Mint Chocolate Cookies (World trigger)

Debt

A checkbook.

Ninomiya looked at the empty pages, and counted a 5 by 5 grid out, one square at a time.

He was getting restless, unsure of whether he should or shouldn't get his hopes up for any of this. Success was practically guaranteed, but this was so important to him, and he didn't want to be let down. Anything but the crushing disappointment he had felt when she had left. Because she not only taken herself away when she traveled into a suicide mission, but she had stolen him along with her, and he had been lost for so long without her.

He looked at the grid, thin blue lines scoring the paper in a stiff style that could only be conceived in a factory. He counted the boxes over and over again, even though he knew that a five-by-five grid would always be 25 cubes deep, and no more, but he counted again and again, ensuring that the number was what it appeared to be. It was like how he felt about the mission, sitting there, just inside the doorways to the plaza, awaiting the away ship. It was to be expected without fail, but the one time you miscount 25 to be 24 or 26 and his dreams would be down the drain again.

Dark thoughts were creeping into his mind at a rate that was too fast for him to conceive, so he opted focused on his breath.

He remembered Azuma coming to him, his old captain, to teach him basic breathing exercises after Hatohara's disappearance. He told him how you can't think of your breath as an in an out pull, but should think of it as a circle, cycling through inhales, and exhales, and the transition being neverending.

He began to skip boxes purposely. He tried to skip over different boxes each time, seeing how many results he could get while still not thinking too hard about it. It was peculiar, and he doubts anything of the sort could tame somebody else's nerves, but it seemed to work for him and that's all that matters.

1, 2, 3, 4, 5, in, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, out.

He counted with his breath, making sure he got enough air. He was the type to hold their breath under pressure.

And after a while, he eased into a state of nothing. His mind empty, his eyes drawing along the simple, blank 5 by 5 grid that he was suddenly so well acquainted with, but he no longer counted squares, only looked at the microscopic edges of the impressed ink, and the small little rough edges where the ink had bled into the neighboring grains in the paper, so small you needed to squint and purposefully be looking for it to even get a sense that it was there. Why was he looking at it?

Why indeed.

A question Ninomiya knew no answer for. Then again, there were no important questions in his life that he could answer anyways. It's not to be considered an important question, unless the answer slips out of your fingertips so narrowly every time.

He decided, after the minutes sunk away into the murky depths of past, that for whatever reason, he liked this little grid, and he was unsure if filling it with his scrawled and rushed penmanship would satisfy him. He decided against it, then resumed pondering what fascinated him and comforted him so about a blank chart, and why he felt the need to leave it blank, when it's sole duty was to be filled in the first place.

It was such a strange notion, the idea, so far gone, it bade his mind into the outskirts of absurdity, and pulled his conscious thoughts away from the present time of panic.

Inukai and Tsuji were already present. He realised. However, as the duo had seen him from across the hall a few minutes back, thinking that he knew not of their appearance, they had retreated back from whence they'd came, clearly see to it that he had his space to move, and air to breathe. And he accepted their offer by inhaling and exhaling in a cycle, and flicking the corners of a little grid, the sheet of paper it was printed on, far to thin, and gave the impression that the people who manufactured the booklet on day one, had papercuts up to their necks.