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Rumors haunt this school, Satori can hear them murmuring like ghosts. They slide between window frames, under doors, accumulate in corners along with dust and get trapped in webs, sometimes he finds them stuck under the desk like old chewing gum, ruminated and then spit out. They hide with skeletons in the closet, and in janitors’ storage rooms – Shiratorizawa is huge and full of places to spread all the things Satori would like to run from.
“They’re just idiots who enjoy being assholes,” Semi tells him, “don’t listen to them.”
It doesn’t mean anything. What would Semi Eita know about it anyway? He doesn’t know of the way words stick to the skin – it looks like mud, and when Satori tries to scrape them off they get stuck like dirt under fingernails and even purging hands with boiling water and bleach, the dirt remains. Semi Eita talks and talks and he doesn’t know shit. Satori loves his friend, but he has the clean nails and calluses of a guitar player, and those are hands everyone likes. He can’t understand him.
Satori has never been good at ignoring the icy fingers on the back of his head, the spiders pawing down his back one vertebra at a time. It’s that sickening, euphoric gut feeling – instinct. He hears it all, and when it’s not the whispers chasing each other down the hallway, then it's the stares; eyes fixed on hair too red and face too pale, arms too long and legs too skinny. They won’t miss the way skin stretches over bones, as if there wasn’t enough – it’s just that Tendo Satori takes up too much space and he really wasn’t meant to (what do you do with all that, six feet one of pure mess?) but he’s here and nobody can send him back, even if no one wants him. They all have to deal with this.
The hallway, the school, the whole world is really just one big monster. Hideous, terrifying. All eyes and whispers. It looks at him, judges him, hates him. It reminds him that of all the monsters Tendo Satori is still the worst. That it would be better to be a skeleton in the back of the closet, or a ghost. Forgotten somewhere, barely visible.
Being able to pass through walls (and people).
He has been standing still for so long that he may not know how to move anymore. Perhaps he has been curled up here with his head between his knees for hours, or days, or centuries. Perhaps the skin that holds his limbs together has already melted away – deteriorated, disintegrated like paper – and Satori is already a ghost, a shadow of something else.
But if he breathes a little too hard, in the dark, his bones screech.
Satori hears them, the voices. They all hear them, in this haunted castle (and when people run out of monsters to fear, then they create them).
He tried to hate it, to hate this school. He really tried.
He arrived at Shiratorizawa not even fifteen, with pockets already full of resentments but also the team hoodie on, because for the first time somebody had wanted him there and that was a pretty good feeling – Satori is scary and scary to some people can mean strong . He stepped into a gym that had seen so many angry kids likes him (and yet never as angry as he had been) and he told himself not to get his hopes up, don't fall for it, don't be stupid, Satori, you know how it goes – monsters can't play on human teams.
He wasn’t even fifteen yet but he had known better than he does now that he should have held onto that anger. He should have built walls, and a fortress, and cannons. It would have been better, easier to hate everything, that gym and its promises, the new teammates and Ushijima Wakatoshi. He knew, back then – the universe is a bastard and life sucks and kids like Ushiwaka, not yet fifteen and already perfect, shouldn’t exist because it’s not fair.
And he tried. But then Ushiwaka is not Wakatoshi, or only partially so. And Satori knows better, and has known all along that you only hate the things you don’t know and the things that are scary. Satori has learned every cell, every thought of Wakatoshi, every speck of life wedged between his eyelashes – and he cannot help but adore every little bit of him. If people are books, as cheap poets declare, then Satori has memorized every word, every comma; and if, on the other hand, they are planets, as some other romantic might claim, then Wakatoshi is the one with the densest mass, with the most powerful gravitational force. And Satori should perhaps do better, but he just can't stay away from him.
(The poets do not say, but Shiratorizawa might be, for Tendo Satori, the closest thing there is to heaven – a team of monsters. And so, Ushijima Wakatoshi is the chain tightened around his neck, and he cannot escape.)
Everyone here hears the voices. Everyone knows there is a monster lurking in the hallways and ghosts settling in corners and skeletons hiding in closets. Everyone here is afraid of the Guess Monster.
Not Wakatoshi.
It is not the glimmer of light that brings him back to reality, but the draft of fresh air sneaking into this locked room that smells of dust, that makes him raise his head. For how much time may have passed, Satori is still something similar to a person a little too tall and a little too thin.
“Found you,” says Wakatoshi, and it sounds like relief.
“Found me,” Satori replies, and it’s like giving up. He can’t tell him to go away, to leave him alone, to forget him and lock the gym closet, let him rot with the volleyballs and gymnastic equipment. He really can’t say it – not now, not to him.
Wakatoshi is not afraid of monsters or ghosts, he could step on all those rumors without getting splinters, and when Satori decides to pretend to be a skeleton in the back of the closet until the world has forgotten about him, Wakatoshi keeps him company. Now, he closes the door behind him, and when the room plunges into darkness he trudges forward and slips past him until they are sitting close together. Their bodies brush against each other.
And now Satori knows that he still has skin, taut, pulled on his bones, because when Wakatoshi's fingers find his hand he can feel their warmth, and shivers like electricity up his arm.
And even if they stay that way for hours or centuries, if they are skeletons or monsters or just boys, it's dark and quiet here anyway, who cares?