Chapter Text
Ushijima Wakatoshi is seven years old when he loses his first tooth.
One of his upper teeth had recently started feeling…looser than usual, if such a thing was possible. It wasn’t very loose, just loose enough that Wakatoshi could move it side to side if he really pushed at it with his fingers. Then his mother would tell him that it was unhygienic to touch his mouth with his bare hands, and then he would stop.
He’s at a family reunion of sorts, for his oldest aunt’s fortieth birthday. He’s been put with the rest of the children, and rather unfortunately, there is nobody there that is his age. His youngest cousin is five years older than him, and his oldest cousin is twenty one, old enough to talk with his mother about jobs and whatever else adults talk about.
There’s nothing for him to really do. His cousins gave him a picture book to look at, a book about farm animals, which Wakatoshi finished in about five minutes. His younger cousins are watching a TV show on the TV, one involving a lot of kissing, and his older cousins are all involved in some intense and violent videogame.
So he decides to amuse himself in what is really his last option: wiggling his loose tooth around. He vaguely wonders if it’ll fall out if he wiggles it around enough, but then comes to the conclusion that it probably wouldn’t. His teeth are hard, dependable things. They didn’t break when he crunched on carrot sticks or pretzels or bread. They wouldn’t fall out.
“Hey, Waka-chan,” one of his cousins—his name is Saito—says as he peers at him over the couch. “Whatcha doin’?”
“My tooth is loose,” Wakatoshi says, immediately taking his hands out of his mouth. He doesn’t want his cousins to shout at him like his mother did.
“Oh, is it?” Saito slowly begins to smile—Wakatoshi’s not sure why. “Mind showing me?”
Wakatoshi, obediently, opens his mouth and wiggles the tooth with his fingers.
“Huh. Cool.” Saito nudges another one of their cousins—Ginji. “Hey, Ginji, you wanna show Waka-chan that magic trick we showed Fumiko?”
Ginji shakes his bangs out of his hair and smiles, in the same way Saito is smiling. “Sure. It’ll be fun, right Waka-chan?”
Wakatoshi nods, his small seven year old mind telling him that his cousins are older than him—they would know what fun is. Right?
—
Evidently, the magic trick involves the three of them standing at the door to their aunt’s backyard. It’s one of those heavy doors, the ones that slam closed and require you to shove your entire body against it to open. Ginji is holding it open, with Saito tying a piece of dental floss to the doorknob.
“Now, the important part of this magic trick is that you don’t move,” Saito tells him as he ties the other end of the dental floss to Wakatoshi’s loose tooth. Wakatoshi isn’t sure how this is going to be a magic trick, but he trusts his older cousins and their judgment.
“Alright.” Saito dusts his hands off and moves to stand next to Ginji. “Here comes the magic. Watch the door carefully, okay? Three…two…one!”
On one, Ginji lets go of the door, allowing it to close with a loud bang! The sound makes Wakatoshi flinch back. He still doesn’t see what the magic trick is.
Then he notices something…swinging? It’s hanging from the doorknob, jostling back and forth. It’s small, and white, and…
At that moment, Wakatoshi tastes something…strange in his mouth. He puts his finger to where his wiggly tooth is and finds—
There’s nothing there.
His finger comes back red.
Saito lets out a laugh, holding the small swinging thing between his fingers.
In between his cousin’s fingers is Wakatoshi’s tooth.
“Nice magic trick, huh, Waka-chan?”
The scream of horror that Wakatoshi lets out is loud enough that the neighbor’s dog starts to bark.
—
Wakatoshi hasn’t cried since—well, since he was an infant, and even then, all his relatives talked about how little he cried, how well-behaved he was.
He is anything but right now.
“Stop crying, stop crying,” his mother hisses as she tries to shove pieces of tissue into his mouth. “Everyone is watching, Wakkun. Be a good boy and stop crying.”
He can’t stop crying, not long enough for his mother to stop the bleeding, not long enough for him to hear his aunts’ explanations of what’s going on, not long enough to see his cousins still snickering.
Oddly enough, everyone seems more hung up on the fact that he keeps crying, more so than the fact that his cousins essentially ripped his tooth out of his mouth. He didn’t even know teeth could bleed! He’s seven!
“It happens to everyone, Wakatoshi-chan,” one of his aunts coos in what he thinks is supposed to be a calming voice, but Wakatoshi can’t hear her over the sound of his own wailing. “Your baby teeth fall out and are replaced by grown up teeth!”
What? That’s stupid! Why would he need new teeth? His old ones were just fine! Why did they need to become wiggly and fall out?!
“Apologize to your cousin!” One of his uncles grabs Saito and Ginji by the ears and drags them forward. Both mumble out half hearted apologies before pushing through the crowd of adults and running off.
“There, there, bite down,” his mother says, finally having managed to wrestle the tissue into his mouth. Wakatoshi bites down, feeling the flimsy paper immediately soak up all his blood and spit and tears. He just wants to go home.
But there’s still an hour left of his aunt’s birthday party. So he miserably trods back upstairs to find a dark closet to hide in until the party is over. He can entertain himself using nothing but his own thoughts. That’s fine.
But the night still holds more misery in store for Ushijima Wakatoshi. He turns the corner to find Saito and Ginji prying open a window.
“Hey, Waka-chan,” Saito says, that same smile still playing around his lips. “Y’know what you do with baby teeth?”
Wakatoshi does not know. Wakatoshi is seven years old. He doesn’t know anything about the world. He doesn’t know why his older cousins decided to rip out his tooth because—because what? Because it was funny?
“This came from your top lip. You bury your top teeth, so the next one can grow in big and strong.” Saito holds up Wakatoshi’s missing tooth. It’s white and red all over. Now that some of the initial fear is gone, Wakatoshi wonders what it might look like if he rinsed it and cleaned it. It was part of him, up until fifteen minutes ago.
“Go bury it, yeah?”
And with that, Saito throws Wakatoshi’s first ever baby tooth out of the window.
Wakatoshi doesn’t cry this time.
But he does run as fast as his small seven year old feet can towards the window, reaching his hand out in some vain, desperate attempt to catch the tooth before it falls down.
He fails. He gets to watch as his tooth clatters down the concrete, tumbling into the soil of Wakatoshi’s aunt’s flowers, never to be seen again.
The sound of his cousins laughing at him will echo in his mind for a very, very long time.
—
He starts school a week later. He’s afraid to smile. He’s so very afraid to smile.
“Don’t be like that,” his mother chides as she tilts her camera to find the perfect angle to take a picture. “Smile, Wakkun, smile!”
Wakatoshi does not smile. He attempts his best try at a close-lipped smile, but he glances at the pictures a few moments later and decides that he doesn’t like that at all. It looks like he’s in pain. His mother says as much.
"Wakkun, try smiling with only your top teeth, can you do that for mama?"
Wakatoshi tries again, moving his lower lip to cover his lower teeth. He doesn't bother looking at the pictures his mother took. At the very least, she seems happier with the new photos.
"Don't try so hard, Wakkun, just act natural." His mother smiles, a beautiful one, probably to show him how he should do it. "You try too hard!" She taps his nose, laughing as she does.
I'm not trying. This is just how my face is.
His tongue keeps migrating to the spot where his tooth should be. His mother tells him to stop being so nervous. “Other kids will have missing teeth as well. Nothing to be scared about.”
His mother wasn't there to see his older cousins laughing as he propped himself up on a chair, looking into the bathroom mirror, trying to practice his smiling, stretching his lips around and squinting at his reflection.
It's an ugly reflection. His mother says it's a beautiful one.
He’s still scared.
—
The first few hours of his first ever day of school pass in a blur of introductions. Nobody is really keen to talk to him; he is tall and big for his age, he responds to questions with one word answers, and he has not smiled once. Everyone must be weirded out by him.
Well—at the very least, he is not the weirdest kid in his class. That honor would belong to a red-headed kid with a bowl cut, wide eyes, a smile that looks more like a leer, and a name that’s—
“Ten-dou Sa-to-ri!” the kid shouts, planting his hands on his hips as he speaks.
“He looks like a lizard person,” one of the girls next to him whispers.
“Yeah, like a monster!” her friend whispers back.
“So weird…”
“Creepy!”
Tendou seems to hear them, as he suddenly snaps his head in their direction to give them a bright, toothy smile. The girls shudder and turn away. Wakatoshi wonders how Tendou knew they were talking about him; he’s too far away for him to have heard them whisper.
Wakatoshi disagrees with the girls’ words. Tendou Satori may be strange-looking, but he is neither weird nor creepy. If he were any braver, he’d stand up for his classmate.
He is not brave. He can’t even smile at his classmates.
—
“U-shi-ji-ma?”
Wakatoshi looks up from where he’s bumping a volleyball against the wall. It’s recess. None of the other kids invited him to play volleyball with them—he sees a couple of them aimlessly tossing a volleyball around, but he would bet that none of them actually know how to play well—so he figured he would use this time to practice his receives. The ball misses his hands and bounces to the concrete, rolling to rest against his foot.
It’s Tendou Satori, the boy with the strange hair and the strange eyes and the strange smile. Tendou Satori, the supposed weird creepy lizard monster.
Tendou Satori, who is currently smiling at him .
"Whatcha doin'?" Tendou asks, tilting his head to the side. Wakatoshi's sure that he's not even blinking as he stares at him.
"Practicing my receives," Wakatoshi says, picking the ball up and bumping it against his fists again, and Tendou gasps in delight.
"So you do speak!" he says as he watches Wakatoshi receive the ball against the wall again and again and again. "You didn't talk at all during class except to introduce yourself."
Tendou watches him in silence for a couple moments more, as Wakatoshi concentrates on his receives. The silence is then broken by Tendou saying: "You're pretty good at this! You should play with the other kids. Y'know, instead of just doing this by yourself. You look sad and lonely, all the way over here."
"Mm." Tendou is as blunt as only a seven year old can be. Wakatoshi appreciates it. He's blunt as well. "I am better than all the other kids. I would beat them. They would just get angry at me for beating them."
The red-haired boy barks out a laugh. "You're really that good, Ushijima?"
“Yes. Would you like me to show you?”
“Yeah! Yeah! Show me!” Tendou claps, then laughs.
“Okay. Hold this.” Wakatoshi throws the ball to Tendou. Tendou catches it—he looks as though he’ll be knocked over, but he catches it—and eagerly awaits Wakatoshi’s next instructions.
It is then that Wakatoshi hesitates. He has never played volleyball with anyone but his father. What if he is actually not as good as his father says he is? What if he just makes a fool of himself in front of the one person who actually approached him of their own free will?
“So do I just hold it, or…?” Tendou throws the ball up, laughing as it hits him on the head on the way down.
Right.
“Toss it like that,” Wakatoshi says, backing up to the brick wall. “But stay right there.” Tendou nods enthusiastically, tossing the ball up with both hands.
Wakatoshi waits, watching the ball curve in a tight arc. His father hasn’t yet taught him how to spike the ball; he’s only seen it on television. He’s tried to do it before. He’s never fully gotten it right before.
He has to hope he gets it right now.
Three…two…one…
Go.
SMACK!
The sound of his left palm hitting the volleyball has never been more welcome.
The ball bounds all the way to the playground equipment, startling a couple of kids into looking up. It’s never gone that far before.
When Wakatoshi’s feet hit the ground, the first thing that he registers is that his palm stings, in the best way possible. A warm sense of success fills his chest, and despite himself, he feels himself smiling—
Oh, right. His smile.
Tendou would laugh at his smile. Just like his cousins. Just like his mother.
He can feel his smile fading away as quickly as it came.
The second thing he notices is Tendou absolutely screaming his head off.
“THAT WAS AMAZING!” he screams, crashing into Wakatoshi, grabbing him by the shoulders and shaking him vigorously. "How did you do that?! Can you teach me? Please? Pleaaaaaaaaaase??? Ushiwaka, please?"
Wakatoshi barely recognizes the new nickname he's gained, he’s more focused on Tendou's smiling face.
It's not a bad smile. Wakatoshi can see one snaggletooth near the front of his mouth, different from all the rest of his teeth. He likes how big Tendou’s smile is, how it shows off all his teeth, how unafraid Tendou is to show it. It's a good smile. If he looks like a monster, he's a friendly one.
"Yeah. Okay. I can try."
Tendou lets out a whoop of delight, clapping his hands together. "Yeah! First day at school, and I already got a new best friend. I'm pretty awesome." He tilts his head, staring at Wakatoshi with those wide eyes of his. "Well, not more awesome than you, Ushiwaka. You're like, the coolest person to ever walk on this earth."
Coolest person to ever walk on this earth.
"I don't think that's true, Tendou."
Tendou smiles once again. It's a good smile . "It is to me, Ushiwaka!"
—
He likes gardening with his mother.
It’s a thing they do, on Friday nights, on the weekends, on Monday mornings. It’s a part of their routine, his mother gets the trowel, Wakatoshi gets the watering can, and they garden together.
It’s mostly just his mother trimming her plants, pulling out weeds, fussing over her flower placement. But he does get to water the plants, stand over them as he watches the droplets of water trickle down the foliage.
His mother likes beautiful things. The flowers she tends to are no different. They’re all bright, vibrant colors, pink, purple, blue, yellow. And they all require different amounts of light, water, soil, care. If the sunlight is too much, the flower will shrivel up. If the water is too much, the flower will drown. If the soil is wrong, the flower will simply refuse to grow. And if the flower is not tended to enough, the flower will run wild.
“But with the right amount of everything,” his mother says. “They will grow up to be big and strong and beautiful.”
Wakatoshi nods, the water sloshing around in his watering can. Some of it spills over onto the flowers, and his mother immediately moves him away from them. He feels a stab of shame; his mother had just told him that all of the flowers require proper care, and overwatering them is not proper care at all.
“Be more careful,” his mother scolds him. “You’re never careful enough, Wakkun.” She gives him a teasing smile, shaking her head. “So clumsy.”
“Sorry, mother,” Wakatoshi murmurs. “The flowers are beautiful today.” He finds it interesting, how such beautiful things can sprout from tiny seeds, how something so big can come from something so small. He hopes he can be like that someday—well, he wouldn’t be a flower. Flowers are too delicate, too soft, too beautiful, everything that Wakatoshi is not. He hopes he would be a tree, strong and reliable and dependable. He hopes that his roots would run deep, anchoring him to the ground, providing him with stability.
“Mm, yes.” His mother digs up a weed, throwing it onto the pile that’s slowly building up next to her. “Did you know that each flower has its own special meaning?”
“No, mother.” Wakatoshi stares around at the different flowers. It would make sense; all of them are different and unique. “Please tell me about them.”
His mother hums, happy to have an opportunity to hear the sound of her own voice. She points her trowel at each of the different flowers, listing off their meanings. Carnations mean fascination, distinction, and love. Azaleas mean patience and modesty. Irises mean good news, glad tidings, and loyalty. Hydrangeas mean pride. Morning glories mean willful promises. Forget-me-nots mean true love.
There’s roses amongst her flowers as well. Red roses, pink roses, white roses. He already knows what roses mean, obviously: love. There’s a single red rose that’s the exact shade of Tendou’s hair.
“This is the color of Tendou’s hair,” Wakatoshi notes out loud, poking the flower with the tip of his finger. His mother stops pulling up weeds, staring curiously over at him.
“Who is Tendou?” she asks, and Wakatoshi is very sure that he’s already brought up his new best friend, but he reminds his mother anyway.
“He is my new best friend.” Wakatoshi stares down at a worm making its way through the dirt. “Tendou Satori. He has red hair just like this rose.”
His mother nods her head, slowly. “That’s good, that you’re making new friends, Wakatoshi. Very good. I hope he’s a good friend to you.”
—
Tendou is not a bad friend.
Tendou is—Tendou is a very, very good friend.
Wakatoshi teaches Tendou how to play volleyball during recess and their lunch break, before school, after school, on the weekends. He's not very good yet, but Wakatoshi supposes that's because he's not a very good teacher. That's fine. He'll just wait until they play volleyball in gym class. Most of the practice just devolves into Tendou getting tired and collapsing onto the ground and Wakatoshi practicing by himself, anyway.
Tendou repays Wakatoshi with snacks, manga, disposable trinkets, strange rocks that he finds. Wakatoshi keeps all of them. It's nice, coming to school knowing that there is someone he can always spend his time with. Someone reliable.
They make an odd pair—Wakatoshi is one of the tallest and biggest kids in their class, and one of the most intimidating. Nobody comes to talk to him—he hears whispers about how he looks like a heartless, angry giant, how he could probably beat any one of them up without breaking a sweat. He doesn't really understand why; he would never beat up anyone, that's not nice. On the other hand, Tendou is lanky, skinny, and prone to staring and smiling creepily at people. 'Monster' is synonymous with 'Tendou', and the boy wears it like a badge of pride.
They get teased plenty, mostly when kids think they're not looking. Children are mean. They work out a system. When someone calls Tendou a monster, Wakatoshi is there, silently lurking behind them until they notice and run away in fear. When someone calls Wakatoshi heartless, Tendou is there, getting up in their face with his wide eyes and his smile that looks more like a snarl and his endless, endless questions.
His grandmother says that he should stay away, even though she knows nothing about Tendou. She says that he’s named after a satori , a mind-reading monkey monster that dwells within the mountains. Wakatoshi knows that this mythical satori has nothing at all to do with his friend, Tendou Satori, but his grandmother insists that the boy is a bad omen.
“They can read your mind, Wakatoshi-kun, and they can say what you’re thinking before you yourself know it. They feast on your liver, your heart. They take and take until there is nothing left of you. Do you really want to befriend a boy named after something so horrible?”
He thinks about what his grandmother says, often. He never follows her advice. He thinks there is zero chance that Tendou would ever turn into a monkey monster, read his mind, or eat his heart. His grandmother has always been superstitious. The rest of his family as well.
His strange friendship with Tendou Satori continues, well into and past their second year of elementary school.
—
He likes playing volleyball with his father.
It’s a thing they do, every day, after he gets home from school and his father gets home from work. His father teaches him how to serve, how to set, how to receive, how to block.
He likes all of it. But he likes spiking the most, though.
His father tells him stories about volleyball while they practice.
“Y’know, son, our ace was literally the best in all of Japan,” his father says as he throws the ball and catches it with one hand. His right hand—his father spikes the ball and plays volleyball with his right hand. Like every other volleyball player. He sends the ball over to Wakatoshi in a practiced arc, and Wakatoshi receives it perfectly. They bump the ball back and forth, back and forth, steady as routine. “By the time we were in our third year of high school, he was already well over six feet tall. But his height wasn’t his only weapon.”
This seems counterintuitive to Wakatoshi’s nine year old mind. All the best volleyball players were tall, and strong, and could send spikes over the net in the blink of an eye. Strength, speed, and stamina. Those were the most important characteristics of a good volleyball player.
“He ultimately made you feel like that, no matter what, if you just set him the ball—” And here, his father’s hands come above his head, to set the ball. “He’d score! It felt like he could pull anything off.”
His father catches the ball, stopping their game. “Also—he would get you so pumped just to play with him!”
Something about his father’s words resonates with him. He doesn’t fully understand all of it quite yet, but it’s the beginning of something .
“It would be for the best if you joined a strong team,” his father tells him the next day. “It’s the kind of environment where you can thrive and learn from powerful and…knowledgeable people.” He serves the ball, and Wakatoshi receives it. “And once you gain strength, you’ll be ready to play against all sorts of opponents.”
The puzzle pieces are beginning to click together.
“Strong opponents. Unconventional opponents. Anyone. And in return, all of them will make you even stronger.” Wakatoshi receives and receives, over and over again. “And actually, that can apply to all walks of life too.”
His father catches the ball, scratching the back of his neck. “Although—it’s up to you, of course, if you wanna pursue the sport or not. It’s your choice.”
His father’s question seems like an absurd one. Of course Wakatoshi wants to play volleyball. He wants to be like his father, but more than that, he wants to be like the ace from his father’s high school days. He wants to be the one that serves as a beacon of strength for others, the one that motivates somebody to keep on going. He wants to be brave .
“In the end, though, I just hope you come to love volleyball. Just like me.”
Later that day, Wakatoshi will pore through his father’s high school yearbooks. It will be on that day that he finds out about the private school called Shiratorizawa Academy .
—
It's in his third year when something goes terribly wrong.
They've finally learnt volleyball in gym class. Wakatoshi is there to finally witness the moment where Tendou successfully blocks a ball, there to finally watch a light come into Tendou's eyes, there to watch Tendou block ball after ball after ball with an instinct he previously thought impossible. Wakatoshi never even thought to teach Tendou how to block a ball—but in his defense, Tendou always wanted to learn how to spike the ball. He thought that was all there was to volleyball. Wakatoshi supposes he is not a good teacher at all, nothing like his father.
"Blocking's so much fun!" Tendou says cheerfully as they walk back to their classes. "I finally get why you like volleyball so much, Ushiwaka!"
"Mm." Wakatoshi nods in agreement. It's nice to finally have someone teaching him volleyball again—his father left a couple months ago. Left to where, Wakatoshi has no idea. All he knows is that he's never coming back.
"It's for the best." His mother had said, smiling widely. It looked forced, like the kind Wakatoshi used to pull when he was younger, the kind that his mother never liked because they didn't look natural enough. "It's for the best, Wakkun."
He doesn’t know what happened to his father, but if his mother tells him that it’s for the best, he figures that it really must be for the best. Even if his father will never play volleyball with him ever again.
That’s fine. He can make peace with that.
He has Tendou.
"Can I come over after school?" Tendou asks as they take their seats. He’s met Wakatoshi’s parents before. He must have noticed by now that his father is never around anymore. If he does notice something, he doesn’t mention it. Wakatoshi is grateful for that. "I wanna try more blocking!"
"Hm. Okay."
"Ha ha!" Tendou wraps his arm around Wakatoshi's shoulders, pumping his fist into the air. "Ushiwaka and Tendou, the volleyball miracle boys!"
"Mm." Tendou had recently came up with the nickname 'Miracle Boy Wakatoshi' for him when they were swinging on the swings last night, in the park. He doesn't quite understand it—it's longer than his actual name, so it can't really count as a nickname like Ushiwaka does—but it was the thought that counted, and Wakatoshi wholeheartedly appreciated the sentiment. It was just so Tendou of him.
"Tendou, sit down!"
"Sorry, miss!" Tendou shouts back as he scurries away to his seat. Across the classroom, he gives Wakatoshi a beaming smile and a thumbs up.
Yes, Wakatoshi appreciated Tendou for simply being Tendou .
—
They start out fine, like how they normally do. Receives. Serves. Wakatoshi isn't really sure how to practice blocking, so he just throws the ball at Tendou’s face, and Tendou blocks it with his strange sense of intuition. He tries throwing it from different angles, bouncing it off the ground, but Tendou always manages to block it. There seems to be a method to his madness.
Until it doesn't.
Wakatoshi gives volleyball his full focus. Whatever he is doing, he gives it his full attention, as it deserves. Especially when it comes to volleyball.
Tendou does not give volleyball his full focus. Tendou gets distracted very easily, by quite literally everything.
Wakatoshi throws the ball at Tendou's face. Tendou doesn't realize the ball's coming towards him until it's too late.
"TENDOU—!"
The ball, tossed perfectly by Wakatoshi, lands perfectly into Tendou's face. It knocks him off balance, and Wakatoshi swears Tendou's moving in slow motion. Tendou rocks backward, then falls forward.
Tendou shrieks, crashing face-first into the cold, unforgiving concrete of Wakatoshi's driveway. The ball bounces pitifully down into the road. Wakatoshi couldn't care less about it.
"Are you okay?" Wakatoshi asks, running over to his fallen friend. He's not quite sure what to do—his hands seem to move by themselves, grabbing Tendou by the arms and shaking him. "Tendou, are you okay?"
"Huh? Whuh? Oh yeah, I'm fine." Tendou holds up his scratched-up arm. "My arm helped protect my face. I can put a bandaid on it. It's fine."
There's something dripping from Tendou's mouth.
Something red—
"Tendou," Wakatoshi says slowly, fearfully, staring at the trail of red dribbling down Tendou's mouth. "Your...your tooth...."
"Hm?" Tendou looks down, spotting a small white thing on the concrete. "Oh yeah! My tooth! Huh, that was a wiggly one— oof! "
"I'm sorry," Wakatoshi says as he wraps his arms tightly around Tendou in his best approximation of a hug. He doesn’t know what he should do. He needs someone to tell him what to do. "I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm so sorry, I'm—"
You just knocked out your best friend's tooth. You just knocked out Tendou's tooth. You're a bad friend. You're such a bad friend. Tendou's never gonna want to speak to you again. Tendou should never speak to you ever again.
"Ushiwaka?" Tendou asks slowly. This is probably the most emotion Wakatoshi has ever shown in front of him. "Hey, I'm—I'm fine. Are you—are you crying?"
Wakatoshi is crying. It's less hysterical than that day two years ago, with just small tears gathering at the corners of his eyes, and more sniffling than anything. It's stupid. He doesn't even know why he's doing this. He’s supposed to think rationally, always, like his mother has told him. This is not rational.
"Hey, it's okay," Tendou says, fighting his way out of Wakatoshi's ironclad grip. "It's okay. I'm okay. I'm not hurt or anything. That was—that wasn't your fault. Or maybe it was your fault for throwing it directly into my face—"
"You weren't paying attention," Wakatoshi mumbles.
"Oh yeah. Uh. Sorry for not paying attention." Tendou gives him a few hard slaps on the back. Wakatoshi thinks this is his way of trying to give him a hug. He's grateful they're both equally bad at hugging. "But I'm okay! Look!"
Tendou pulls back and smiles, showing all of his teeth. There's one missing, one of the very front ones. Tendou's tongue pokes at the hole, giggling as he does. "Coooooool."
Wakatoshi's breath begins to even out. How could Tendou still smile so brightly? The kids at school will make fun of him even more.
Tendou's never been afraid to hide. There's no reason for him to be afraid now.
He's brave.
Wakatoshi wishes he could be brave like that.
"You wanna bury it with me?" Tendou asks, getting to his feet, holding up his tooth with interest, turning it over in his fingers. "That's what you do with baby teeth."
Wakatoshi shakily nods. "Alright. Okay."
And Tendou smiles, baring his teeth, and Wakatoshi swears it's brighter than the setting sun.