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intro no.4: bokuto

  "You're so stupid, Bokuto," the group of kids laughed as Bokuto fell over, scraping his knee on the playground. He smiled, laughing back. Bokuto Koutarou was never offended by the things everyone said to him until he found out he was supposed to be.

  "Hey, shut up," Kuroo, Bokuto's best friend, yelled, "no he's not. Get up, Bo."

  Bokuto had gotten up hesitantly before Kuroo grabbed his wrist, dragging him away from the group of laughing boys that were shouting names at Bokuto that he had never heard before. "Kuroo, I think they liked me! They were laughing and everything! Why are you so angry?" 

  Kuroo stopped and turned around, and Bokuto saw tears shining in his cat-like eyes. Bokuto's own golden eyes grew twice their size as he tried to wipe his friend's tears away in confusion. "Why are you crying??" Bokuto asked, his own tears starting to emerge from the mere sight of his best friend being unhappy.

  "Those kids weren't trying to be your friend," Kuroo said, a sob escaping his throat as he aggressively wiped at his tears, "they're being mean to you, Bo. Calling you names. I don't like it when they call you those things. You shouldn't, either. You are really smart. You even helped me get an A on our history quiz!" Kuroo put his hands on his friend's shoulders and hugged him as tightly as possible. "You're the smartest guy I know," Kuroo whispered, looking his best friend in the eye. "I promise."

  And Bokuto, in his six years of being alive, had never heard anyone call him smart before. And he smiled as widely as he ever had because he knew  that from that moment on, Kuroo would be his best friend forever.

  However, the name-calling never did quite change from then on. Bokuto's grades had been terrible growing up, even though everyone knew how hard he tried in class and on his homework. For hours, Bokuto worked with tutor after tutor (which eventually just turned into Kuroo due to money issues), yet they always found him spacing off or drumming his pencils against the desk or bouncing his legs, his mind going off into faraway worlds where him and Kuroo could just play music and have fun. It didn't help that his best friend and him did stupid things outside of school, too. Jumping off of roofs into pools strayed to bad skateboarding incidents strayed to dangerously violent pranks that left each other in shambles of "ow" and insane laughter.  Kuroo, being at the top of his class and taking college-level chemistry from 13 years old, got away with these stunts.

  Bokuto, being dyslexic and having a terrible case of ADHD that put him towards the bottom, was shamed for being just another normal teenage boy.

  So, Instead, Bokuto worked out. He would study for hours at a time, and when everything in his head got too crazy, he would let out all of his stress and anger and confusion into working out and playing the drums. And nothing ever changed. The bigger he got, the stronger he got, the harder he tried, the words people said to him in the halls and on the street never ceased to tear the boy down, even when he got his first A on an exam his sophomore year of school, even when his mother told him that she was proud. And so he just kept working, and working, and everything was too much and he was lifting too much and reading too much and when he had slammed down his weights and his books and his drumsticks, yelling, "I'm so fucking stupid," Kuroo had punched him square in the face.

  Bokuto looked at his best friend in shock, a person who had never laid a violent finger on him. But Kuroo's face showed nothing but sheer anger at Bokuto as he said, "No one is allowed to call you stupid. Not even you. Don't ever say it again."

  They never spoke about it again. And Kuroo never apologized. And Bokuto didn't want him to.

  A year later, he had been practicing a song with Kuroo, who had taken up guitar and cello around the same time Bokuto did with drums in elementary school, when his first boyfriend came and found him in the band room. "Hi," a fifteen year old Bokuto said, his cheeks tinting red and smile widening at the sight of the boy with wavy, long hair and chocolate-colored eyes.