Chapter Text
By the time Ryu joined the group, Mitsui was in a better mood than when the night began and his spirits sky-rocketed when Ryu flashed the rabble of teens an unlabeled bottle of something he promised would be strong.
Norio laughed nervously before dragging his eyes over their crew, landing on Mitsui last, their unofficial leader. Mitsui shrugged nonchalantly. He wasn’t a big drinker, none of them really were, but he felt like loosening up. He felt wound up, his muscles tense, his head swimming with thoughts he’d rather not have swirling around in there.
His mom had tried to stop him from leaving the house earlier that evening, going on about how he barely went to school and how he hardly spent any time at home. He’d made sure to remind her there was a period in his life when he couldn’t even be bothered to drag himself out of bed, too depressed to care whether he lived or died, licking a wounded limb long healed yet still useless to him. She’d recoiled from him, stricken with guilt over something that had never been her fault. He felt guilty after that, laying eyes on her dejected face. He couldn’t muster the words to form an apology, there was no sincerity to pull from. He’d pushed past her in the end and had walked out the door.
It was Friday night! What was he supposed to do? Stay in with her? Locked in his room staring at his walls plastered with posters he stuck up only to cover the ones underneath. Fuck that!
“Pass it here,” he barked at Ryu, snatching the bottle from the other teen's hands before he even had a chance to offer it up properly.
Mitsui twisted off the cap to the bottle and took a substantial swig of the mystery drink. He could hear Ryu telling him to be careful—to take it easy—but his voice had no real urgency behind it. It wouldn’t stop Mitsui even if it had. However, once the liquid poured over his tongue, flooding his mouth and subsequently assaulting his taste buds until it carved a torrential trail down his throat, he felt like he should’ve heeded Ryu’s tepid warning.
Something strong suddenly felt like an understatement.
Still, Mitsui swallowed the bitter drink with a grimace, poorly hiding the amount of difficulty it truly took. Ryu snickered beside him. Norio and the other guys looked at him worriedly. Mitsui eventually cleared his throat and scoffed, attempting to regain his composure. His body felt hot, his skin prickled, and his nose tingled. He wondered briefly if the alcohol was already taking effect or if he was just confusing embarrassment with intoxication. He hated that he couldn’t quite tell the difference.
Determined not to let his mood sour again, Mitsui recapped the bottle and shoved it into Norio’s gut.
And so it began.
They continued to walk to nowhere in particular as they had been before Ryu’s unceremonious arrival and passed the bottle around in the same rotation for what seemed like hours, taking small sips, trying to stretch what little alcohol Ryu had so kindly blessed them with.
Two-faced bastard, Mitsui thought to himself while laughing outwardly. The rest of the group was a few paces ahead of him, chattering endlessly about nothing and everything all at once. He felt the warm embrace of a buzz blanket his entire body as he watched the group walk further ahead, their silhouettes growing distant; fuzzy, blurring thickly.
Everything seemed to slow down around him. The cool night air kissed his flushed cheeks and he smiled, an artificial sense of happiness creeping into him like an insidious spill. He felt like he might be drifting off to sea, even the sound of the ocean filled his ears; waves barreling toward the shoreline.
For a moment, he thought they might be close to the beach but he knew that wasn’t possible, recalling having traveled in the opposite direction. Still, the sound grew louder, louder, louder and then became something else entirely.
Mitsui knew the sound well, it was unmistakable. He’d heard it countless times in the past. A stew of noise: the roar of applause, an audience shouting for opposing teams in tandem, the squeak of basketball shoes, a ball bouncing against the court floor; each sound an exclamation point.
For the second time that night Mitsui’s mind went to places he'd rather it didn't and where his mind went, he was tugged along.
He found himself in the middle of a game, his teammates moving around him, the opposing side trying their best to keep up. It was no use, not with the ball in Mitsui’s hands. And he felt it. The round object in his hold, the rubber beneath his perspiring palms, the weight of it.
He felt his body tick into place; muscle memory. Every part of him moved without conscious thought, setting up the perfect 3-point shot. He felt his hands push that invisible basketball up into the sky toward an unseen hoop. He went through the motions like a well-oiled machine but there was something more to it than that. A spirituality that awakened in him, that moved through him.
A light shone down from above, illuminating the goal below, and for a fraction of a second all went quiet until the soft, subtle swish of the ball passing through the netting sounded out, like music to his ears.
"What're you doing?" Mitsui heard someone ask as he was broken from his reverie, his arms dropping to his sides. Reality seeped in around him, black like sludge, and he felt weighed down by it.
He knew he hadn’t been hallucinating, perhaps only doing something a person on his way to drunkenness would do. His heart adopted a rabbit-fast rhythm as he realized this and he blinked furiously, looking ahead at Ryu stepping into his line of sight.
The bottle of alcohol was in his hand though it appeared to only have one or two sips remaining. The small amount of liquid swished around the bottom of the plastic container, it was probably more backwash than anything else.
Ryu casually walked up to him and plastered himself to his side, hooking his arm around his shoulders before pushing the near empty bottle into his hands.
"You get the honors of finishing it off," Ryu said, his sharp eyes meeting Mitsui’s head on.
"Thanks," Mitsui replied flatly, glancing briefly at the other teen's hand along his shoulder.
Ryu’s hand felt a lot like the gnarled paw of a creature that only meant harm. He wanted to shrug it off, they weren't close like this and it struck him as odd.
Through his heady buzz, Mitsui chalked Ryu's behavior up to ass kissing. The other teen often tried sucking up whenever the chance arose, mostly aiming his annoying tendencies at Tetsuo when it came to that. Mitsui glanced down at the bottle in his hands, a soft flutter rippling across his abdomen as he thought of the older man.
Tetsuo had been gone for two weeks (out of town on ‘business’) and no one had heard from him in that time. Something bitter settled into Mitsui’s gut. He felt upset for some reason, an emotion most likely instigated by the alcohol. It wasn’t like Tetsuo would check in with any of the guys he hung around with but still…a simple call would've been nice. After all, Mitsui had slipped him his number long ago.
Begrudgingly, Mitsui’s hands twisted the cap off the bottle. He brought the bottle to his lips and downed what was left of the alcohol, its taste not as bitter as before.
It didn’t hit him all that once.
Fuzzier.
Farther away.
Distant voices.
Mitsui blinked wearily in Norio’s direction. His large silhouette came in and out of focus.
Ryu’s arm around his shoulders felt heavy, so heavy and the hot stink of his breath assaulted the side of his face and the inside of his nose.
“You don't look so good,” Ryu whispered into his ear, not a grain of sincerity in his voice. “Maybe you should lie down,” he added, yanking the bottle out of his hands and tossing it aside along the sidewalk.
Mitsui glanced at Ryu, his eyelids drooping. He opened his mouth to speak, but nothing but a string of slurred words poured out. He couldn’t even understand himself. Distantly, he thought, this isn’t what being drunk feels like…He felt the sudden, heart-sinking dread of something being terribly wrong.
However, he could not get his mind to work with his body in the way he wanted and the abrupt feeling of sedation made him cling to Ryu despite feeling like whatever was happening to him was most likely his doing.
Ryu’s voice sounded again, this time louder and directed toward the group of guys ahead of them. “I think he's sick!” His voice boomed.
Mitsui heard Norio speak up, a worried tone seeping into every elongated syllable. For one fleeting moment, Mitsui thought he might be saved from whatever wretched thing was occurring.
"I'll make sure he gets home safe," Ryu said to the others and before anyone could protest, Mitsui was shoved in the opposite direction.