I wrote this, geez, probably almost a year ago now, and wasn't very happy with it, so only posted it on livejournal. Reading back over it, however, I'm not quite sure why I thought it was so crappy; hence the reason I'm posting it now. This is the second of fifty drabbles written for the prompt challenge at odd50out, and occurs in the same universe as my previous odd50out drabble "Getting Lucky". The prompt for this piece was #23 – Likeness.
I chose xenophobia as a theme because it is an issue in Japan, and in other Asian countries, and I find the dichotomy between the parts of a culture that mistrust foreigners and those that appropriate aspects of foreign culture and standards of physical beauty, even in so far as to sell skin-lightening cream, absolutely fascinating! The title, double-dyed, means "to be completely and permanently imbued with a particular characteristic or opinion"; I thought the phraseology apropos.
Warnings: This drabble contains xenophobia and, like pretty much anything else I've ever written, homosexuality, though it is only discussed. If such topics do not appeal to you I would advise that you hit the back button.
Disclaimer: Digimon and all recognizable characters herein are property of their creators; no copywrite infringement is intended.
Feedback and CC are always appreciated, even if it is just a "Hey, I read it."
Double-Dyed
Looking around at the number of unnaturally orange-haired passengers his age waiting amongst the more prevalent, conventionally dark-haired Japanese pedestrians on the subway platform, Yamato, for maybe the first time in his life, was really glad he was a natural blond. The tawny, brassy colour was unflattering on most Japanese skin tones and probably wasn't what the hapless trendsetters had been anticipating when they'd bought a box of peroxide at the local convenie. If you managed to do a half-way decent job of it, you still had to contend with dark brown roots.
He hadn't hated his hair colour since he'd been ten or eleven, around the time he'd made friends at "summer camp", he grinned at the euphemism, but until now he'd been fairly indifferent to it. Or, well, he'd liked it on one level and wouldn't have changed it given the opportunity, but he'd spent a lot of his life resenting the way his hair set him apart from other Japanese.
All throughout his childhood, he'd been picked on by his classmates for his appearance. Not that he'd been bullied exactly, he hadn't been, but he'd heard the whispered comments at the start of each school year: his hair, eyes, and skin were too light, his nose was too narrow, his legs were too long, so he'd had to let the hems out on his pant legs. Comments that weren't always intended to wound, sometimes just simple observations, but the sense of novelty that coloured the words meant it hadn't mattered; Yamato had been made well aware of how different he was.
He hadn't really understood when he'd been really young when the kids in his class had told him he wasn't Japanese. He was! He'd been born in Tokyo, his father had too, and his mother was from Osaka; how could he be anything else? He'd never even visited out of the country; he'd only seen his mom's mom and dad two times in his life, and one of those times he'd been so young he hardly remembered it. Obaa and Ojii lived in Paris, in France; his mother had shown him on a map once.
"This is Japan here." She'd pointed to a long, skinny group of islands before trailing her index finger across to the adjacent page, bringing it to rest on a much larger landmass and tapping a spot on the end furthest from 'Japan'. "That's where my mommy and daddy, your grandma and grandpa, live." she'd said as Yamato had leaned against her side and looked at the picture atlas on her lap. He'd only been four or five then, and he'd had no real concept of the distances involved. "How long does it take to get there?" he'd asked placing the index fingers of each hand where his mother's had been in an effort to determine how close France was to Japan compared with other places on the map. He'd had to crane his head this way and that to see around his own arms without lifting his firmly planted digits off the page.
"Well," his mother had smiled, "you'd have to take a plane to get there, and it would still take a long time." Yamato had peered up at his mother inquisitively, "How long?" Natsuko ruffled her eldest child's soft blond mop of hair; it would be time to get it cut again soon, "More than a day." she replied. "A whole day?!" Yamato had asked, shocked. His mother had nodded, "And, you'd have to sleep on the plane." The little blond boy's eyes were wide as he'd stared down at the map with new appreciation. "Sooooo, how long would it take to get…" Yamato's stubby finger hovered circles over the map as he spoke. "…Here?" he jabbed the finger down in the middle of the word 'Botswana'.
Yamato had insisted that he was just as Japanese as his classmates were, and he'd hit a boy who had called him a liar before bursting into tears. They had both gotten in trouble, and Yamato remembered feeling angry, and frustrated, and humiliated and being unable to express it adequately enough to explain himself because he was only six.
When they'd learned about dominant and recessive genes in high school biology, Yamato had wondered pettishly why he and his brother had both been born blue-eyed blonds with vaguely Western European features if the only family member with whom they shared the colouring was their mother's father. Yamato's mother was half, so that made he and Takeru a quarter, which meant that, in theory, neither of them should look the way they did, let alone both of them. He'd hoped Takeru didn't have to deal with as many comments as he had when he'd been in middle school, now that there seemed to be more and more foreigners in Odaiba because of the apartments the university had erected to house exchange students. Takeru would handle it regardless; he'd always been more outgoing and immediately likeable than his reticent older brother.
As often as he'd told himself that moving to a new school would solve the problem, things hadn't changed as he'd gotten older, but he had gotten better at tuning it out. The comments were less guileless now that he was in middle school, intended to crack his cool exterior. It was mostly other boys who'd made racial slurs in his direction during his preteens, since the girls were more interested in belittling each other in an effort to attract his attention than alienating the cute boy with the "enviable" complexion. The comments hadn't been a really frequent thing and those sorts of opinions hadn't ever been expressed by the majority of his male peers, but he wasn't the same as them either and people couldn't help but notice his differences before his similarities.
In middle school it was normal to evaluate yourself in relation to others; although Yamato had hardly been convinced that acting like a pack of wild dogs whenever you were with your friends and a girl walked by could be considered "normal" behaviour, regardless of age or hormone levels. That hadn't stopped him from participating though, showboating or jockeying for attention, though not to the extent that the other boys had. He'd wanted to be liked and raucousness, dirty jokes, and horseplay had been the accepted form of interaction between male friends. Other than the few boys who looked for reasons to actively dislike Yamato, he'd gotten on well with most of the other students in his year, largely thanks to Taichi, who had introduced Yamato to all of his soccer friends. Taichi always invited the blond and made him feel welcome when they hung out together in a group. Yamato had felt accepted, but the boys in his class had spent all their time together talking and laughing about girls and sex. And, Yamato, who was interested in the latter, but not the former, again had to face the realization that he was different.
He remembered being back in elementary school, before he'd gone to the Digital World, and thinking to himself, seemingly out of the blue, I hope I'm not gay. He'd had no context or reason for the thought, but there it was; solid enough that it appeared in his conscious mind as fully formed words, as if he'd said them out loud in his brain, rather than the collection of intuition, vague emotions, and almost-images that comprised most thoughts. It was a thought that, as soon as he'd had it, he'd shoved away in a panic, and refused to think about or acknowledge, except in so far as to remind himself that all pubescent boys wondered about their sexuality.
On some level though, he'd known, in the same way he'd have known if something, God forbid, were to happen to Takeru; a heaviness in his chest and a sense of foreboding. Following that one stray mental remark at age nine, it wasn't something that had ever really crossed his mind again until he'd been thirteen, but, the second time the niggling thought had appeared, he hadn't experienced the sort of denial that, in hindsight, he imagined he would have felt if he hadn't already resigned himself to it—it, of course, being his homosexuality.
Yamato had withdrawn a bit after that realization; not only was he different on the outside, but on all those occasions he'd told himself that he was no different from anybody else on the inside, where it counted presumably, he'd been lying to himself. Acknowledging his sexuality had been harder than accepting his looks: he would never have to see a look of poorly disguised shock or discomfort when he told someone that he was, surprise, part French because it was, pardon the pun, as plain as the nose on his face.
As with his appearance, the blond had often wished he could be "normal": that he enjoyed boobs, and curvy hips, and soft, fleshy thighs, but wishing it hadn't changed how he felt about such things—detached and uninterested. He could appreciate feminine beauty, certainly, but he wasn't attracted to it. He'd talked a good game though.
He was in his final year of high school now, and, as much as he'd come to accept and like himself for who he was, Yamato still felt like a bit of a fraud. He flirted casually with the girls who talked to him in the hallway and were fans of his band, and he'd never bothered to correct his friends' assumptions when they joked about his popularity with women. He kept meaning to insert a seemingly off-handed remark that would both clue them in and help diffuse any negative reactions, but he could never think of one at the appropriate time. So, Yamato laughed right along with them when they ribbed him about his unwillingness to kiss-and-tell and tried to ignore the lump in his chest. He was almost out of high school, and he still hadn't come out, he didn't know how.
He knew Taichi knew, not that they'd ever discussed it, but he definitely knew. His father probably suspected, but he hadn't brought it up either. Ishida Hiroaki wasn't the type of man who was comfortable talking about feelings, but then neither was Yamato, so it was a topic they mutually avoided. Yamato shook his head ruefully; it was the elephant in the room that they pointedly didn't talk about. He was sure his mother had no idea her eldest son had a preference for men, and he figured that they didn't see each other often enough that it mattered one way or the other, even though it definitely did, if he were honest with himself. Takeru… he mulled that over in his head for a moment. He wasn't sure about Takeru, he'd never told him, but he thought that he might know anyway. So, he still had to officially tell his parents and Takeru, the other chosen children, and his band mates.
Yamato berated himself for making such a big deal out of it; he honestly liked himself the way he was, deviant sexual tendencies and all. The blond rolled his eyes and the corner of his lips quirked up. He was psyching himself out, imagining scenarios in his head that were likely far worse than his friends' and family's actual reactions would be. He expected confrontations, and disbelief, and discomfort, and maybe some anger and disappointment, but he didn't expect to be dragged out and lynched, and he didn't think any of them would hate him forever. Not for something beyond his control; they hadn't hated him for being born blond, had they?
And, he'd just realized that he really, really liked his hair colour anyway. He'd wanted to dye it when he was younger, so he could be "as Japanese as" those kids who, back in first grade, had asserted he wasn't and made him cry. He realized now that he was older that they hadn't necessarily been trying to be cruel; they simply hadn't understood beyond their own six year-old logic: he couldn't be as Japanese as they were because they were Japanese, and he didn't look like them. Sora had once mentioned that she had been picked on for having big ears and playing sports when she was little.
Yamato didn't think his experiences growing up were all that different from anyone else's, and watching heads of hair, black, black, brown, black, brassy blond, precede him into the train car, Yamato was struck by the thought that from behind it was hard to tell the difference between people with similar hair cuts and colours, especially the students dressed in their school uniforms. A slim boy with a deep tan, round brown eyes, a wide face, and dyed honey blond hair stepped in front of him, and Yamato paused on the platform, being bumped and jostled by other commuters trying to board. He cocked his head to the side; from the back he and the boy probably didn't look all that different from one another either.
The blond stepped forward through the doors a moment before they slid shut. Yamato knew he was different, and he didn't really mind so much anymore, but maybe, he thought, not so different. Or rather, he was just as different in some ways and just as alike in others as everyone else, and maybe he didn't mind that so much either.