Touga looked down at his hands, becoming intensely interested in a cuticle.

"What am I waiting for?" he asked.

Across from him, the man with the glasses and the bad haircut looked down at the pad of paper he was holding. Touga expected him to write something down, but he didn't.

"That," the man said, "is a very interesting question. And a very important one. What is it you're waiting to do?"

Touga looked up at the man, but said nothing. After a while, it occurred to him that the man had become more tolerant of these silences. Then he wondered, was he trying to wait the man out? To hide something from him?

"I don't know," he admitted, reluctantly.

"Then, could you be waiting to know what you are going to do?"

"That hardly seems sensible," Touga scoffed.

The man smiled kindly. "Perhaps," he offered, "one does not always need to be sensible."

"Perhaps," Touga conceded.

Thoughts of Ohtori drifted, unbidden, to his mind. That, for sure, was a place that gave sensibility a wide berth. Was this, then, the source of his newfound reluctance to acknowledge the viability of nonsense?

"How can one stop themself from making a mistake one knows they're going to make?" he asked.

The man tilted his head in concern, and his glasses became momentarily opaque with reflected light. What was it, Touga wondered, about that look? Why did it make him feel numb? He leaned back against the couch on which he sat.

"I think," said the man with the thick glasses, "that it depends upon the mistake in question. And to consider how you know that it is a mistake."

"Perhaps..." Touga paused. "Perhaps the only way to really know that something is a mistake is to make it."

The man nodded. "That may well be true."

"And then, would there be any point in regretting it? Once it's done..." he trailed off, and the two lapsed once more into silence.

Having waited for some time, the man with the glasses spoke up. "It still worries me, that you don't seem comfortable sharing specifics about your life. I'm glad for the things you've been able to talk about here, and I've seen how much you've had to struggle even with that much. Still, sometimes it feels like I'm trying to coach you with a blindfold on. I'm trying to help you make the decisions that are best for you, but I can't look around and see what those decisions might entail."

Touga stared back coldly. Even if the man never said anything to anyone, even then.

The man with the glasses sighed. "I'm sure this is difficult to hear. And really, I won't ask you to change it right away. Things are the way they are for you for a reason. But perhaps, consider it. Consider, what makes it so difficult to talk about these these things?"

"You think that everything happens for a reason?" Touga asked bitterly.

"If you mean, do I believe in a higher power, which directs all things to an end, my position on the matter is not something I would wish to impose on you. But the way we are, the way we react to things, doesn't come from nowhere. We are shaped by our experiences. Not defined utterly, but shaped."

Touga looked critically at the man. Had he just slipped up? Had he just said something he regretted, something unethical?

But some little creature of doubt at the back of Touga's mind said that this was not it at all, that the man with the glasses was communicating suspicion of an entirely different nature. Touga, quite frankly, hated that little creature. He wanted to wring its neck and dispose of the body. Doubt, he thought, was not a thing that suited him.