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1
Satori is not having a good first day of high school.
When he thinks about it logically, he knew it would be the same. Satori is good at seeing patterns; at understanding what’s going to happen next. This, the stares and whispers that follow him everywhere, is something he is especially good at predicting. They’re a definite, one that Satori desperately wishes would cease.
The sun is starting to peek through the leaves of the tree he’s sitting under. It warms his previously breeze-chilled skin. I really should have worn sunscreen today, he thinks.
He packed his own lunch today, wanting to make sure that it was balanced and would leave him prepared for the volleyball team try-outs after school.
Satori shifts around the rice on one side of his bento. He really hopes this team will be better than the one in middle school. If they even let him in, that is, and judging by the amount of stares that have been shot in his direction just this morning, he isn’t feeling very confident they will.
He could play as well as a pro-volleyball player, and most teams still wouldn’t let him in if he made the team look bad.
It’s not that Satori isn’t aware of his lack of reading the room and knowing what to say, or the entirety of his appearance, really. He knows his hair is too bright compared to his peers, that he’s tall and lanky, and how creepy his smile is.
There was a time when he tried to hide it all. Drowning in self-consciousness, a far smaller and younger Satori would dye his hair black and practice his smile in the mirror. He’d rehearse scripts on what he was allowed to say during the day, and take notes on everything people made fun of so he could go home and try to fix it.
He learned quickly that even if he changed one thing, they’d just find something else wrong with him.
So, he learned to dial it up. If they’re going to hate him for it, might as well make it as enhanced as possible. He started smiling wider, gelling his hair up every day, and refusing to get it cut even when his mother begged. He stopped censoring himself and purposefully looked for pauses in conversation to spill out anything coming to mind.
He’ll give them something to call a monster.
Satori watches a group of second years pass by him, judging by their uniforms. One of the girls in the back is talking to her friend to her left and catches sight of him behind her. For a moment, she stands still staring at him. Quickly, she regains control of herself and looks away to furiously whisper to the rest of their group. One by one, the rest of them turn to look at him.
This is his cue.
He grins and tilts his head, waving at them. One of them gasps, and another slaps their hand over the gasping one’s mouth. He hears a few words about being subtle exchanged between them, but even if they were, he still would have noticed their rapid exchanges as they walked by him.
Satori’s shoulders slump. He knows to expect it by now, but it doesn’t hurt any less. Maybe they would give him a chance if he stopped playing into it, especially at a new school. He shakes his head, frowning at his bento. Even if they did give him a chance, he would mess it up anyway. He’d say the wrong thing, and when they stared at him in confusion, he’d dig the hole even deeper, trying to explain his way out of it. Eventually, the ground would eclipse above him, and he’d be too far gone.
A few minutes later, someone slides up next to him. He startles out of his thoughts and turns to face the raven boy that’s too close next to him for comfort. He recognizes him; he’s one of his classmates. Kobayashi, he thinks. There’s a girl following shortly behind him, anxious hands clasped in front of her that contrast with the almost eerie smile on her face.
Kobayashi slides an arm over Satori’s shoulders and leans into his side. “Hey!” He greets cheerfully.
His smile is too wide. Satori knows this tone.
“You should be our best friend!” He says, and Satori steels himself in an attempt not to recoil at the words.
His stomach twists. Looking at the girl, he notices she’s trying to hide the phone in her hand. She’s holding it as though she’s simply carrying it around, but she’s also making sure the camera is pointing at him. He knows this game.
She giggles and walks closer to him. Shiny black Mary Jane shoes close to stepping on his leg as she leans down to look at him. “We’re classmates, right? Do you remember our names, best friend?”
When Satori was little, he would have been ecstatic to hear someone calling him their best friend. He’d wished and wished to have a friend. Someone who didn’t think he was weird — that he was a monster. But he’s lived this before. It’s a game that never changes.
They come up to him and call him their best friend. He gets excited and starts talking to them. Sometimes, they play the long game and wait for him to start paying for their outings before he realizes. Others, like this time, wait to take a photo with him and post it somewhere, laughing at the concept of ever being friends with him. It’s comical, really.
If he says something, it feeds into their joke. If he doesn’t say anything back, he’s now rude on top of being weird. There’s no good ending for him.
He scoots away ever so slightly from the duo next to him and places a lid on his lunch. He’s not hungry anymore.
The arm around him falls slack, and he can see Kobayashi open his mouth to say something, but before he can, a deep, confused voice speaks behind Satori.
Great, Satori thinks. They really had to pull another person into this? Isn’t two enough?
“Oh, am I interrupting?”
Satori whips his head around and meets eyes with an olive-haired boy. His hands are shoved in his pockets, unsure, and Satori’s eyes brighten at the realization that he’s not with them. Instead, this boy’s attention is focused solely on him and is so tense and self-conscious that Satori quickly understands he had no clue what he was walking into.
He can feel the two retreat from behind him; their game interrupted and no longer fun. Satori ignores them and shakes his head before he loses the chance to talk to the boy in front of him. He pats a patch of grass next to him, inviting him to sit. “You’re not.”
When the boy sits, Satori places his palms under his legs to resist climbing on top of the boy to analyze every one of his features. This boy is not like the others, he thinks. Tilting his head, he sees the boy stare at him, unfazed by his behavior. Oh?
“Who are you?” Satori asks.
“You’re Tendou Satori, right? I saw your name on the volleyball team’s try-out list.”
Satori nods. “I am, but that doesn’t answer my question.”
The boy scowls, a focused look washing over him as though he’s trying to figure out what to say next. Satori’s eyes crinkle when he smiles.
You’re like me, aren’t you? He thinks. Or, at least, not like everyone else here.
2
Satori’s new team is great.
Really.
He makes the team without a single argument breaking out among them about letting that freak on the team. So, in his book, it’s a win.
They don’t hesitate to pass the ball to him during practice. They’ll invite him to after-practice outings to the corner store across the street. And, they don’t mock him to his face.
He can still feel it sometimes, though. When he twirls in excitement after blocking one of Ushijima’s powerful spikes, he’ll catch them rolling their eyes. When one of them mentions something he knows a lot about, and he starts rambling about the topic and switching to others, they’ll widen their eyes and smirk at each other.
Ushijima doesn’t notice this, and neither does their captain. Even if they did, Satori wouldn’t expect them to care. They aren’t excluding him from games or making him take showers, laugh so he wouldn’t make them dirty, which was never enough reason for the higher-ups of his old team to do anything, so this… child's play most definitely doesn’t matter.
He refuses to tell Ushijima about this. The boy is oblivious to anything occurring in the team dynamics that doesn’t affect volleyball. It’s not his problem, anyway.
(And, maybe a small part of him doesn’t want Ushijima to realize they’re right to do so. He thinks it might break him if Ushijima looks at him the way they do, if he stops taking Satori seriously.)
Satori is talking to some of the other first years currently. They’re doing warm-up drills, and it’s way too quiet for him. He doesn’t like the quiet. It leaves too much room for him to think about the way one of them is definitely not listening to him as they pass the ball back and forth and the other is pointedly trying not to laugh at how sporadically he is talking.
He knows they don’t realize that he notices this. If they did, they would stop right away. It’s not like they tell him he’s a freak to his face, or even say it out loud. They’d hate themselves if they realized any of this was showing externally, but it’s just the effect he has on people.
It’s his fault, really, for being too observant.
Satori’s tense for the rest of their practice. He doesn’t try to block Ushijima’s impossible spikes, even when he knows they’re coming. He holds himself back from skipping steps to get the stray volleyball on the floor. During break, he walks outside, with the excuse of needing fresh air, to avoid accidentally going on a tangent in their conversations.
At the end of practice, the captain pulls them aside. They discuss their prior games, the good, bad, and ugly of their plays, and review their upcoming schedule. He already knows that Ushijima will be their future captain, so he asks the boy to give them a small speech to practice. Ushijima swallows as he steps up and locks eyes with Satori as he addresses the team.
He starts by talking about their last game, and Satori vibrates while remembering it. It was exhilarating. He completely forgets about the rest of today, too lost in remembering the feeling of blocking the last shot their rivals needed to win.
Ushijima saying his name is what breaks him out of his thoughts, and his stomach sinks. Did he do something wrong? Is Ushijima kicking him off the team? What-
“While everyone was adequate, Tendou was at the top of his game. He blocked the most plays out of everyone. It’s not just his intuition, but his skill too. I hope you all take note of his skills to improve your own.”
Oh.
He swallows.
That’s not good.
All eyes turn on him, and he can feel the outrage bubbling in them. The freak being praised? What a joke.
When Satori braves a look at their faces, though, all he can see is an emotion he hasn’t seen directed towards him before. He’s definitely seen it, on his teammates looking at each other and his teachers watching students present, but being on the other end of respect is completely uncanny to him.
They… respect him?
He pushes back any tears fighting to well in his eyes and instead reaches a hand behind his head. “Well, thanks, Wakatoshi-kun!”
He ignores the way his voice cracks over these words. It’s definitely just puberty. Yep, yeah, no emotion here. None.
It takes him a moment longer to really process that they aren’t playing a sick joke on him. That they aren’t giving him a taste of what he could have if he was normal. That they genuinely respect him.
(And, if the laughing at him slowly fades away as the team starts to respect him more, well, Satori doesn’t mind giving Wakatoshi an extra-long hug at the end of the week. Even if it just makes the boy confused as to why.)
3
He’s at the corner store with his team after practice, trying to decide between getting a meat bun or ice cream, when he hears it.
Satori shouldn’t be able to recognize the voices of his old team by a few words. Their voices aren’t that distinct. He does, anyway.
The popsicle he was considering slips out of his hand and onto the floor. He freezes, staring at the wall and hoping that if he stays still — if he holds his breath long enough — they won't notice him. They’ll get what they need and leave without a second glance.
He’s never that lucky.
“Hey! It’s that guy!” One of them points out. Satori can’t see them, but he knows they’re talking about him anyway. He can feel the eyes on his back, and he tries to remind himself to suck in a breath.
It’s different now, Satori.
“It is! What was his name again?” Another boy asks, his volume normal this time.
At least they’re not yelling anymore. He’d hate for his teammates to hear this.
If they did, maybe they’d realize they were wrong. That he is a monster. That he doesn’t deserve them.
“You can hear us, right?” Someone else asks, and Satori tries to ignore them, attention returning to the freezer in front of him. He realizes just how cold he is from standing in front of the open freezer for so long.
Still, he can’t move away.
He can’t face them.
One of them places their hand on his shoulder and tries to turn Satori towards them. He plants his feet down, and either he’s gotten stronger or they’ve gotten weaker because they can’t move him. Instead, they resort to shaking him. “Hey, stop ignoring us!”
At this point, he doesn’t even think he can move. He’s like a deer in headlights, only able to tense up in preparation for what's about to happen. Satori feels another hand join them, this time on his hair, and he squeezes his eyes shut-
“Tendou? Are you coming?” Wakatoshi’s voice echoes through the store.
Satori snaps his eyes open and turns to look at where his voice his coming from.
At the same time, the hands leave him almost immediately.
He sucks in a breath, feeling the crowd retreat. “Yeah, Wakatoshi-kun! Just a minute!”
He grabs whatever is in front of him and closes the freezer door. As he runs over to Wakatoshi, who is now complaining about how long it’s taken him to decide what he wants, he looks back at his old “team”, who are now staring at him in surprise.
After a moment, Satori turns his attention back to Wakatoshi, feeling warm. “Thanks,” he whispers and doesn’t expect the boy to hear him.
As always, Ushijima hears him anyway and looks back at him, confused. “For what?”
Satori shakes his head and smiles.
+1
Honestly, Satori didn’t even realize what happened until he processed the bruising pain in his knuckles, but that doesn’t mean he wouldn’t do it again.
He barely slept last night. Shiratorizawa lost an important game over the weekend, and he couldn’t sleep without watching the game over and over again in his mind and finding everything he did wrong. Most of it isn’t his fault, really, but retrospect is a bitch and his conscience is chronically uneasy.
Satori woke up this morning, only an hour after he had finally fallen asleep. Groaning, he turned over in his pillow and ignored the wetness covering it and returning to his face. His eyes are mucky when he turns back to face the ceiling, and he has to rub them before he can actually see anything.
When he finally makes it out of his bed and to school, his stomach growls. He rolls his eyes and pulls a cheese stick out of his lunch to snack on in lieu of his forgotten breakfast. His first class went fine, but by the third, his eyes were fighting to close themselves and fall asleep. When the teacher calls his name to wake him up, he groans in frustration, earning him clean-up duty after school.
He bites his lip at that.
He’ll have to skip practice.
They lost the game this weekend, and Satori goes and skips the first practice they have after? That’s a great look for him. They’re going to think he’s lazy. That he puts no effort into the sport, and that, actually, they don’t need him.
They’ll realize they’re better off without the freak who’s currently slacking, and they’ll kick him off the team.
He shakes his head. That’s not true. He knows it’s not, because Semi cheered just as hard as he did when Satori learned a new play. Goshiki looks at him with the brightest eyes that are full of admiration. Reon shakes his hand after practice and gives him subtle nods of respect during their games. Wakatoshi, well. Wakatoshi is his best friend, and the ever-volleyball-brained boy wouldn’t be his friend if he didn’t think he was worth having on the team.
Still, Satori can’t bear to sit with Wakatoshi at lunch like they have ever since Wakatoshi first found him on the first day of school. He clenches his hands and resists the temptation of walking to their usual spot. Wakatoshi is going to be confused as to why he’s not there. He might even get worried. Guilt and shame engulf his being, but he just… can’t today.
He sits under the same tree as before and feels so alone. This was his choice, though, so he deals with it and pulls out his lunch even though the idea of breaking his routine of eating lunch with Wakatoshi deeply disturbs him.
The sky is clear without a cloud in sight when he looks up. It doesn’t cheer him up like it should, but the tightness in his chest does unravel just a bit.
That is, until he hears a group of students sitting at the table in front of him talking.
At first, he thinks they’re talking about him. “I mean, if they can’t even win a game, what use does he have?”
It’s the same rhetoric always thrown at him. This time, however, it’s also volleyball-centric. Usually, they don’t focus on that. They go for the easy thing — the looks, the behavior. They don’t bother to even know him past that.
When they continue, however, his body flushes in rage.
“Did you hear him in class today? All he could talk about was the game and improving. Why can’t he talk about anything el-”
They’re talking about Wakatoshi. They seal the suspicion a few words later by actually saying his name.
Now, Satori knows all about Wakatoshi’s awkwardness. He struggles with appropriate timing in the same way that Satori struggles with appropriate topics, and stays stuck on one topic in the span of time that Satori could jump through seven. Satori honestly kind of loves him for it. They complement each other.
Others don’t appreciate Wakatoshi’s lack of tact like he does, though, and the group in front of him makes that extremely evident.
He doesn’t realize what he’s doing until he’s done it. Somehow, he’s made his way over to the table, and his fist collides with the face of the guy currently spitting out Wakatoshi’s name. The boy reels back, shocked.
They can shit talk him all they want, but Wakatoshi? No way in hell is he letting that slide.
The entire group looks at him, a mix of surprise and outrage. He smiles with purpose.
He’ll be a monster for Wakatoshi-kun if it keeps him from having to hear this.
Satori leans closely to the boy he punched and grabs his hair, pulling him right up to his face. His eyes widen, and Satori can feel the others trying to scramble to figure out what to do. He makes it quick for them, still grinning as he speaks.
“If you talk about him like that again — actually, if you talk about him at all — there’s going to be more than your disgusting saliva on my knuckles.”
He releases the boy’s head suddenly, and it makes the boy lose his balance and fall against the friend behind him. To his other side, another guy stands up and gets a punch in before Satori can face him.
Satori, however, isn’t phased by this. He’s had worse than a weak asshole punching his face. He cups a hand under his definitely broken nose and smiles the same look that made everyone call him a monster throughout his life. Before the guy can go after him again, he walks away to find Wakatoshi-kun.
When he does, the boy panics and fusses over his nose. Satori simply waves him off and grabs one of his napkins to shove up his nose. “Hey, Wakatoshi-kun.” He greets, voice nasally at the lack of oxygen flowing through his nose. He purposefully twisted the tissues to look like a walrus.
He may not know how much he has helped Satori, but Satori is more than happy to return the favor anyway.