It rained all night. He had gotten home at about 2 o'clock in the morning, dazed, confused, and with a small portion of the right side of his head still covered with small patches of dried blood. From the moment he walked in the door to the moment he collapsed in bed, hair now soft and clean from a warm bath, he kept thinking about how surreal it felt. Three of his closest friends and one of his best teachers had just died. He was never going to hear Suzumoto laugh again and he was never going to see Morishige fulfil his dream nor would he see the day when Shinohara would finally grow a pair and confess here feelings to Nakashima. Not to mention, he was going to miss having Ms. Yui to dot on him like she would. Who would even take care of her cat?

All night his mind raced, wondering what kind of questions they would get. That kept him up for a while until sleep finally took him. Then the nightmares started.

He dreamt of blood, so much blood. The blood that permanently strained the wooden hallways a mucky red-brown. He dreamt of the bodies of the poor, unfortunate souls who had the misfortune of hearing about the Sachiko charm. He hoped that the school didn't swallow the remaining sane souls whole. He dreamt of Shinozaki falling into that pool and not being able to get her in time, God knows he can't swim and if it hadn't been for that burst in adrenaline they both would have drowned. He dreamed of Yuki, the girl with one eye who desperately wanted to keep what was left of her sanity. In the end he woke up about five times that night, each time he would be sweating like crazy, panting as his lungs tried to desperately give his erratic heart more and more oxygen. On a later date, when he was a bit more clear headed, he estimated that he got about an two hours and fifteen minutes of sleep. That was the best night of sleep he would have gotten in the months to come.

The next day passed by like a blur. Walking through the halls of Kisaragi High felt just as surreal as the night before. It was honestly frightening for him to see how similar both school were, structure wise, and how some of the corridors of his school seemed to stretch it just as far as the ones in Heavenly Host. There were no mentions of Suzumoto or Morishige or Shinohara or of Ms. Yui, as a matter of fact, they just didn't exist anymore. Any record of them just vanished, vanished as if they were never really there in the first place. This made him frustrated to no end. Did that really just die for nothing, he asked himself throughout the day. He didn't want that for them, no one that mattered anymore did, but there were no convincing the rest of the student body of the teachers that they had existed.

The one that had taken this the worst was Nakashima. Shinohara had been her best friend, no, she had been her soul mate. They did everything together, they barely ever fought; they were the type of people that wanted their children to get married so that they would become family. Being without her was physically painful, at one point it look like she was going to start having a panic attack. Shinozaki didn't look like she wan doing any better, nasty purple rings circled her eye and he thinks that she might have gotten less sleep than he did. Satoshi looked equally exhausted and it looked like he didn't seem to know what to do with himself. He wondered if he looked just as terrible as they did and a quick trip to the restroom confirmed that he looked even worse. His head had bruised badly, deep purple marks spread across the side were he had been hit. Red specks sat underneath these marks in areas were the impact of the bar of that sledgehammer was strong enough to make him bleed, but not strong enough to break through the skin. The skin had also been raised slightly, the inflammation had gone down significantly the night before. It didn't help that he hadn't slept well that night.

To be perfectly honest, he looked like a God damn druggie and the fact that he was disoriented didn't help his case at all. Both teachers and students had asked him about his behavior with suspicion looks in their eyes and all he would do was grunt and point at his head. It was common knowledge that he supported himself and, even though he was covered quite nicely because of the health insurance laws, he still had other bills to pay. At the end of that day he had been stopped four times. He had stopped talking to the other students and by the day he wasn' to anyone. Not to Satoshi, not to Nakashima, he couldn't even look at Shinozaki. He felt so ashamed, swearing to protect a girl that he couldn't even face. He couldn't look at Nakashima either because she was just a nasty reminder of how he must have seem to the world, so shut out and stark. SatoshI tried to make him come out of his shell all day, but he couldn't make out words, he couldn't make out any sort of coherent thought that didn't have to do with that night. He juat really wanted to talk to Suzumoto. She had always been nice enough to listen to whatever bullshit he had to spew. He just wished he had more time, time that could have been used to tell them all how much they meant to him. This wasn't fucking fair, he just wanted to have it be like the old times, even if it meant that Shinozaki still avoided him like a plague and that Suzumoto wasn't going to be going to the same school as the rest of them.

Work went better than school did, that was evident. Even though he left work early, he felt like he had worked an eight hour shift. After he dragged himself home from work he took a nice painkiller and doused off. He awoke about an hour later, covered in cold sweat.

Just a warning for the rest of the story: there will be little to no romance-based chapters. As much as I like writing romance, and I do, I feel like it would not be appropriate for this story to contain a lot of romance.

Review, please?