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Tendou's classmates don't like him.
He doesn't actually care, but his teacher does, and so she's constantly trying to force the other kids to interact with him. It doesn't really work out for anyone, and Tendou doesn't know why she keeps trying, but she gets upset if he goes off to play by himself, so he doesn't argue with her anymore.
The other kids make jokes about the way he looks. They tell him that he looks like a monster.
Tendou thinks monsters are pretty cool, so he's not really sure what their problem is.
His problem is that they've decided not to leave him alone.
Tendou preferred it when they were ignoring him and not letting him play with them. He didn't actually want to play with them, so it's not like it was bothering him. But this? The way they've started poking him and pulling on his shirt and yelling in his ears? Tendou really doesn't like it.
But they don't listen when he tells them to stop, and so he's not sure what to do about it.
The teacher is reading and he's supposed to be listening. So are the kids behind him, but instead they're whispering in his ears and tugging on his hair, the girl next to him keeps on bumping against his arm. He knows that if he tells the teacher, then they'll just bother him twice as much later, so he keeps his mouth shut.
He keeps his mouth shut until he can't handle it anymore, and then he just... snaps.
It takes him an hour to calm down, and after he has, the teacher doesn't press him to go play with the other kids. It wouldn't do any good anyway, they won't let him get within arm's length of him, they've all moved their seats as far away from him as they can without getting in trouble.
The teacher tells him that he has to wait until everyone else is gone because she wants to have a "conference" with his mom.
The three of them have been sitting for a while, but no one is saying anything. Tendou has his back to the adults, he doesn't actually care what they have to say, and it's more interesting to face the window and wave his hand in front of his face, to watch the way the light moves as he hums quietly to himself.
"Satori... doesn't get along well with the other students." His teacher says. He's not interested in what they're saying, but that doesn't mean that he can't hear them. "They've... they've taken to calling him a monster."
"What?" his mom asks, her voice is quieter than it usually is.
"There was a bit of an incident today... Satori threw a fit? It seems to be what set them off. I'm terribly sorry, I tried to make them stop, but... with the way he was acting... screaming and hitting himself on the head, it's just..."
She breaks off and Tendou glances over his shoulder and sees his mom's face turn as red as his hair.
"Maybe you should consider taking him to a doctor?" The teacher suggests hesitantly, when Tendou's mom doesn't say anything. "Or a church?"
Tendou and his mom leave in a hurry after that, and in the end, no one does or says anything. His mom doesn't take him anywhere, and the teacher stops trying to make the other kids play with him.
Tendou's a lot happier that way, but he doesn't like how no one at school except his teacher calls him by his actual name anymore. (But even her, sometimes, when she thinks he isn't listening, he hears her saying that maybe he's been possessed.)
His mom tells him not to mind it, that's there's nothing wrong with him. But sometimes Tendou thinks back to the look on her burning red face and wonders if maybe there's something wrong with him after all.
-
Nothing changes until years later.
After Tendou's seen a volleyball match on the television, it's all he can think about, all he can talk about. It's one of the coolest things he's seen in a while, almost as cool as the manga in Shounen Jump, and it's exciting.
His mom listens to talk about it for hours, until she gets tired and tells him to stop. He's not actually ready to stop talking about it and so instead he just goes to his room and talks to himself about it.
Later, she tells him that there's a volleyball club at his school where he'd be able to play.
"Maybe you'll be able to make some friends there! The other kids there love volleyball too."
By now Tendou knows that that's nothing but wishful thinking, but he does want to play and so he goes anyway.
He shouldn't have gone.
"Go away, don't you know monsters can't play on human teams?" Someone says, and the groups laugh and Tendou is left on the sidelines, nails curled into the palms of his hands, pissed as hell. None of the adults say anything. He just wants to play.
He pesters his mom until she buys him a volleyball, and he teaches himself. Serving the ball against the wall and receiving it when it bounces back. He tells himself that it's good practice for whenever he'll finally be able to play.
He is going to play one day. The right way, on a team and everything.
He doesn't give a shit about what they want. He'll make them let him play.
When he finally forces his way into a game, it's just as good as he thought it would be. Both teams try to avoid letting him get the ball, but with a sport like volleyball, it doesn't work out that easily. He doesn't care about that, or the fact that they all still call him a monster. He can play now, so why would he care about something like that?
The first time he blocks the ball it feels amazing.
Blocking wasn't something that he was able to practice by himself, but he manages it anyway, and when his feet touch the ground after the ball falls, he looks at the face of the kid who has been bullying him since first grade and feels a rush of vindication.
"That's what you get for treating me like shit." He thinks to himself, and smirks.
Tendou finds out quickly that if you're good at helping the team win, they let you keep playing. So Tendou keeps on blocking, and every time he manages it successfully he gets that thrill, even if he's playing against teams full of people who he's never met before. It's a good feeling, and Tendou wants to stay on the court for as long as possible and hold onto that feeling up until the moment where he wins.
-
When he's choosing a high school, and decides to go to Shiratorizowa, he's not expecting anything new.
He figures that it'll be the same wary tension between him and his teammates as always, where he keeps an eye out for when they'll attack and they gawk at his differences.
He's not expecting Ushijima.
Tendou stares at him with a distant sort of awe and disbelief. Not only is the other first year a great player, but there's something in the slight swaying of his body and the way he handles the volleyball that screams out to Tendou that the two of them are the same.
Tendou watches him throughout practice and then decides that he's going to stick close to Ushijima, just to see what comes out of it.
Ushijima doesn't talk much, or emote much, or seem to get out much, but Tendou doesn't actually mind. He's never been good at letting other people talk in conversations, and Ushijima doesn't seem to be good at remembering to speak during conversations. So Tendou talks and Ushijima listens, offering his two cents when he remembers to, even if it's obvious he has no idea what Tendou is talking about most of the time.
"You two don't seem to match." One of the third years says, interrupting one of Tendou's breakdowns of what happened in a manga that Ushijima doesn't read.
"Of course not." Ushijima says, "We don't look anything alike."
The third year chokes on a laugh, and Tendou finds himself wishing that he had suffocated on it. "No I mean, you two don't exactly operate at the same pace." Ushijima only looks more confused. "Look, never mind, it doesn't matter. Whatever works, right?"
The third year steps away to talk to someone else, and Tendou decides to ignore the teasing the same way he always has. But he finds himself worrying that maybe the third year was right. It's not like Tendou's ever had something like this before, and he learned early on that everyone has their limits.
But Ushijima doesn't complain. Weeks pass, and Ushijima never complains once. He never tells Tendou to stop talking, never asks him to talk about something else, never calls him annoying. And Ushijima isn't exactly the type to hide what he's thinking because he's being "polite", so Tendou assumes that until Ushijima complains, then he's in the clear.
-
"What are you doing?" Tendou asks, slowing to a stop and turning around to face Ushijima, who had come to an abrupt halt in the middle of their run.
Ushijima is bent over, picking something off the ground carefully, and Tendou walks over and peers at it to see what it is.
It's a bee.
"Bees are insects." Ushijima says, cupping his hand over the other to trap the bee, he doesn't seem at all worried about the threat of being stung. "The worker bees are all females, and do all work for the hive."
He carefully deposits the bee on a nearby bush and then reaches up and plucks a second bee that Tendou hadn't even seen off of his shirt and puts it down as well.
"Honeybees are the only insects that make food that humans can eat."
"Really?" Tendou asks, curious about where this is going.
It doesn't really go anywhere. Ushijima resumes the run, and Tendou follows, and after a few moments, Ushijima hesitantly continues, offering small bits of information about bees, and it doesn't take long for Tendou to understand what's going on, and so he shuts up and listens, responding with enthusiasm every time Ushijima falls silent.
It's obvious that Ushijima doesn't infodump often, it comes in loud and clear through the anxious curling of his fingers and the unusual softness of his voice. He doesn't do this often, and not in front of just anyone, and Tendou is thrilled to be able to hear it.
If Ushijima is talking back to him, doing this sort of thing too, then that means that it's okay. It's mutual. It's definite.
Tendou's never been happier.
-
Tendou doesn't meltdown in public anymore.
After elementary school, his mom taught him how to "remove himself from the situation" and isolate himself and make sure that no one saw (because if people saw, his mom got embarrassed.)
But sometimes he get caught off-guard, and it's too late to do anything about it.
He doesn't even know what set it off. He barely even had any time to realize that it was creeping up on him, and by then he was too frazzled to do anything or go anywhere. He's in the middle of practice, in front of everyone.
Everyone who are his actual friends now, and not just Ushijima. And Tendou can't help but feel a weird twist of jealousy, because Ushijima doesn't seem like the type to have these kinds of episodes. He seems far too put together for something like this.
Something like frantic humming to block out the noise. Something like curling in on himself to hide from the sensations. Something like slamming the heel of his palm against his head repeatedly. Something like all of this helpless crying.
It's bad, and all Tendou can do is ride it out and try not to imagine the reactions of his teammates around him.
When he stops hitting himself, stops crying, gets a handle on his breathing, chokes the hum into a strangled whine, and finally opens his eyes again, the first thing Tendou sees is Ushijima's back.
He doesn't remember backing into a corner, but he'd wound up in one somehow, and Ushijima is there, blocking Tendou off from the rest of the team's stares and voices and touches.
"Thought I was supposed to be the blocker." Tendou rasps, mustering up a grin.
Ushijima looks at him from over his shoulder, brows furrowed. "You are." he says, seeming confused. Tendou snorts, straightening and drying his face and trying to ignore the dull ache in his skull.
Ushijima steps away, and the rest of the team surges forward. Tendou watches them approach warily, and Semi asks, "Are you alright?" Tendou stares at them cautiously, but they're not making fun of him, they're concerned. It's such an unfamiliar reaction that Tendou bursts into laughter.
He's never felt this "okay" after a meltdown in his life.
-
He's a third year when another one shows up.
Goshiki is a kid who tries so earnestly that Tendou almost feels bad about having to call him out, but the enthusiastic agreements immediately followed by obvious confusion isn't only going to affect Goshiki in the long run, it's going to affect the whole team. So Tendou doesn't really have a choice.
"You can ask us to repeat ourselves, if you need to." Tendou says, when he's finally able to get the kid alone.
"What?" Goshiki asks, and then his expression shutters. "No."
Tendou almost wants to laugh, but finds that he can't.
"It feels like a big deal, but it isn't. No one is going to give you shit if you have to hear what we said again."
"People always say that," the first year protests tiredly.
"Yeah." Tendou agrees, because they do, and some of them even believe it up until they find that they don't. "But some of us understand, and we mean it."
He's said his part, and so he leaves. It's not his job to keep pestering the kid until he gives in.
Still, he gives Goshiki a thumbs up next practice, when the kid steels himself and asks for instructions to be repeated because he hadn't understood.
Someone always does, even if it takes three or four attempts for the words to finally click. No one really minds it and no one says a bad word about it.
-
"When you said that you understood, you meant that you were autistic, right?" Goshiki asks one day.
"Yeah." Tendou says, at the same time Ushijima says, "Yes."
Tendou turns to look at him, "You weren't even there." he says, incredulously.
"But I am." Ushijima replies, "Were you referring to a specific incident?"
"Do you pay attention when people talk to you?"
"Of course." Ushijima looks confused, "That's why I answered his question."
"Wakatoshi-kuuun, he wasn't even talking to you."
"He didn't specify which of us he was talking to." Ushijima retorts. Trying to maintain this kind of banter with Ushijima is damn near impossible, Tendou can never tell when Ushijima is being literal or when he's joking around too.
Luckily, before it can go any further, the two of them are interrupted by a muffled laugh.
"What are you laughing at?" Tendou asks, and Goshiki tries and fails to get himself under control.
"Nothing!" The first year says, "I'm just glad I chose to come here."
"Yeah?" Tendou thinks back to his previous teams and interactions with his teammates. "Me too."
It's not even a fucking contest.