He wheels her over the paths and across the grass, hands gently gripping the handles of the wheelchair as if they were her small, fragile wrists.
They chat about small things. How nice the weather is, where they should go next, what time Sayu has to be back home. After all, she doesn't want to leave her grieving mother along for too long. But, as much as he wants to, the two words that Matsuda is longing to say to the girl can't be shared:
I'm sorry.
On the handle his right hand starts trembling, forcing him to clench it in an effort to make it still. A few seconds afterwards, however, he grits his teeth and forces his hand to relax again.
It reminds him too much of when, shaking with anger and with tears blurring his vision, he tightly gripped his gun and turned it on Light Yagami.
Thankfully, Sayu is facing away from him, so she can't see these various thoughts flick across Matsuda's face and run through his body like a deadly poison. She has enough to deal with right now. His murder of her brother can't have helped that load. Matsuda does his best to make life nice for her, but behind his soft smiles and his gentle actions, one deadly thought pulses in his mind.
If it hadn't been for me, she wouldn't be like this.
Of course, Matsuda's dominant cheerful side always pushs against this thought – it wasn't him that put a shell-shocked Sayu into this wheelchair! That had been thanks to Mello and his 'colleagues'. But by shooting her brother… he'd probably extended her time confined in it.
They reach a small park bench, and he carefully helps Sayu out of the metal chair and onto the wooden one. She leans against him and his steady left hand holds her close; he moves in to gently kiss her wavy brown hair. At that small gesture Sayu looks up with a faint smile – one that quickly fades when she sees his eyes: tinted ever so slightly red. "Matsuda, are you alright?" She asks, and he gives a small sniffle, moving his still-trembling right hand to wipe at his eyes. "H-huh? Yeah, it's just… hayfever." Sayu laughs then, and Matsuda can't help but join in slightly. The sound makes him happy. He wishes he could hear it more.
But Sayu hardly laughs anymore.
It's because of you.
Suddenly she stands up, and for a moment Matsuda's blood runs cold. Does she know? Has she been lulling him into a false sense of security? Is she about to accuse him of killing her brother? He stares up at her, eyes slightly wide, before relaxing slightly when she just says "I want to try and walk around…"
"Are you gonna be okay? I-I can come with you..!"
"It's okay, Matsuda, I appreciate it. But I just want to try it by myself, okay?" He's still holding onto her hand, and she squeezes it and smiles before tentatively stepping onto the grass and walking off. His hand feels warm where Sayu has been holding it, and Matsuda stares at for a few moments, almost in wonder.
And then his 'hayfever' kicks in and he breaks down, clenching his hands into tights fists and hanging his head with his whole body shaking. His eyes are really stinging now; tears dripping off his face and mingling with the streaks of blood that were running down his hand thanks to his nails digging into his skin.
Suddenly he remembers Light clutching his hand, blood pouring from a bullet wound.
He forces himself to calm down then, slowly unclenching his hands until they lie limp on his knees.
'Survivors guilt.', someone – he forgot who, possibly Aizawa - had said to him during a particularly vulnerable moment. He'd come into work that day as his usual cheerful self, but that mood had slowly declined until someone came to rescue him from the kitchen, where he'd been stirring the same cup of coffee for about five or ten minutes in a robotic action. Pre-Kira – or even during Kira - Matsuda would have been thrilled at being a survivor – why wasn't he now? They'd won! The case, after all these years, had been solved, and Matsuda Touta had played an important part in it! He was practically a hero! But it seemed that, during that showdown in the warehouse and everything that followed as a result, he'd grown up a little bit. And he realised that being a survivor in a battle against an opponent such as Kira came with a heavy price: everyone who hadn't been so lucky. L, Watari, Chief Yagami… Light…
And then, of course, the living, who appeared to have paid a much higher price.
Especially Sayu.
Because of you.
Wiping his eyes in an attempt to regain some normality, Matsuda thinks it over. It's probably better for Sayu that she doesn't know the truth about Kira. But it made it all the more worse for him. It left the tremendous guilt to build up inside him where it could attack his heart directly; all the unspoken apologies nesting in the back of his mind, only to spill forth whenever he looked at her. How long until one slipped through his lips? How long until she had to find out everything, one way or another? Matsuda loved being with Sayu. He loved holding her close, he loved meeting her lips, he loved making her eyes sparkle.
What would he do if they filled with hatred?
"…Matsuda? Are you okay?"
He couldn't blame it on hayfever this time.