Dark Places | S. Tendou

FLASHBACK*

[TW REMINDER: Contains themes of bullying, verbal abuse, and physical abuse. Please skip if you'd prefer to avoid this type of content, thanks! This is going to be the only chapter written in Tendou's POV.]

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Tendou sat cross-legged on the living room floor, watching his favourite cartoon. It would have been far more comfortable to sit on the couch just behind him, but he was holding a chocolate chip cookie in his hands, and his mother always got upset if she found crumbs on the cushions. It was a lesson that Tendou only needed to learn once.

Normally, Tendou ate at the kitchen table, but he could hear his mother and father fighting about something, probably bills, or who would pick him up from school later, and he was reluctant to put himself in the middle of it. It was either he risked getting cookie crumbs on the floor—which was only marginally better than the cushions because, at least, he could try to pick them all up or brush them underneath the couch to buy time—or he risked getting pulled into their argument if he sat at the kitchen table. He hardly had to think about which one he preferred. His parents always found a way to blame their problems on him. Life wasn't challenging, or expensive, or difficult, until there was the burden of a child.

Every once in a while, Tendou wondered if other children had to pay as much careful attention as he did to where and how they ate their snacks, but then he would brush it off and return to business as usual, trying to enjoy his cartoons over the sound of his parents' yelling at each other in the other room.

He continued eating. He even spared a smile for his favourite cartoon character on the screen. His parents had gotten so loud that he could no longer hear the dialogue, but that was no problem. He would just have to make up his own dialogue again. He had become rather fond of doing it.

"Time for school." His mother said, harsh and to the point. She poked her head into the living room but, upon seeing the half-eaten cookie in her son's hands, she was paying more attention to the floor than to his face.

Tendou scurried to his feet, turning off the television and then hoisting his backpack on. He followed his mother to the car with a skip in his step. He was thrilled that she would be the one driving him to school today. She was frightening when she got upset but, at least, she very rarely laid a hand on him. He couldn't even remember the last time it happened.

Which he couldn't say about his father.

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His mother could be cruel in her own way, but he had to thank her, really, for giving him the gift of perception, of looking too closely at every little detail, picking and prying it apart to ensure it would never come back and bite him.

The volleyball ricocheted of the tips of Tendou's fingers, slamming down into the spiker's court. He smiled through the net, eyes shining, mouth held agape in awe, as the receiver who dove to retrieve it glared up at him from where they had fallen. There was something about that expression, that look of anger, of a sore loser who couldn't accept defeat, that Tendou loved.

Even if that love made him hated.

"Don't worry," the spiker said, helping the receiver, who was still glaring at Tendou, back onto his feet. "We'll play again after school without him."

"Why can't I come?" Tendou asked innocently. It was difficult to keep the desperation to understand, or the deep-seeded desire to be accepted and included, from showing on his youthful face.

He wouldn't hone that skill until much later in life.

Now there were two boys glaring at him.

"Because you're too weird." One of them said.