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The faint sound of raindrops hitting the metal window sill echoed through the otherwise completely silent room. There was still a bit of time left before the sky darkened and bid farewell to the sun for the day. The view from the window was bright and gray, no sunshine was visible from any cracks in between the clouds that covered the usually colorful expanse of the atmosphere like a blanket, yet it was still bright outside, reminiscent of the screen of a computer without a blue light filter. Everything was gray and black and white so high up in the air. Only the roofs of other buildings rivaling this one in terms of height were visible from the tempered glass. If one tried hard enough and reached as high as they could on their tiptoes and forced their eyes to gaze as low as they could, kilometers of abandoned, worn down asphalt would enter their field of vision.
Inside the room sat a lonely man, in deep contemplation. His thin eyebrows were knit together, framing his pained, bloodshot red eyes. He was hiding his frown under his hands which he had brought together to rest on the bridge of his nose, index fingers extended to the corners of his eyes and thumbs resting under his chin. He wasn't doing this to hide his frown from anyone in particular though, it was just unnecessary courtesy. He did not know who he was trying to be courteous towards, the only thing he knew of was the headache gnawing at the front of his skull from the inside. Perhaps he was attempting to apply pressure to his eye sockets, intending to ease the pain coursing through them from all the alcohol he had consumed. He did not know, all he wanted was to… He didn't know what he wanted. Maybe that was why he had decided to sit here, to think about what he wanted. That was what Sasara had asked him, anyway. Was he supposed to want anything in particular from their… partnership? He had only wanted to team up with him because of how serious he was when it came to what they were doing and the fact that he was talented, never thinking about anything ahead of that point. Clearly, that was what Sasara was concerned about all this time. All this time during which their relationship had grown from just teammates to… Something more. All this time during which Samatoki hadn't been aware of the fact that this was all supposed to have a meaning.
Maybe he had been too caught up in their battles and all the territories they had taken for themselves to notice their evolving relationship, but after thinking back, he ruled out this possibility. There was no way someone wouldn't be aware of a romantic involvement, but then why had he regarded Sasara as his best friend rather than a romantic partner? What even was romantic involvement? Romance? He had never thought of what that word meant to him. He had only ever had meaningless flings to get rid of that sense of stability which made him uneasy. That's the only experience he had ever had on this subject, so he had treated this situation the same way he had treated all the others in the past. How foolish of him, to think of his teammate as merely someone he could end things with when it all became too much. They clearly couldn't just cut things off like what he had done with the others, they were partners, damn it!
In reality, he knew cutting things off would get in MCD's way, and it would also make him lose Sasara, so he hadn't even considered it, but he also hadn't considered Sasara's feelings. Nor his own, really. Being faced with the other sides to this predicament, he didn't know what had got in him to make him think they could put an end to their relationship like that when he valued Sasara so much as an individual, and it made him want to rip his hair out, to claw away at his face, to curl up and just beat some sense into himself without anyone seeing him, although he wasn't so sure that would work. No matter how much self-loathing and condemning he went through, he just couldn't seem to change the way he thought. Or rather, the way he felt. Yes, this wasn't about how his brain functioned at his will. He wasn't doing this on purpose. Regardless, he wasn't ready to make peace with that fact yet. And that made his desire to just ruin everything around him even stronger. He stood up slowly, calmly. He just stayed there like that for a few seconds, waiting for that string inside his mind to snap and cut off his connection with any inhibition he had left in him.