Hello, all. Here's chapter twenty-one.

Lunar Eclipse

Chapter Twenty-One

Takeda was terrified. Ukai had said this morning that he was going home to forget that last night had ever happened, and it didn't take a genius to figure out that was code for "get very, very drunk." He knew from their nightly adventures with Nekoma's coaches during the training camp that Keishin Ukai was very good at holding his liquor, and that high alcohol tolerance meant that he would also be tempted to keep pushing that tolerance until his body couldn't handle any more - especially if he was trying to get plastered. Given that Ukai, who perpetually kept his ringer on full volume and never slept through it, hadn't answered even one call out of the last fifteen Takeda had just placed, he had every right wonder if his friend had seriously hurt himself this time.

As Takeda fast-walked the trek from the school to Ukai's apartment, cell phone clutched in his right hand and bag slung over his left shoulder, he began to second guess himself. Would Ukai really give himself alcohol poisoning so soon after Tsukishima's tragedy? He had to know that the team was already so worked up over current events thus far, that one more incident would not only be incredibly irresponsible, but too much for them to handle.

But then again, the younger Ukai was never known for his forethought and self control, and if he had gone overboard this time, it most likely wasn't on purpose.

Pretty soon the flustered teacher found Ukai's front door. His first instinct was to ring the doorbell, but after several seconds of waiting and not hearing any movement from inside, Takeda moved to force the door open and realized that it was already unlocked. He must have forgotten to lock it behind him when he got home this morning, he thought as he stepped carefully over the threshold. If Ukai's mental state had been such that he'd forgotten to lock his front door, then it only strengthened the possibility that the coach could have been distraught enough to drink himself into a coma. Or worse.

The first thing Takeda noticed once he actually entered the apartment was the odor; the place smelled like old gym socks and stale cigarettes. There were wads of clothing thrown about the living room floor, and various tables and counters had ashtrays sitting stop them that looked like they hadn't been emptied and cleaned in weeks. About half the furniture looked like Ukai had bought it from an Ikea at least six years ago, and the other, nicer half old and worn - like they were gifts from relatives and he hadn't bothered to take care of them.

Takeda looked around the living room for his friend. Nothing. If he came home and started drinking, then he most likely went to the kitchen, Takeda thought as he toed around discarded clothes, traversing the short hallway from the entrance in the living room to Ukai's kitchen.

At first glance, Takeda didn't see him. He saw the open bottle of scotch on the kitchen table, empty glass at its side. One of the chairs had been pulled out slightly, as if someone had stood up without pushing it back in. It was upon looking a little closer that he saw the red of Ukai's jacket under the table. Adrenaline-fueled panic flooded Takeda's system as he ran to the table and threw the chair aside, fearing the worst. Tossing his phone and bag aside as well, he knelt next to Ukai, his breathing ragged and harsh with fear. Ukai was clearly unconscious, lying face down on the linoleum floor. Takeda pressed his fingers to his neck and waited anxiously for a pulse. Normal. He rolled Ukai onto his side with one hand and placed the back of the other one over the coach's mouth and nose. Breathing was also normal.

Good, he thought, He's alive, and he appears to be okay. That means no alcohol poisoning. Probably.

It was in that moment that Ukai's eyelids fluttered to life, slowly revealing the dark irises and bloodshot whites underneath. Takeda pulled his hands back and watched as his friend blinked a few times to clear his vision and bring himself into consciousness. Slowly, Ukai rolled back onto his hands and knees and pushed himself off the floor. As he hoisted himself off the linoleum, he could feel how much heavier and more sluggish it felt to carry his own body weight. His vision blurred again, his stomach lurched into his throat, and without thinking, Ukai promptly vomited onto his kitchen floor.

Takeda felt the acrid stench of vomit hit his nostrils as the disgusting yellow/orange almost-liquid spewed from the coach's mouth. He watched as Ukai emptied the contents of his stomach, taking particular note of the fact that the disgusting mess was, in fact, almost entirely liquid.

"You didn't bother to eat anything first?" Ukai looked up from the floor, wiping his mouth on the back of his hand.

"No." Silence.

"You didn't answer your phone." Ukai slowly sat up on the floor, still clearly in a bit of a haze. He didn't meet Takeda's eyes.

"What do you mean?"

"I mean you always answer your phone. I teach teenage girls who spend less time on their phones." Ukai tried to stand, but faltered, and sat back down on the floor until his head cleared.

"My head is killing me."

"You could be dead, Ukai. You can't drink that recklessly alone. What if I hadn't come over to check on you?" Ukai stood again, leaning on the counter. He opened a cupboard and pulled out a bottle of aspirin and a glass. He filled the glass with water from the sink. Maybe he had some crackers around here somewhere...

"I was fine. I am fine. You didn't need to check on me. Who are you, my mother?"

"If you had given yourself alcohol poisoning, you could have thrown up in your mouth and choked on it. Your gag reflex would have been suppressed. You'd have suffocated and died."

Ukai shook three or four aspirin into his hand and popped them in his mouth, swallowing them with a few gulps of tap water. The crackers had been a no-go. He guessed he'd just have to deal with the nausea until he could get some real food somewhere. Setting the glass back onto the counter with a bit too much force, Ukai shuffled around to another part of the counter and pulled a half empty roll of paper towels from its stand. Takeda, noticing what he was doing, moved to stop him.

"Let me do it. You're barely functional." He took the paper towels from Ukai's grasp.

"Maybe I didn't want to be contacted."

"You didn't ignore my calls because you didn't want to be contacted. You ignored my calls because you were passed out drunk." Takeda said as he bent down to clean up the puddle on the floor. Ukai's eyebrows furrowed at the teacher's words.

"What did you expect me to do?"

"I expected you to handle things like an adult. We're not children. The team looks to us to handle adult matters. What would you have wanted me to tell them if I had found you dead in here?"

"Sensei, a kid just died! I spoke with him not more than an hour before they found him!" the coach shouted as he slammed his fist on the table, knocking over the glass and spilling the remainder of the water all over the counter. He sighed, and lowered himself into a kitchen chair, resting his face in his hands. "Every player on the team is going to ask me what we're going to do now that Tsukishima's out of the picture, and I don't have an answer for them. At what point are they old enough to find out that sometimes, there's nothing you can do?"

Takeda's expression was overcome with a mixture of pity and empathy. He knew the team looked up to Ukai much more than they looked up to him, and it had nothing to do with Ukai being a more mature adult, (because honestly, he wasn't). In terms of volleyball, Ukai was their mentor. Takeda often felt that he did nothing more than stand in the background and learn as they did. It was understandable, but it wasn't why Takeda pitied his friend. Takeda pitied his friend because he knew that the way the team looked up to him meant that they would take any and all cues on the matter from Ukai; they trusted him that much - and Ukai wasn't anywhere near mentally stable enough to handle that. He knew that was why Ukai had come straight home from the hospital and tried to drown himself in scotch - because he was just barely older than a kid himself; he probably had people Akiteru's age in his life who he considered to be peers. He was running because he felt like he wasn't qualified to direct a bunch of kids in such serious matters while he still felt like a kid himself. There were teachers on the staff Takeda still felt like that around. It made him wonder - at what age do you stop seeing yourself as a child?

"Sensei..." the coach muttered without looking up from his lap. Maybe it was the fact that, at the moment, Ukai's emotions were particularly vulnerable. Maybe it was because Ukai was hungover and the alcohol was still lowering his inhibitions, but there was an honest pain in the coach's voice that Takeda had never heard before. "I don't know what I'm doing. I don't wanna fuck up their entire future because I handled this the wrong way."

Takeda put down the paper towels, stood from the floor, and sat down in a chair next to his friend.

"How could you handle this the wrong way? What are you afraid of?"

"These kids are already having trouble dealing with their friend just barely surviving a shooting, and as an added bonus, they've lost their chance at Nationals. Sugawara's already going to need months of therapy. Yamaguchi might, too. Tsukishima is going to take months to recover, and that'll be hard on him both physically and mentally - and that's the best case scenario. There's still the chance he could suffer some sort of complication that could slow down his recovery, cripple him for life, or hell, even kill him. If I give any of them the wrong advice, if I don't handle the situation perfectly, I could ruin them."

Takeda paused for a second and thought. It frightened him how easily he could follow Ukai's train of thought. One small slip could tip the team's delicate mental and emotional balance for the worse, and Ukai was the one they were going to look to for that potential stability. Even so, the team respected him. They would understand that the coach is just a regular human being, right? And besides, there was no guarantee that he would screw it up.

"First of all," he began, trying to choose his words carefully, "There's no guarantee that you'll say the wrong thing. Second of all, they know that this is hard on you, too. Yeah, they're kids, but they're not stupid. I've had plenty of experiences in class where certain students understand way more than I give them credit. I think that as adults, we really tend to underestimate them. It'll be okay. As long as you're honest with them, everything will work out."

"That's your advice? Everything will work out? Things don't just 'work out' because we try really hard."

"Did I say it would be easy? I said it would work out. We're people, and we all have our own little binoculars we use to see our little slice of reality. Communication is important because it means we share the visions from those binoculars to maybe someday get a complete picture. Maybe we can never get there, but we have to keep trying. It's who we are. What I'm saying is, just communicate honestly, and they'll understand."

Ukai and Takeda sat like that for several minutes in mutual silence, settling in their shared turmoil. As the afternoon sunlight flickered through the slight openings in the kitchen blinds, the duo wondered what they would do next. The road to recovery would be difficult, they knew, but at least neither of them would have to go through it alone.

Yamaguchi felt the blinding sunlight assault his eyes, burning the backs of his eyelids and startling him into consciousness. Throwing his arm over his face, he slowly pried his eyes open, using his forearm to shield them from the light. The blurry image of Sugawara's bedroom came into view as he blinked and rubbed the crusted mucus out of the corners of his eyes with the back of his hand. Finally sitting up, he looked at his phone. It was 2:52pm. They'd slept for six hours? Seven? Yamaguchi wasn't entirely sure.

I hoped I'd feel more rested, he thought as he tried to ignore the migraine growing in the back of his head. Instead of feeling refreshed and ready to tackle the rest of his day, he was groggy, and every joint in his body ached like he'd just been hit by a garbage truck. The emotional weight of the night before hit him hard and fast, like a mound of bricks dropping onto his shoulders with all the abruptness of a collapsing building. His breath hitched in his chest, and everything inside him felt like a thousand tiny explosions, all doing their damage to the organs within. Akiteru was dead, Tsukki was halfway there himself... it was nothing short of agony. And not to mention that migraine...

I should take something for that. Maybe have a glass of water. Yamaguchi was about to stand from his seated position on the air mattress when he turned and saw Sugawara on the bed beside him, still asleep. He seemed to be sleeping peacefully until, like a lightning strike, his face flipped from a tranquil slumber to one of anguish and unease. The setter's eyebrows furrowed, he pulled his knees into his chest under the blanket and shivered. As Yamaguchi watched, he could swear to a faint whimpering that could only be coming from his sleeping teammate.

He's having a nightmare, probably about last night. In an effort to shake Sugawara from his nightmare, Yamaguchi stood from the air mattress and stepped onto the floor beside his teammate's bed. Reaching out, he pulled the blanket from Sugawara's shoulders and shook him.

"Suga!" he called in somewhat of a harsh whisper, "Suga, you've gotta wake up. You're having a bad dream!"

Sugawara flew up from the bed, startling Yamaguchi into taking a step or two back. His eyes were wide, and a cold sweat had broken on his face. He sat in place, pupils dilated and frozen, staring into nothingness for several seconds. Yamaguchi watched as Sugawara's breathing slowed from a quick rasping to a normal, controlled pace. Once he was sure his teammate had recovered from his shock, he began to speak.

"Suga? Suga, are you okay?" Sugawara turned to look at Yamaguchi, his eyes still wide with fear. Though his gaze was still far away, he was much more coherent than he was a several short seconds ago. He spoke with a small, far-off voice.

"Yeah... bad dream..." Yamaguchi sat down on the edge of the bed.

"Wanna talk about it?" His teammate's surprise finally eased as his he let his head drop between his knees, covering the back of his head with his hands and knotting his fingers in his silver hair.

"No..." He answered in a weary voice, "No, I don't wanna talk about it." Just then -

Ding.

Yamaguchi turned to look at his phone. There was a message in the group chat. He picked it up from the air mattress and unlocked it with a quick swipe of his finger. Upon further inspection, he found that the message was from their team captain.

"Hey, check your phone. Daichi just sent a message around to the team chat." At Yamaguchi's request, Sugawara took his own cell phone from beside his pillow and checked the message as well. It read as follows:

TeamDad: Hey, guys. I know we had a rough day today, but since coach isn't holding practice, I'm putting together a trip to the hospital to see Tsukishima instead. I already cleared everything with his mother, but I need drivers. Does anyone have any ideas? Tanaka, your sister?

Yamaguchi turned to Sugawara.

"Hey, could your mom take us?" The setter shook his head.

"Sorry, our car's not working. What about your mom?" This time, it was Yamaguchi's turn to decline.

"I'd, uh, rather not bother my mom anymore today. She can be a little moody, and she's still worried about my dad..."

"Right, sorry. I forgot." Ding. Ding. Ding. Ding. More messages.

Dad2.0: Have you tried coach or Takeda-sensei?

TeamDad: I tried both. Coach didn't pick up his phone, and Sensei wasn't in his office when I checked after class.

BallsyBaldy: I can try to ask Saeko, but she's been a mess since this morning. I'll call her and let you know.

TeamDad: Anyway, anyone who wants to come along, meet me in the gym in about ten minutes. We'll gather there and see how many drivers we need.

Yamaguchi and Sugawara both watched the messages appear on their screens one after another with a look of mild surprise. What had Daichi meant when he said they'd "had a rough day"? Were they simply exhausted and depressed after last night? Or had someone found out about the incident and caused their teammates trouble? Neither of the boys knew, and in a weird way, they were pretty afraid to find out. How could things have possibly gotten any worse in the time that they'd been asleep?

In the end, Daichi was able to call Takeda to get him to drive them to the hospital, and Tanaka was able to pull Saeko out of her funk enough to convince her to drive as well. Yamaguchi packed up his stuff as Sugawara got himself together, and together the two boys said goodbye to Sugawara's mother and walked back to the school, where they would willingly endure the memory of what happened all over again.

A bit of a slower, character-driven chapter, but I felt that was appropriate.

Anyway, I'm not really anticipating that this story go beyond chapter 24 or 25 (+ an epilogue). It might end up being longer, but I can't really see it. That being said, I am toying with the idea of writing a sequel with Tuskishima's recovery, his family's grief process, and maybe a court case? I just thought that trying to cram everything into one 40+ chapter story was a bit unnecessary, and that it would make the plot and central themes get a bit out of hand.

If you have thoughts on the matter feel free to share them with me, and as always, constructive criticism is greatly appreciated :)