyoomi prepares to commit to the most terrifying and possibly best thing he’ll ever do for himself.
He squeezes Atsumu’s hand just that much tighter and avoids eye contact as they settle into stiff backed chairs to wait for his name — his legal name, now — to be called.
“What’s up, Omi? Ya nervous ya won’t be prettier than me while yer in yer rest period? Well, that’s not really a worry, seein’ as ya never were, any—”
And then he stops, and Kiyoomi feels like a villain because he would do anything for Atsumu to keep talking to him, to keep being with him. Yet here he is, wiping a single tear before it can slip under his mask in a hospital waiting room.
Sakusa Kiyoomi does not make a habit of crying. It requires some level of vulnerability, any amount of which he is usually deeply uncomfortable with, especially in a public setting. But, he reminds himself, grounding: Atsumu is here with him. Hospital staff have certainly seen worse than a man sniffling into his boyfriend’s shoulder. Atsumu is here with him .
“Omi. Hey, look at me. Kiyoomi . Hey. It’s gonna be alright.”
He tilts his head to the side, meeting his boyfriend’s gaze hesitantly. “I know that.” And he does , somewhere, but his voice is low and gruff and even he wouldn’t believe himself if asked.
“Yer gonna be fine. Hell, yer gonna be fuckin’ amazing. God, I love ya, Omi, yer so strong.”
“I love you, too.” He speaks with no hesitation; this is something rare: something he’s certain of.
When Kiyoomi wakes up, eyes cloudy and throat groggy, clad in a hospital gown and connected to approximately fourteen tubes and wires (he estimates), the first thing he processes is a mob of golden yellow hair casting shadows over bright eyes, and he smiles. “Omi! Yer up! How’re ya feelin’, sweetheart?”
And this — a surgery he’s dreamed of for a decade and change, the love of his life folded into a tiny hospital chair in his everyday sweats, hair messy and pushed back from his face — it’s not everything, not by a long shot. It doesn’t suddenly make him a man or change something fundamental to Kiyoomi’s very core. But it does something. It does enough.