[Haikyuu!!] Little Red Riding Hood Bursts Out of the Belly

[No Blushing or Heart-Pounding. A Strange Story. Involves Dostoevsky's "Netochka Nezvanova," the ace/aro spectrum, and thoughts on gender.]

Tsumugi Akabone can only be cut open.

The warm, narrow passage at the center of her body is a useless dead end.

If the eyes of the world insist on focusing only on this false entrance, then she will not even give them the chance to come close, let alone step inside.

In the years spent tearing into the wolf's belly, and in the years she gave up feeding the clownfish, she met three cats from Nekoma.

The first told her, "The surname 'Akabone' sounds just as nice as 'Hamasaki.'" And so Tsumugi Akabone came to owe Kuroo Tetsurou a favor.

The second once curled up and confessed to her, "I'm sorry. I must be crazy..." It made her feel sympathy for her later partner, Keiyo Ohara.

The third cat, meanwhile, looked a lot like Mr. Mime.

The first signal he sent to her, or rather, to the area below her lower abdomen that she regarded as nothingness, was a string of radio waves only she could decode: "Tsumugi-chan, Bapu-chan."

And so Tsumugi Akabone understood. Fukunaga Shohei, the oddball who greeted people with puns, had sent her seven years of static that, translated, amounted to the simplest line:

"Netochka, come embrace me."

All right.

Then she, too, was willing to try embracing a Richard in Japan.

Theme: I really wish gender were more of a hobby and less of a societal contract and mandate