Chapter Text
It doesn’t happen when he’s little.
He reads a lot of forum posts, scanning the internet late at night with volatile key words typed into blinking, expecting places. He finds these little secrets, typed out in winding paragraphs that pin point specific moments as children where all these tiny instances of unease and misunderstanding clash together to bring forth a cohesive moment of childhood confidence and innocent naivety. In these moments, they sometimes announce it to the people around them, happy or angry and oblivious of any consequences, while others tuck these truths deep into their chest where it is safest, where it can’t hurt them. But they have that truth, that little realisation.
Kenma wishes desperately that he could have, at least, had that. It’s an ugly bitterness he can almost taste on his tongue, because he knows it’s not always a good thing, knowing for so long, and that these people typing out their lives for others like them aren’t always accepted by the people around them. That life can be push after shove after kick, and that kids are cruel and adults’ crueller, believing forceful ignorance is somehow equivalent to tolerance. He knows this, has read this and buried this into his skin, but too often he stares at his bedroom ceiling and wonders what commodities he’d trade just so know a little earlier, what treatment he’d willing take to have just one more year of awareness.
As long back as he can remember, he had been shy and doubtful, easily swayed by the beliefs of others and realigning fluid cogs of his reality to match it to those around him, bringing himself quickly and quietly onto their wavelength. He was passive and obeying when his mother would call him indoors, tell him not to play with the boys, and to help her make dinner or read quietly. Kenma had always liked games, liked the easy logic and lull of theme tunes and worn out buttons clicking softly, but was rarely allowed to play them. His mother had worried her lip constantly, murmuring about newspapers and news reports on gaming addictions and lazy youth throwing away their lives for pseudo realities.
“… And it’s even girls, honey. Promise me you’ll be good girl, okay?” And his mother would stroke his silky hair (never ruffle, because that would make his hair messy, and only boys were allowed messy hair while Kenma would have to be fussed over and touched) “Girls like that won’t ever find a suitable husband.” Kenma, as always, would nod along drowsily with his mother’s words. She was probably right.
He remembers this conversation because the night before it, young and tired of not being allowed to do so much, he had snuck his GameBoy into his room under the band of his dress and played until his eyes were both dry and tearful. The guilt from it was fleeting, blanketed over by the knowledge no one would ever find out. Kenma had wondered if beating levels in games meant he couldn’t get married. He hadn’t understood at the time, but he didn’t think he would mind overly much.
Every other moment from his childhood seemed faded and irrelevant, if not horribly normal. He wore skirts, and he didn’t mind being a girl but he did mind the attention and ducked away from his hands stroking his hair and people touching his pretty little dresses and telling him how beautiful he would grow up to be, just like his mother. Kenma didn’t want to be a good girl or a pretty girl, didn’t want boys to whisper about him or aunts to fuss over his cardigans – he didn’t want the attention.
Despite that, for twelve years, everything had been fine.
His mother was waiting for something.
She would hmm happily in the kitchen, emphasizing in small bites of conversation that now was a special time in Kenma’s life, that he was growing up so fast. At these points, his father would look pointedly away towards his coffee or newspaper or just – anything else. He didn’t understand what she want hinting at, didn’t understand what the other women in his family meant when they crowded around and cooed about him blooming and blossoming, becoming a woman. They always used this flowery language.
He just nodded along, pliant as always, and felt the edges of his DS in his cardigan pocket. His mother would scold him if he played it.
A week after the family get together, a girl in his Languages class left the classroom in tears, ushered away by a teacher and blotches of blood staining the back of her school issued skirt. Unchaperoned, the boys in the laugh between hands and girls looks concerned, faces red and whispering one word over and over to each other. Period.
Alone in his room, door closed and in the precious time where he’d usually be playing a game, he types this word into a web browsers and clicks through medicinal looking websites with daisies and flowers shoved into the corners of the page to appear inviting. There are bullet points on pain and blood, lines on uterus’s shedding their lining and bones shifting, muscles tightening and aching. There are hormonal balances – different for every girl, but ‘usually occurs in the early teens, ages 11-14 in most healthy girls,”
Don’t worry, the page says, this is perfectly normal.
Then why is nausea creeping up his throat?
This is blossoming. Blooming. And it bubbles up something hysterical and darkly, thickly, horrible inside of Kenma, crushing at his lungs and squeezing his bones; this is his biology, cementing and pathing his identity for him, pushing him along further and further towards something he never agreed to, never thought too hard about. There’s panic, deep and wild, shaking at his hands and forcing his finger to scroll further down the page, to read more.
Healthy girls.
Healthy.
This new found knowledge is heavy on him.
Kenma catches it more often now, in discussions. His mother is beaming and glowing still, squeezing his arms, catching the soft flesh there with her nails. She’s excited for him to be old enough, big enough, to grow up and be like her. Kenma doesn’t talk to many other girls, doesn’t talk to many other people in general (he never knows quite what they want from him when they speak to him, isn’t sure what their goal is with someone like him. There are no rules to follow, no restarts or pauses, so he stays silent. Silence is safe. People are not.) and so he doesn’t know if it’s normal for him to feel with every fiber this impending, haunting doom.
He doesnt like to think about gender too much, but it becomes more difficult with every passing day. He is hyper-aware of being sorted into the girls team in sports class, the way he is always put into groups with other girls, how everyone calls him ‘she’ and ‘her’. Before, he had never minded, never noticed, and now it’s there every step like an unrelenting itch. He feels different. Like it should strange or notable that people address him as a girl, that he is forced into skirts.
He likes skirts. They're free, unrestricted; but why does he have to wear it?
The older girls, walking from home along the same path as he and his mother, would always be wearing skirts and dresses and never trousers. When he grew up, he would still have to wear that, too. It’s wasn’t, isn’t, fair that he has to dress like a girl, be a girl just because – just because he’s always been one. He doesn’t have to be a girl forever.
He can change.
He will.
Kuroo was the only one that never asked why Kenma stopped wearing skirts. Kuroo had always ruffled his hair, anyway, and invited him to do whatever he was into at that point of time regardless of the unimpressed noises Kenmas mother would make about him ruining his dress playing in the mud. He always told Kenma he was cool, and he liked hanging around him, even if that meant watching him play a game and walk the long way around the park to avoid the big crowds around the gate.
The older boy understood on a level Kenma himself didn’t understand. He stayed through the teasing, the nasty words and the shoves in the corridor, the snickering of groups of girls and the lewd suggestions of boys in sports classes. Kenma doesn’t quite know how to put his thankfulness into words, how to shape a sentence to express the depth of meaning and warmth that had kept each tiny piece of him from fracturing away. But he’s always been bad with words. Kuroo knows anyway, and it makes his chest ache a little under his binder that he has been lucky enough to find someone like him. Someone to trust, even if his mind can convince him otherwise sometimes.
It’s Sunday evening, and Kenma finished his remaining homework hours ago. He’s sprawled out over Kuroo’s lap as he tackles the same boss fight for the fifth time on his PSP. A text book is laid out on his back, a slight pressure that comes and goes as Kuroo leans down to read passages and draw out the information he needs to complete the draft he needs for an essay, due tomorrow. Kenma finds his attention oddly halved between the buttons beneath his fingers and the warm press of Kuroos thighs, digging into the soft flesh of his stomach.
He likes the closeness. Likes feeling small and light compared to Kuroo, who has always been taller and stronger, broad with muscle but lean. Kenma can pretend to be tiny when he’s next to Kuroo, can pretend the fat on his legs doesn’t make his stomach turn every time he sits, that the way they seem to double in size doesn't make his head hurt. He likes thinking his hands are slim when Kuroo holds them, but the reality is Kuroo has big hands and strong thighs and all his bulk is muscle. Kenma is just fat, Kenma is curves and Kenma is weak.
With Kuroo, he can pretend. It almost works sometimes, until he shifts just so and his binder digs into his fatty waist and suddenly he is horribly aware of every inch of his heavy, sickly body that is pressed into Kuroo. He wonders if Kuroo can still feel his legs with Kenma lying across them, he must have cut off circulation, and if the book balanced on his back is sinking into the soft flesh there, anchored by greed.
Does Kuroo know how fat he is, under all the layers?
How wrong he is?
“Kenma?” Kuroo breaks the silence, one hand coming to rest on the inside of Kenma’s knee.
“Hmm?” He replies, staring hard at his PSP.
“Are you okay?”
“Hmm…”
“Your game’s been paused for a while now.” He doesn’t reply this time, just pushes himself slowly off of Kuroo’s lap, giving the other time to grab his text book before it fell and creased a page. Kuroo’s free hand moves to loop around Kenma’s wrist in their new position, the setter leaning against the wall next to him, PSP still in his hands like he means to play it. It’s familiar. Comforting. He watches those long fingers tighten around his wrist as Kuroo slides closer, bumping their shoulders together and looking down at him through his unstyled hair.
“Hmm? What’s up, Kenma?”
“Nothing, I’m tired.” He huffs out, ducking his head down further to shrink away from that gaze. The one that doesn’t let him get away with anything.
“Did you eat breakfast?”
No.
“Yeah.”
“Lunch?”
“I ate that with you, stupid.” Kuroo brings his wrist up to his knee and presses a smile into the skin there. Kenma doesn’t blush, feeling the lunch that he did eat with Kuroo lying like a brick in his body. Sushi. He could have probably thrown it up and got away with food poisoning, but Kuroo has been watching too close lately, had gone out of his way to take him to one of the few restaurants open on a Sunday to buy him lunch. He had always liked something about Nekoma, the cat team, eating fish. Kenma can catch him smiling about it to himself whenever they order it.
“And you’re going to eat dinner, yes?”
No.
“Yes.”
The smile on his wrist straightens out to a frown.
Kuroo doesn’t believe him.
It hits the ground with a resounding smack.
Silence, and then –
“What was that?”
“Kenma!”
The Setter in question stares down at his reddening hands, eyes floating towards the ball rolling away on the ground in his peripheral. His hands are trembling slightly, but too much, and he clasps them together to stop it being noticeable before the rest of Nekoma get too close. He breathes in deeply, as far as he can while recently exerted and wrapped up in his binder to its tightest hook, and looks up at his teams faces.
“I missed.”
They are disappointed, he knows. He is too.
“Sorry.”
“Kenma, are you okay? You don’t usually-”
“Let’s take five minutes,” Kuroo interrupts Lev, stretching his arms above his head in a show of fake nonchalance, meeting his gaze dead on. The team shift away from the court at their captains call, Taketora shooting a glance Kenma’s way as he retrieves the fallen ball from the court. Kuroo heads straight towards where Kenma still stands, stupidly still next to the net, and the younger boy finally gets into motion, drifting towards the side of the gym. He had hoped the rest of the team wouldn’t have picked up on it so soon.
“You promised me, Kenma,” Kuroo’s voice isn’t soft or forging, but it isn’t mean either. It’s firm. He has come to stand in front of Kenma, taller than him but somehow lesser with the creases of concern marking his expression and painted in the shadows of the hand he out stretches towards Kenma, longing to hold, comfort. But Kenma has nothing to say, can only drop his gaze and wish he had his phone, his PSP, anything to distract his hands right now.
He ends up staring at his monstrous thighs, impossibly large and barely covered by shorts.
“Come on, Kenma. You can’t play if you do this, and we can’t play without you. You’re our heart.”
“I don’t-“ He starts softly.
“Don’t, don’t. Just don’t, okay?” His denial, his lie, is cut short, “It’s obvious. I – I know, okay? You don’t look – well. I can’t deal with…” Kuroo runs his hand through his hair, looking mildly stressed. Kenma would feel guilty if he could feel anything right now. “Just – eat something, okay?”
Kuroo squeezes his shoulder, and turns away.
Eat something.
Like it’s that easy.
After practice, an affair that had dragged out painfully, Kenma stops only to grab his bags from the changing rooms, pointedly ignoring flat chests and defined muscle. It leaves his mouth feeling better and a dizzy emptiness in his stomach that has nothing and everything to do with hunger. He ignores Kuroo’s watchful eyes as he crouches down to pull his bags over his shoulders, wincing as the straps dig into fat and bone.
He never changes with the team after training. There’s little point really, he tells himself, when there’s no showers at the school. He doesn’t like having to change into otherwise clean clothes while sweaty; either way, he walks home, and only takes the tube when absolutely necessary and the humid climate clinging to this city buildings is enough to build up a sweat alike to another practice session. It’s logical, not to change with the others when there’s so little point, and he is not suspicious for doing it. No one thinks anything of it. He has nothing to hide.
Kuroo knows.
Pulling the sides of the over-sized volleyball jacket tightly around his bound chest, he sets off out of the room without a word, already reaching for his phone to amuse himself on the way back.
“I hope your mum makes you something nice, Kenma. She’s a good cook.”
He keeps walking resolutely.
Arriving home, he is alone.
Kenma pulls down his mask to his neck and shrugs off his bags, carrying then by hand to his room. He drops them besides his bed, willing himself to carry on ignoring the persistent tremble wracking his hands as he attempts to unzip his jacket. His back is aching up a storm from both the binder and the combined weights of the bag, his stomach is humming and spiking with jolts of hunger and his god damn hands will not stay still.
Finally, he gets some leverage on the zip and pulls it down, discarding his jacket and then his shorts, continuing to undress and forcing his eyes away from his ugly, distorted body, ignoring the hallowness he always feels when he is forced to take off his binder. The skin beneath is red. He’s fine. This is fine. He grabs his bath towel from the cupboard above his wardrobe and wraps himself in it as he journeys to the small bathroom. His arms and legs are beginning to feel shaky, exhausted and letting his emotions slip, but he pushes on to get the shower started. He just needs to get clean and then he can – deal with everything else.
Just eat something.
The water hasn’t quite heated up yet when he steps under, but warm tears pool from his eyes.
It’s not that he doesn’t eat – because he does, and he is painfully aware of every occurrence of it. Kuroo bothers him otherwise, all big eyes and kid hands, and it’s so much energy to be bothered. Energy he doesn’t have to spare. Kuroo would pay too much attention to him, too much attention to his body, and so in turn would his team. Kenma doesn’t want people to look at his body. The mere thought of people seeing him, noticing him, is enough to dig up something fluttery and hysterical in his throat.
He is trapped between an insistent desire to whittle away until no one can ever see him again, and the fact that right now, doing just that would draw too much mind.
For now, he needs to maintain some semblance of fitness. He has to eat certain amounts – protein is the hardest, the most daunting, yet the most essential. This is all he needs to stay functional, to keep what little muscle he has, everything else is a surplus and a weight gain in fat he can’t afford. He can feel his binder dig into his waist whenever he eats, bearing down at the fatty tissue there while simultaneously pushing back what is wrong into his chest. If he eats too much, his figure will round out more. His chest will grow. His period will start.
He can eat the bare minimum. He can survive, but cannot blossom.
He will stay in his cocoon forever.