Chapter ten is here! Just a note, I looked at Tsukishima's wiki page for his age and birthday. Since the page didn't give a year (just the month and day), I chose a year based on the premise that this story is happening right now, in 2017, and did the math to determine what year he'd have to be born to make him 16 right now. If there is a technically "correct" year for his birthday, I couldn't find it. I also took Sugawara's age from his wiki page as well.

Also, I named one of the paramedics in this chapter. Can anyone guess which anime I got the name from? :D

Lunar Eclipse

Chapter Ten

Sugawara almost cried the moment he heard the police and ambulance pull into the convenience store parking lot. They were here. Tsukishima was going to live.

The store's double doors burst open as police officers and paramedics rushed into the building. Sugawara almost laughed, despite himself. He couldn't imagine what those officers and paramedics were thinking, entering a store and seeing three kids on the floor covered in blood in the middle of the night. He felt like something had snapped inside himself, like there was a barrier of sanity he had somehow crossed over without his own knowledge. Unable to keep himself together any more, the sight of the paramedics - dare he call them his saviors - had pushed his sanity further than he'd ever intended to go. Releasing the terror-tinged joy bubbling deep inside his chest, Sugawara laughed.

As his insane laughter died down, he could feel himself start to slip back into his subconscious, escaping the trauma of his situation. He felt himself mentally slip backwards, as if he were trust falling into an absolute darkness. As he was falling he reached out and caught himself, anchoring himself to reality. No, I need to stay with it. Tsukishima could still need me. I've failed him too much already.

It was at that point he realized he was still sitting on the floor of the convenience store. He registered that someone was yelling.

"Get that kid out of here, now!"

As if on cue, he felt a pair of strong hands lift him to his feet and lead him away from the commotion. He registered that the person was speaking to him, but he was too far away to care. It was like they were speaking across the room through a barrier of glass - there, but not there. Several seconds later, he had pulled himself together enough to understand the person's words.

"I'm going to ask you again, can you tell me your name?"

"... Koushi Sugawara."

"How old are you, Koushi?"

His mind continued to fog over. Struggling, he pushed through.

"Eighteen."

"Can you tell me where you are right now?"

"... Family Mart. In Torono Town."

"What day of the week is it today?"

"... Thursday."

"Okay. Koushi, you need to stay with me right now, alright? Everything's going to be okay. Do you know the boy who was shot?" He felt a pair of large hands drape him with a warm, heavy cloth.

"...Yeah. I go to school with him. He's on my volleyball team."

The paramedic had probably begun to say something else to him, but in that moment, he didn't care. He turned his attention to the police officers milling around the store, marking different areas, keeping the general populace - who had begun to gather near the doors at the sound of the sirens - at peace and out of the way.

"Sir, I need you to move. We need to do our jobs," one officer was telling someone. A woman with him seemed to be shouting into the crowd.

"Hey, did anyone catch a good look at that guy?"

Another officer had taken Kiku aside. She trembled as she cleaned the blood from her hands with an alcohol wipe, answering all the officer's questions. Her adrenaline seems to be wearing off, too, Sugawara found himself thinking as he watched her revert back into the shy, backwards, and exhausted cashier he'd met upon walking into the store.

Sugawara turned his attention to Tsukishima, who was, at this point, being swarmed by paramedics. They were replacing Kiku's soaked gauze with a proper bandage, and Sugawara could hear another paramedic try to speak to Tsukishima.

"Hello, my name is Kaede. I'm a paramedic, and I'm here to help you. Can you tell me where you are?" She knelt down and took his wrist. After Tsukishima didn't answer, his glassy-eyed expression focused somewhere on the ceiling, she looked over at her colleagues.

"He's conscious, but not responding to verbal stimuli. Pulse is thready, breathing is severely compromised." She turned to someone next to her, "This kid's lost a lot of blood. His next stop is cardiac arrest, so keep an eye on his pulse." Another paramedic handed Kaede an oxygen tank and she held the connected mask to Tsukishima's mouth and nose and fastened it in place as two more people carefully lifted him and rolled him onto a backboard. They had him quickly secured, transferred him to a gurney, and wheeled him out of the store.

As they did so, Sugawara felt the pair of hands guide him by the shoulders and lead him toward the store's exit.

"Now, Koushi, we need you to come with us to the hospital. In addition to making sure you're okay, we also need you to answer any questions about your friend that we may need answered, since he can't answer for himself. Do you understand?" Somewhere far away from himself, Sugawara nodded.

"What's your friend's name?"

"Kei Tsukishima."

"Do you know when his birthday is?" Sugawara closed his eyes. He tried to remember the beginning of the school year, when Daichi showed him the first years' club applications. They all had birthdays filled in.

"Um...September 27, 2000... I think."

"And last one: do you have any of his emergency contact info? Any way we can reach his family?"

Sugawara thought for a moment, before hanging his head. Tsukishima's club application probably had that information, but he hadn't looked at the forms enough to know any of it offhand.

"No... I don't."

"That's okay, thank-you."

The paramedic helped Sugawara climb into the ambulance, sitting him down on a small chair near the front of the vehicle, closer to the driver's seat. He watched wide-eyed as the other paramedics, Kaede included, wheeled Tsukishima's gurney in behind him, climbing in and shutting the doors. Sugawara's paramedic informed them of the information he had relayed. Kaede nodded and pressed a small button on a radio beside her as the ambulance kicked into drive.

"Miyagi General, this is Ambulance 72. We're en-route with a 16-year-old male gunshot victim with a sucking chest wound, name Kei Tsukishima. He's conscious, but unresponsive to verbal stimuli and in stage 4 hypovolemic shock. Current vital signs: Blood pressure is 65/50 pulse is 110, respiration is 36. ETA is 5 minutes."

After Kaede finished contacting the hospital, she turned her attention from the radio back to Tsukishima and the other paramedics.

"We need to get a chest tube for this kid before he suffocates. Someone get me a scalpel." Different people began to pull different supplies from drawers and cabinets - tubes, scalpels, some sort of canister among other things- and hand them to Kaede. She took some sort of cloth and wiped down a portion of the skin around Tsukishima's rib cage. Once she had made a small incision in the space she began to feed a plastic tube that seemed to be connected to some sort of canister in through the hole. Other paramedics chimed in to secure the tube with other various supplies while Kaede turned her attention to other matters: setting up a heart monitor and, once they had Tsukishima's medical records from the hospital, hanging IVs for blood transfusions and various medications.

Sugawara watched the paramedics flock Tsukishima. They're doing everything they can to keep him alive, he found himself thinking as he watched them constantly check and re-check his vital signs. He listened to the ambulance's rumbling as it sped down Torono Town's streets, listened to the shake of various supplies in the ambulance as it occasionally hit small bumps in the road, and listened to the little heart monitor as it constantly kept to the rhythm of Tsukishima's heartbeat, getting lost in the commotion. Still high on adrenaline, Sugawara fought to settle his stomach as the ambulance swayed, turning a corner.

"It's so fast..." he mumbled, his eyes never breaking contact with the heart monitor. The paramedic at his side, as if reading his mind, immediately responded.

"It's called Sinus Tachycardia - probably because his blood pressure is so low." Sugawara suddenly turned to look at her. She paused slightly before continuing.

"Whenever you lose a significant amount of blood, your heart then has less blood to send oxygen to all your organs. When that happens, your heart pumps faster to make up for the difference, to keep your body running smoothly and minimize the damage, so to speak."

"He won't be able to keep that up forever..." She looked down, refusing to make eye contact with Sugawara.

"No, he won't. If we don't get his bleeding under control the blood loss will become too much for his heart to compensate for anymore. His organs won't be getting the oxygen they need. His heart will keep trying to compensate until it quits." Sugawara looked down as well, tears welling in the corners of his eyes. Tsukishima could still die. Even though he was alive when the ambulance got here... they still may have been too late. He could still die.

"C - can I ask you a question? And don't sugar-coat your answer - please." The paramedic looked back up at Sugawara.

"Of course."

"Is - is Tsukishima going to die? I mean... is he too far gone?"

"Right now, your friend is in stage four hypovolemic shock. Stage four is the most severe stage. What that means is that he's lost over forty percent of his total blood volume. To be frank, in the condition he's in right now, his heart could give out at any moment. If he passes out and goes into cardiac arrest right now, there's a very slim chance that we'll be able to bring him back. Should he get to the hospital in time, he'll need a team of trauma surgeons to operate on him immediately. They'll most likely open him up and begin tying off different blood vessels to keep him from losing any more blood while they repair any damage the bullet caused as quickly as they can. Trauma surgery is always extremely risky. A thousand different things could happen while he's on the table, and sometimes it takes nothing short of a sure hand and a miracle. I'm sorry. It's grim, but that's the un-sugar-coated reality."

She watched Sugawara pale more and more as she told him his friend's chances. She needed to save this conversation. Despite the fact that he asked for the brutally honest truth, she needed to give him some glimmer of hope. She took his shoulders and faced him.

"Listen. Just because the situation's grim right now does not mean that things are absolutely going to turn out that way. His fate is not sealed. He may be hanging by a thread, but the fact is that right here, right now, your friend is alive. It is absolutely possible for him to survive and make a full recovery, and these people here and in the hospital are going to do everything in their power to make sure that happens." Sugawara smiled faintly at the paramedic beside him, his expression quickly deteriorating from a half smile to a grimace. When he spoke, his voice quieted to almost a whisper.

"Thank-you... I understand, but... I'm sorry... I just can't hope for something that seems impossible. I... I feel like I've failed him."

They arrived at Miyagi General Hospital before the paramedic could respond. As the ambulance pulled up to the emergency drop-off point, Sugawara had a sudden flashback to a memory from when he was very little. When he was about five or six, he'd fallen from a chair trying to reach some dishes in the top shelf of a cabinet in their kitchen. When he fell, his face had bounced off the counter on the way down, breaking some blood vessels and causing a nosebleed. He felt something warm and wet tickle his upper lip, and went to wipe it away as if he just had a runny nose. When he removed his hand and saw that it was blood, he started to cry hysterically. Thinking back on the incident now, Sugawara realized he was probably more scared at the sight of blood than he was in pain, but that didn't stop his panicked mother from practically sprinting into the kitchen the moment he'd begun yelling. She'd tried to plug up his nose with napkins and paper towels, but the bleed hadn't even slowed down after several minutes. When tiny Sugawara had begun to complain that his head "felt funny," that was the last straw. She took him into her arms, put him in the car, and rushed to the emergency room. As the doctor there took a look at Sugawara's nose, the blood finally slowed to a trickle and soon stopped altogether. The doctor had told his mother that he'd probably just burst a particularly nasty vessel when he'd hit his face on the counter, and that he'd be fine. The doctor ended the visit by handing Sugawara a bright red lollipop and telling him to ask his mom for help the next time he wanted something he couldn't reach. He'd associated that bright red lollipop with blood ever since.

It feels so strange, he thought as the ambulance doors opened to reveal the hospital's emergency entrance, The same hospital that cared for me over something so innocent will now try to save my friend's life in a time of crisis.

Sugawara snapped back into reality just in time to hear Kaede shout something to the other paramedics. Together they pushed Tsukishima's gurney out of the ambulance. Despite how much worse he looked now than when he was still in the store (Sugawara didn't think it was possible), his eyes were still open - glassy and unfocused - but open and shifting around, staring past the faces surrounding him. That paramedic was right. He was still here. Slowly, a tiny glimmer of hope deep inside his chest flickered to life.

Shortly after Tsukishima and his team of paramedics disappeared through the hospital doors, his own paramedic took him inside herself.

"Come on," she said, gently helping Sugawara to his feet, "We need to get you inside, too, so they can check you out."

Sugawara sat on the edge of a gurney in a plain white room. The doctor standing in front of him had spent the last several minutes doing various tests to make sure Sugawara hadn't been injured in the incident as well - two fingers at the wrist to check that his pulse was normal, a thermometer to check that his temperature was normal, a blood pressure cuff to check that his blood pressure was normal, and an accurate count of his breathing to make sure his respiration was normal - at least normal for someone coming down off of shock. The doctor also asked Sugawara various questions to make sure that he was both coherent and unharmed, including many of the same questions that the paramedic had asked him earlier, questions like who he was, how old he was, and if he knew his present location. As his adrenaline wore off, he found it easier and easier to focus on the questions, much easier than when the paramedic had asked him. He supposed this meant he was calming down.

"You don't feel any pain anywhere?" the doctor asked.

"No, nothing." Sugawara replied.

"Well, you don't seem to have any obvious injuries anywhere and all your vital signs check out fine. I'd say you're good to go talk to the officers now, Sugawara." Sugawara thanked him and nodded, turning his attention to the police officer who had been standing sternly by the door. He approached Sugawara with a firm expression.

"Young man, my name is Officer Hashimoto. You've witnessed a serious crime, and I have a few questions I need to ask you." Sugawara stayed where he was, startled by the man's imposing aura.

"O-of course, officer. What do you need to know?"

Sugawara then proceeded to answer all the officer's questions about the incident: What his name was, what the victim's name was, how old they were, how they knew each other, and, most importantly, what happened. Sugawara retold the story the best he could, trying his best to leave out the unimportant bits, like his heart-stopping fear at the sight of Tsukishima's blood, or his overwhelming guilt at being the one who put him in that situation to begin with. The interrogation seemed to take forever, and Sugawara was relieved when it was over and he could finally settle himself after everything.

After Officer Hashimoto dismissed him, he got down from the gurney and wandered out into the hallway, trying to find someplace quiet to collect his thoughts. Out of habit he took his phone from his pocket to check the time, unlocked it, and almost dropped it out of surprise. First of all, it was after 1:30 in the morning already. Second of all, he had fifty-three missed calls from his mother. He was initially surprised that he'd never heard it ring, but quickly remembered that he'd put it on silent before practice started in the event that, should someone need to go into the club room for some reason, it wouldn't disturb them. He'd planned on calling his mom after they got out of the convenience store to let her know he was on his way home, but with everything that happened afterward, he had much more important things on his mind to worry about.

As if on cue, the phone rang again. Sugawara answered it, eliciting a cry of relief from his mother.

"Koushi Sugawara, where on earth are you? I've been calling you for the last two hours and you haven't answered once! I was this close to calling the police to report you missing!"

He told his mom where he was, and about everything that happened, the shooting, the ambulance ride, and the officer's questioning.

"Oh my god, Koushi, tell me you're okay."

"I'm fine, mom. The doctors checked me out, nothing's wrong. I'm fine."

"You need to come home right now and let me squeeze the pudding out of you, you hear me? I could have lost you, young man!"

"Mom... I can't. Tsukishima's in surgery... It's my fault he's here... I need to make sure he's okay. At least let me stay until the doctors come out to say things are fine. Please?" Mrs. Sugawara was silent for a long time. Her Koushi could have been killed. He could have ended up in that other boy's place. She wanted nothing more than to hold him tightly in her arms and be assured that he was okay, but he felt personally responsible for his friend's injury. She knew the kind of parental instinct her son had for his volleyball team. Maybe...maybe it was finally time for her boy to grow up.

"If that's what you need to do, Koushi. I can't come get you myself anyway, since your father forgot to call the mechanic today and the car's still not running. But if you get overwhelmed, please, please call someone to take you home." She begged as her voice quieted to almost a whisper, "Promise me."

"I understand, mom. I promise. Thanks." They both hung up, and as Sugawara looked down at his phone once again, he noticed it was almost 2am. That conversation took over twenty minutes...

But he wasn't done yet. If he was going to take responsibility for this incident, he needed to make one more phone call. He may not be able to contact Tsukishima's parents, he didn't have their numbers, but there was one more number he did have. Sugawara opened his contacts list and dialed Coach Ukai.

There's chapter ten! Since this chapter was a very medically heavy chapter, I tried my best to get the details correct and believable. If I have made a mistake anywhere, feel free to let me know. Any and all constructive criticism is appreciated :)