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There are many things Akaashi knows.
There are also many things Akaashi should know, but doesn’t.
The love of a parent, for one, is something he doesn’t.
And of course, there are much, much, so much more things that he shouldn’t know but knows anyway.
He knows not to speak to his parents unless spoken to first, to not address his parents as kaa-san and tou-san but instead not to address them at all, unless he wanted to feel the sharp sting of a palm across his face or the overwhelming presence of a much too loud voice screaming at him. He knows to never cross his parents unless they planned this out in front of their friends, and to never, ever, look them straight in the eye.
He also knows that he’d much rather die than run away to someplace safer. Why? Why can’t he just run away, be free, go do whatever a four year-old should do?
Akaashi Keiji doesn’t know life outside of the constant torture of his home life.
“The walls we build around us to keep sadness out also keeps out the joy.”
Jim Rohn
School started a different story.
At first, his parents told him to ‘miss them’. The sharp whistle their hands made as they snapped across the air? The constant yelling, screaming, and breaking of glass coming from the kitchen after he was supposed to be asleep every night?
He tried.
He did things that would usually get his parents to do that. That’s what missing was, wasn’t it? The longing of something that you’ve had before… trying to get it back maybe?
It was all very new to Akaashi. He didn’t know how to miss something he never wanted in the first place.
But the teachers didn’t do what his parents did. Instead of scratches down his arms he got gentle pats on the arm. Instead of the yelling and screaming at him, he got kind words and the teacher telling him to “ don’t do that anymore honey.” And most of all, instead of yelling, screeching, hatred, coming through and piercing his skull when he was sleeping, he got the teacher sitting next to him, soothing words when he couldn’t sleep.
He didn’t want it to end.
But every day at home- “ WHAT DID I DO TO DESERVE SUCH A BRAT LIKE YOU”
“IT’S ALL YOUR FAULT”
And pain as skin struck skin.
Akaashi Keiji, entering elementary school, now follows a different set of rules.
Instead of missing his parents, he’s supposed to be better than everyone else. He has to be smarter than them, be more athletic, more artistic.
He can’t do it.
But Akaashi, at this point in his life, knows how to school his features into a uninterested, bored look. He never dares to aim it at his parents.
Getting the top of his class is expected of him, according to his mother. Like her going to work everyday to support the family, him overworking himself, studying the materials for second, third, fourth, fifth, sixth grades, still managing to practice an hour of piano everyday and keep the bored, expressionless facade…
That’s all expected of him.
He has to do it.
It hurts anyway, when he looks at their feet with his head slightly bowed, teeth gnawing on his tongue hard enough so that it bleeds.
It hurts when the report card is thrown at him, the A plusses all neatly lined up on one row of the paper with teacher comments saying things like I’ve never had a student as talented as Akaashi-kun or Akaashi continues to be a model student in all his english classes; he focuses so intently and always does all work expected of him and more and even Akaashi has been doing extremely well despite having recently been moved up a grade.
It hurts anyway, when his parents don’t strike him across the face and instead walk away, presumably to brag about him to their friends.
But Akaashi still needs a sport to do if he wants to get into a good college. His parents always tell him this, tell him to go join a club that only required he practice for a few hours for him to be good at it. You don’t have to like it, they tell him, glaring eyes pointed towards him with an air of disapproval. Just be good at it.
That is, after all, what is expected from you.
Akaashi ends up joining the volleyball club; Setting is relatively easy for him, as a right leaning ambidextrous. He works hard as a setter, aiming to get into a good high school for a low price with a sports scholarship. His parents will accept whatever high school choice he wants to go to as longs as it’s cheap and relatively good… right?
He shakes his head and continues to write down formula after formula in his well worn-notebook, notes carefully taken to both look aesthetically pleasing and do their function as notes. His handwriting is small but readable, neat letters almost looking like a typed font as they appear in neat rows under the titles of each section of notes he takes.
He doesn’t write small because it’s easier for him; he writes small because he isn’t sure if his parents will pull out the money to buy him another notebook.
… It still hurts. Not anymore on his face, where his parents no longer hit him. But the way they glance at him through glaring eyes, as though he isn’t even worth the effort to raise a hand and strike him with it. But in his heart it hurts so much. His heart is clenching, tightening, and no matter how much water he drinks he can’t get of the burning that resides in the left side of his chest.
Oh.
It’s guilt.
For not being good enough.
Akaashi cries into his pillow since he was three, on the bed taken from a yard sale for barely the price of a full outfit.
The clothing he wears are either his school uniform or the clothes his father can no longer fit into. The only thing he has- not even really belonging to him but rather lent to him- are his phone and the stuffed owl that he doesn’t even know when he got. His phone was merely a way to blend in with his classmates.
“It’ll look weird if you don’t give your phone number to your friends.” They had said, giving him the phone his mother had used three years earlier.
Akaashi merely forgets to tell them he doesn’t have any.
“I am convinced that material things can contribute a lot to making one's life pleasant, but, basically, if you do not have very good friends and relatives who matter to you, life will be really empty and sad and material things cease to be important.”
David Rockefeller
Nothing matters other than pleasing his parents- the people that created him and are now making his life a living hell.
That changes, very, very suddenly when he walks in for volleyball practice and Bokuto Koutarou stands there, in his navy blue shirt and white shorts, ridiculous kneepads that stretch up to his thighs and a maniacal grin lighting up his golden eyes.
His beautiful golden eyes.
Bokuto, known to Akaashi as Bokuto-san, becomes something other than just a teammate in a sport he actually quite enjoys now. It’s something so different when he sees the happy light that shines in Bokuto’s eyes than the menacing glint in his parents’, so different in every move he makes.
Bokuto is a light in the world of Akaashi’s hell. With every move he makes, more and more of it chips off. Every “ HEY HEY HEY!!!!!!” and mispronounced “AHGAKSJHI!”
Soon. Akaashi tells himself. Soon. Soon He will be free, in college, where his parents can’t touch him. Where he doesn’t have to follow their every word, heed their every order.
Soon, he will follow Bokuto and be the best.
Training camp, Akaashi learns, is another paradise.
Where he is free.
Everyday it’s just volleyball. Instead of the sharp sound of skin on skin; hands smacking down the leather of a volleyball. Instead of screams of hatred, screams of delight, of games won and lost by merely a point.
It’s supposedly a training camp tradition to have a movie night at least one night of the training camp. Of course, it turns into a competition with Bokuto’s nature, and soon enough the entire team is (trying not to) sob as the Titanic sinks. Bokuto himself is furiously wiping his eyes, loud sniffles escaping his lips.
“Akaaajkhfni! Why- hic!- aren’t you crying? She jumped back on the sinking ship to- hic!- be with him and now he’s sacrificing his- hic!- so that she survives!”
Akaashi knows it’s because of the countless times he’s told himself to keep a expressionless face, the countless times he’s shoved his own feeling aside and instead focused on how he could survive the situation without getting too badly hurt. He knows that every tear he sheds won’t be for Rose and Jack’s undying love but of the undying pain that strikes through his body every single time he’s ignored, slapped, or pushed aside.
He knows that he won’t be able to stop.
Akaashi curves his lips into a gentle smile, almost the only expression he knows how to make. He’s practiced his smile in the mirror, making sure it looked natural, conveyed what he really wanted to say but couldn’t.
“It’s just not that sad, Bokuto-san.”
I can’t afford to be weak, Bokuto-san. Especially not when you need me to toss for you.
That morning however, Akaashi wakes up with puffy eyes and run to the bathroom to splash cold water on his face and try to get his eyes to be less red.
They stay the same color.
His team pretends not to notice.
He’s pretty sure Bokuto doesn’t notice.
"Tears come from the heart and not from the brain."
Leonardo da Vinci
Bokuto notices the bruises one day after their practice together.
Akaashi simply forgets to wait until Bokuto is in the shower to get undressed himself, which was blamed on his measly half hour of sleep that was mainly due to insomnia rather than his usually huge workload.
The small gasp from Bokuto had him realizing his mistake.
Akaashi rushed to cover himself, fingers drawing up his towel to wrap around himself. But the bruises- the ones that ran up and down his torso stopping right before his shoulders- in varying degrees of healing- where already seen.
“Tell me who did this to you,” says an enraged Bokuto, golden eyes flashing dangerously before closing. It was a visible strain on Bokuto’s part to not do anything the moment, reflected in his trembling arms and shaking fingers.
“I can’t,” he whispers back. “I’m sorry I-I can’t.”
Akaashi, for the first time in his recent life, has tears streaming down his face, green eyes glimmering, holding water. And yet- he still feels guilty about it. It was his fault that Bokuto found out and now he had to do anything in his power to keep the truth- that the bruises, the scars, the long scab running down one side of his chest were dealt by his parents’ hand.
“ I’m… I’m sorry Bokuto-san.”
Bokuto, instead of screaming and yelling at him to stop crying and stop being weak like his parents would’ve, gently raises a tentative hand to touch the particularly large bruise on his back. Akaashi, instead of flinching away from his touch as he would’ve if it was anyone other than the light in his world, relaxes at the touch.
The night is spent with soft fingers- callused from the hours spent each day smacking volleyball after volleyball into the ground in front of him.
And it doesn’t matter that by the time he is able to go to sleep that night- much sooner than usual actually- the few unmarked places on his torso were now covered in crimson lines that wouldn’t disappear even after they healed.
His heart did not tighten at the guilt.
Akaashi Keiji- for once in his life- feels worthy of something.
Feels worthy of the love shown to him by a certain Bokuto.
One day though, he tells him who did it.
It’s the last day he’ll se Bokuto again in a fairly long time. The third years a graduating now, leaving him to be captain of the volleyball team with Onaga as vice captain.
“It’s my… It’s my parents.”
Bokuto’s eyes light up with such blinding rage that it’s almost terrifying.
“Please don’t tell anyone, Bokuto-san.”
Bokuto promises, albeit with a fire in his eyes that screams defiance.
He got in.
Although it wasn’t on a volleyball scholarship like Bokuto, he still got in.
Akaashi Keiji is no longer attached to the monsters that created him.
Instead of black bruises that show hate- purple marks on his neck and collarbones that shows love.
Instead of the stinging slap of a hand across his face- a gentle caress of it by callused hands.
Instead of harsh words screamed at him- gentle words and soft reminders from Bokuto that he’s still there.
Instead of hate- love.
“We know what we are, but know not what we may be.”
William Shakespeare