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The walk back to his apartment usually goes by pretty quickly. More than on every other day, Tobio is glad he picked the smaller flat close to his new team’s training center, instead of the larger house on the far outskirts of the giant maze that is Rome.
He hurries along the tree-lined sidewalk, sparing the occasional glance to the busy road beside him. He’s still amazed by the absence of snow. Back where he’s from, a mountainous town in northern Honshū, snow was a guarantee all throughout winter. He’s been told it snows in Northern Italy, but seeing snow in Rome is extremely unlikely, even in January.
He turns the last street corner before his apartment complex and spots a woman walking towards him from the opposite direction, accompanied by a little girl holding her left hand and a white poodle whose leash she keeps with her right. As he nears them, the girl points to something on the ground a few steps ahead.
“Mamma, guarda! Una pigna!” Tobio follows her arm with his gaze, trying to see what she’s pointing towards. It’s a pine cone, one that likely fell from the tree just above it. So that’s what those are called, Tobio thinks, and tries to stack the word in the compartment of his brain dedicated to the Italian nouns he’d rarely have to use, hoping for it to stick. He thinks back to his first year of high school, when Hinata and him had enlisted Yachi’s help in order to pass their English exam and be able to go to Tokyo with the rest of the team.
They keep walking and the daughter timidly smiles up at Tobio, who does his best attempt to give her a reassuring smile in return. He must have made a bad impression though, cause her face immediately sours and she retreats to hide halfway behind her mom’s frame. The lady pulls her along and the three of them promptly disappear behind the corner he just came from. Tobio sighs.
As he approaches the main door of his building, he reaches into his sports bag, rifling through it and eventually retrieving his keyring from a small side pocket. He slips the green key into the hole and stalls for a second, observing his reflection in the glass panels of the door, trying to remember what the Italian for green is. Verde, his mind helpfully supplies. He turns the key. The heavy door creaks while opening and closing. He steps inside and rapidly climbs up the three flights of stairs he got used to, during the few months spent living in this plain building from the 70’s with no elevator.
At his apartment, he tries to repeat the same exercise from a minute before and translate yellow in his head, while the corresponding key unlocks the door and he steps inside. Giallo. He slips off his shoes and neatly places them aside, his frustration only growing. He seems to remember most words he learns just fine, and his language teacher often complimented him on his pronunciation, so why is his teammates’ reaction to something he said making him second guess his Italian prowess?
He slides his bag off his shoulder, carrying it to the small, blue-tiled bathroom; he starts unpacking it, tossing his dirty jersey and shorts and socks in the laundry pile. The whites have accumulated enough for him to run a load, so he places them in the washer and picks the low heat cycle as Miwa instructed him to do.
A little while later, he’s already changed into his house clothes and has successfully filled a pot with water and placed it on the stove, waiting for it to boil; he’s about to give in to his doubts and open his Italian textbook, when his phone buzzes in his back pocket. It’s a message from his sister.
He forgoes typing his answer in favor of simply swiping on her contact info, initiating a phone call. It’s a little ritual they started performing shortly after he moved across the globe. She sends a text to let him know she’s free to talk and he can phone her. Tobio would probably never admit it out loud, but he’s glad he has someone that cares about him enough to want to hear about his day and ask how he’s doing. He hasn’t had this since Kazuyo died, and he didn’t expect this treatment from Miwa, given how they had grown apart during her teenage years; it made his days here in Italy a lot less lonely.
She picks up right away. After the initial greetings, she quiets while he recounts his morning training session. She laughs when he mentions their opposite, Paolo, slipping on a discarded cleaning rug in the locker room while they were getting changed earlier.
“What are you cooking?” he asks her once he’s done talking about himself. He’s busy making his lunch, so it’s around dinner time in Japan. He puts the phone on speaker and grabs a handful of coarse salt for his pasta pot. Once the salted water is fully boiling he throws in the spaghetti and sets a timer. Their chat shifts into cooking territory, Tobio proudly stating how he’s becoming a pro in preparing this dish with pasta, oil, garlic and chili peppers, all while grabbing a pan and tossing those ingredients in to make his sauce.
They keep the conversation alive, even while he drains the pasta al dente and mixes it in with the contents of the skillet, stirring for another minute or so before serving it on a dish.
He eats, listening attentively as she talks about her workday at the hair salon. He’s almost certain the call is reaching its end by lack of topics to talk about, when she asks a new, apparently innocuous question.
“Is your Italian improving? Tell me something!”
“It’s okay…” he starts, a little uncertain in tone. All he gets in response is a disbelieving silence. Damn his older sister and her perceptiveness. “Well, okay, I was really feeling confident lately, but then today all my Italian teammates reacted funny to something I said…”
“Oh? What happened?”
“Onee-san, you don’t speak Italian, you wouldn’t understand…”
“It doesn’t matter, out with it. I’m curious now.”
“Okay. Uh,” Tobio scratches his head, unsure of where to start explaining. “So basically, they invited me to have lunch with them today, but I didn’t feel like going, so I turned them down.”
“Tobio! You should’ve gone!” Miwa reprimands him. “It could’ve been a great occasion to bond more!”
“It’s not that easy…” he huffs. “Besides, that’s not the point. I remember telling them ‘no grazie, ando a casa’, which I was sure meant ‘no thanks, I’m going home’. And then they all started chuckling like I’d said something amusing, but I don’t get what I did wrong…”
“Hmm…” Tobio can almost feel Miwa’s cogs turning in her brain from the other end of the line. “Maybe you pronounced something wrong?”
“Nah, I don’t think that’s it…” he rebuts her suggestion. “I have this weird feeling that I messed up the verb somehow, but I don’t possibly see how. You see, my teacher told me verbs conjugate in a very modular way. Get rid of the infinitive’s ending and add specific letters for each person. Are you following?” he inquires, once he realizes he’s been somewhat rambling about a topic his sister knows nothing about.
“Yeah… Kinda.” she replies.
“Okay, take the verb ‘to love’, for example. So the infinitive is ‘amare’ and once you remove the ending, you have to attach -o to make first person singular, -i for second person, -a for third person singular, and so on… Then the first person form of andare is supposed to be ‘io ando’.” Suddenly, a memory resurfaces in his mind. “Unless…”
He stands up from the dining table chair where he was still seated, grabs his phone and rushes towards the desk in the living room.
“Unless what?” he hears Miwa’s ever so interested voice press on. “Tobio, are you still there?”
“Yeah, sorry.” he apologizes. “I just remembered my teacher mentioning there being some irregular verbs, but if a verb like ‘to go’ was one of those, surely he’d tell me, right?” He keeps on ranting as he frantically flips to the pages of his Italian language textbook to reach the verbs section.
He lands on the conjugation he’s looking for. A table is at the bottom of page 343, showing the declensions of four different verbs, the last one to the left being andare. And sure enough, right above it there’s a mix of kanji and kana and some latin characters, confirming his suspicions.
“Irregular type. There are only four verbs ending with -are that show irregular changes: andare, stare, fare, dare.” he reads that part out loud and Miwa’s laughter comes through the speaker, filling the otherwise silent room.
Tobio reads on, taking in all the inflected forms, and his eyes zone in on first person singular, the correct form he should’ve used. Io vado. He frowns.
“Vado.” he repeats out loud for Miwa’s sake. “It’s vado. How was I supposed to know that? Where did the v, a and d even come from?”
His sister’s still wildly giggling, but manages to quell the fit to speak again. “Damn. I wouldn’t wanna have to learn Italian.”
…
The following morning, he leaves the house with a determined plan in mind. He’s just gonna need to find the right occasion and surprise his teammates with his newfound proficiency in their language. He recalls Hinata’s visible excitement every time he would learn a new Portuguese word and could barely wait to see his Brazilian friends’ reaction. He finds he’s feeling somewhat similarly; albeit he’s much better at hiding it and more leaning on the impatient side.
As he steps through the doors to the locker room and while they’re all busy changing into their Ali Roma jersey and shorts, he gets distracted by the lighthearted jokes and puns shared, even though he still doesn’t fully understand them and he even chimes in to show pictures of the ajo, ojo and peperoncino he made the previous day, eliciting a round of compliments on how his cooking skills were definitely improving.
They stand and make a move for the door and Tobio rushes to tie his shoelaces before rushing after them; he realizes, somewhat bitterly, that he hasn’t had his chance of showing off yet.
Practice is grueling in the best way for him. He recalls his teammates’ awestruck comments about his seemingly endless supply of stamina, back when he first started out with them. Nowadays though, they all seem used to him overtaking them during their runs and his impeccable playing even well into a fifth set during official matches. During their locker room chats, they like to playfully chalk it up to him being the youngest among the group, jokingly making it out as if the rest of them was a step away from dying of old age.
Once practice is over, they go change back into their clean clothes. He ventures out of the lockers first; approaching the main doors, he notices a familiar face standing there.
“Hello, Kuroo-san.” he slightly bows, surprised. The old Nekoma captain paying him a visit on the other side of the globe was definitely not something he could have ever predicted happening. Getting to use honorifics again after a while feels good, Kageyama reckons.
As Kuroo is about to formally greet him, they get interrupted by Kageyama’s teammates approaching.
“Tobio! Andiamo a mangiare! ”
Four pairs of hands assault his head as Leonardo, Kerem, Federico and Alessandro ruffle up his hair, all while Kuroo-san watches on, a slight hint of a smile on his face.
It’s the perfect occasion. Now or never.
“Vado dopo.” he tells them, and they break out in praise about him getting the verb right. He’s on the receiving end of some more hair ruffling, then they’re off to their lunch. Tobio follows them with his gaze until they leave, then turns his attention back on Kuroo-san.
“So, it seems you’re settling in well.” his senpai observes.
Kageyama smiles to himself. “Yeah.”
