Dr. Kokuro Tsukino reread the information in the folder in her hands. Shinigami, Death Note, Kira…Kira? What the hell is this? A joke? The symptoms the man exhibited are no joke and fit the textbook description of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. Allowing her professionalism to drift out the window for a moment, a wry grin lifts her lips when she thinks about how she would like to thank the man who is responsible for the death of the notorious serial killer Kira who held the whole world hostage for a while. Clearing her throat, she pushes the thought out of her head and returns to her professional state of mind. She stands up from her desk with the folder in her hands to walk to the front to retrieve her next patient: Touta Matsuda.

Touta Matsuda sits on the couch in the psychologist's waiting room feeling as if his last nerve is about to shatter. He did not want to be here. However, his new Chief, Shuichi Aizawa, had not given him a choice. His options were to seek counseling or search for a new job. He loved working for the National Police Agency and being a detective; there was nothing else he wanted to do. Since Light's death, he had been experiencing constant nightmares and flashbacks of the moment he had killed the man. He put the lethal bullets into the body of the man he trusted and believed in until the very end only to find out he was the mass murderer Kira the whole time.

"Mr. Matsuda."

Touta jumps to his feet nervously upon hearing his name. His palms are sweaty and his hands tremble uncontrollably. Looking toward the source of the sound, he sees a pretty woman with long black hair that cascades in loose waves over her shoulders. She has kind green eyes that are shielded behind a pair of gold oval framed glasses. She is wearing a modest long-sleeved button down shirt of gray silk along with a calf length skirt of a darker gray. She looks exactly how he thinks a woman psychologist should look. He immediately wishes Chief Aizawa had chosen a seventy year old male shrink who smokes a pipe for his counselor instead.

Kokuro returns the man's silent perusal. His youthful appearance coupled with the terrified expression on his handsome face makes him appear completely vulnerable and incredibly young. She had expected a jaded, weary, time hardened investigator who was burnt out; not a frightened man who looks to be all of twenty years old although she already knows he is thirty-two years old. She is actually younger than him by two years. Maybe it is his short shaggy black hair or his huge brown eyes that gives him his young-looking façade…or maybe it is the emotional frailty he displays as evidently as his police badge. She smiles at him, waving him toward her to come back to her office.

Touta returns her smile apprehensively walking forward when she beckons him. He feels warmth rising to his cheeks, embarrassed because he had been standing there like a complete idiot gaping at the beautiful woman. Sometimes he believes people are right when they called him an idiot. As he follows her, his eyes rove from her glossy dark hair down to her narrow waist where her hips bloom to give her a nice curvy shape. Fretfully pulling at the knot of his tie, he compels his eyes to move back up to stare at the back of her head.

After entering her office, Kokuro indicates for him to sit down on the couch while she sits down in the chair caddy corner to the couch. She had been taught in school like all professional psychologists to set up her office this way. Sitting behind a desk was too intimidating and limited open communication with the patient. If her chair were directly across from the couch, she would be seen as a threat and viewed as confrontational. This set up was supposed to put the patient at ease and make them comfortable. The furniture was plush suede in neutral colors of beige and brown to further the homey, soothing atmosphere.

Touta sits down on the cushy beige couch while she settles into the big puffy brown chair at his right. He sits up stiff and straight, unable and somewhat unwilling to relax. His hands tremble visibly as he anxiously twists his fingers together. His eyes rove about the office indiscriminately to avoid meeting hers.

"I don't want to be here. I'm fine," he blurts suddenly, biting his lower lip nervously when her green eyes meet his brown ones.

"I understand, Mr. Matsuda. I'm not your enemy. I'm here to help you," she insists, feeling his resistance as tangibly as if it were a human presence in the room pressing against her.

"I killed someone. I'm a murderer and no better than he is. How are you going to help me with that?" he demands, narrowing his huge round eyes in anger. "I don't believe anyone can help me."

"I will," she promises, leaning forward to place her hand over his that are clasped together between his knees. She expected him to recoil from her, but he did not. That is a good sign that contradicts his previous declaration. It shows he already trusts her, at least on a basic level, that she can put him on the road to recovery. She leans back into her chair, retrieving the notepad and pen from the table in front of her.

"So where do I start? What do I talk about?" he asks, lacing and unlacing his fingers to dispel his edginess.

"Begin wherever you feel comfortable. Say anything. I'm not here to judge you. I'm here to help you," she reminds him, settling into the soft chair further with her yellow legal pad in her lap.

"I always liked Light. I believed that he was a good man like his father. I trusted him. He betrayed me. He betrayed us all," he begins, tears stinging his eyes. "I don't want to be so weak. I don't want to be so stupid."

Kokuro forces herself to sit still. She wants to lean forward and gather him into her arms to soothe him like a mother comforts a hurting child. Reminding herself he is a grown man, his psyche shattered by recent events, he would have to work through this on his own to heal. She taps her pen against her lower lip, waiting for him to continue. Her eyes concentrate on his hands that worked constantly by either clasping and unclasping each other or brushing off invisible lint from his pants.

"I can't stand the guilt. The shame. I killed him. But if I had not killed him, he would have killed us!" Touta exclaims, the tears flowing faster from his large brown eyes.

"Tell me about the nightmares and the flashbacks? Is it always the same thing? What is the frequency?" she inquires, scribbling notes on her paper.

"It's always the same thing. I see Light, this horrible, absolutely dreadful expression on his face. And he's laughing. Laughing at all of us. He deceived us all, killing people right under our nose the whole time. He tells us he's won and he's going to kill us all and he laughs. He laughs…" he murmurs, his voice trailing off. Covering his face with his hands, he sobs softly, a low mournful sound.

Kokuro writes trying not to make noise as she does so. She can see the flood gates about to open and she does not want to do anything to prevent it.

"Nothing happens. He's disappointed. He's angry because we're not all dead," he goes on, trapped in the memory.

Kokuro allows him to ramble, spellbound while he recites the monologue the crazed man ejaculated about how he was supposed be the god of a new world and how he planned to bring it about before berating them for ruining his grand scheme. She is transfixed by the man on her couch, unable to take her eyes off of him as he stands up to reenact what happens next. Gone is the childlike helplessness and his face which physically morphs into something hardened and fearsome as he pretends to draw a gun from his hip and raise it.

"He's got a piece of that damn notebook hidden in his watch. He will write our names down if I don't do this. Deceptive bastard! Liar! Asshole! I will kill you before I let you hurt any of my friends. I don't want to die because of you!" he bellows, his voice loud and strong instead of soft and insecure. He raises his hands, pausing as if he aiming the invisible gun. "I shoot him in the hand and he drops the needle that he used to pierce his finger. He was going to write our names in blood. In his tainted evil blood. Bastard. Murderer. He allowed his father to die. He killed his own father! And he didn't even care. I shoot him again in the right shoulder, then the left. I shoot him two more times but I'm not sure where because he's falling backwards. He's going down."

Touta's eyes fly open wide as if he has come to himself and is aware of his ranting and fierce actions. He drops to his knees as if drained of all of his vitality. Hunching over limply, he holds himself up with his fists pushing so hard against the polished wooden floor his knuckles are turning white. His body shudders violently as his body is wracked with heart wrenching wails of the emotional agony he cannot escape.

"The last bullet in my gun was meant for his head. It's buried in the cement floor of that warehouse because they stopped me. They stopped me," he repeated, regret and anger evident in his voice. He had wanted to kill Light himself and Aizawa, Mogi, and Ide prevented him from doing so. "I keep living that one moment over and over and over! It won't stop," he howls, raising his head to look at her.

Kokuro is irrevocably lost in the moment and the man's overwrought state. She drops to her knees in front of him, enclosing his shaking body with her arms. Her hands stroke his back while she croons kind words in his ear to calm him. Her professionalism had deserted her and she gave in to being a woman. Placing her hands on his tear soaked cheeks, she looks into his deep brown and severely wounded eyes.

"You will get through this. I will help you," she tells him, somehow managing to rein herself in before the impulse to kiss him gets the better of her. Clearing her throat, she rushes to stand to her feet while straightening her skirt. She turns her back to him so he cannot see the hot crimson color spreading up her neck and covering her face to her forehead. "You keep reliving that same moment? No others."

"That's the one that comes on its own. That memory haunts me like a ghost. It wakes me up at night. It drifts in during the day when I'm awake. Suddenly I'm there, in that warehouse, and it's happening all over again. I just want it to end," he mumbles, sitting down heavily on the couch.

"Do you ever think about any good things concerning Light? How you remember him being before you knew he was Kira? Nice experiences you might have had with him?" she asks, returning to her chair. She is reasonably sure she has fully regained control of her senses.

"No. It doesn't change the fact that I hate him. It only makes me more angry and I feel like an even bigger fool when I think about the way he was or how closely we all worked together with that filthy murderer," he grinds out through his teeth, his baby face solidifying momentarily into a mask of hatred.

"You said something about Light's father. What was he to you?" she inquires, putting pen to paper.

"He was my Chief. I respected him. I looked up to him. I thought of him as a father figure. He was the one person I could go to about advice on anything," he says, a wistful grin on his lips. "I wanted to be like him when I grew up. He made me want to be a better detective."

Kokuro allows the smile to curl her lips as she looks at his face that has returned to its initial boyish appearance. Somehow he had managed to make a small joke despite his emotional distress. Her mind wanders for a moment, thinking about how downright cute he is with a captivating aura of naïveté and earnestness. She chews her lower lip, hard enough to bring herself around from her musings. He is a patient and strictly off limits. Besides, he is far too damaged and needs too much help for her to be making an allowance for personal opinions about him.

Touta raises his brown eyes to meet her green ones and is caught off guard by her direct and fervent gaze. His ivory colored cheeks flood with pink and he lowers his eyes from hers. He tells himself she is just regarding him as a patient, thinking about everything he had said. Daring to move his eyes back to her, he sees that she is writing like a madwoman on the pad of paper balanced on her knee from her legs that are elegantly curled beneath her in the big chair. He takes the chance to look her over carefully since she is distracted. Big soft curls of her black hair lay across her chest. One curl has even formed a frame around her breast, accentuating it nicely. Swallowing hard, he looks away, feeling light headed as the blood rushes in opposite directions to show his embarrassment and his excitement from looking at her. He immediately feels like a horny pervert and stares at the highly polished floor between his black dress shoes. He can see his reflection.

"Mr. Matsuda?" Kokuro calls to garner his attention. She smiles when he looks at her. "Is there anything else you would like to tell me today?"

"Not today. When should I come back?" he inquires trying not to sound too expectant since he will be coming for counseling after all.

"Is Thursday all right?" she queries, writing again.

"That's fine," he responds, standing up to leave. Turning back at the door, he tells her, "Thank you, Dr. Tsukino."

"I haven't done anything yet. Besides, it will be you who does all the work. You're going to be just fine," she assures him, giving him a smile that falters when he holds her gaze a little too long.

Touta nodded, giving her a small smile before walking out of the door to close it soundlessly behind him.

Kokuro relinquishes the breath that she had been holding once he departed. She looks down at her notes from the session with the tormented police investigator. A vision of his benevolent brown eyes that were so full of suffering swiftly forms in her mind. Shaking her head, she forces out the image to concentrate on the words on the page in front of her. She reminds herself to view this patient objectively without allowing her personal feelings to get involved. She had seen far too many colleagues fall prey to the temptation of getting involved with patients on a personal level. As a woman it was doubly difficult to maintain a sense of detached emotionlessness where patients are concerned. There have been times when she has come home from work and shed tears for a mother grieving the loss of her child who succumbed to cancer or thrown things against the wall in anger because of the alcoholic patient who fell off the wagon again only to spout lame excuses for his setback. She knows some of her patients do not want to get better and only want to make excuses for their behavior which is so damn infuriating. Then there are patients like Touta Matsuda who sincerely want to get beyond their issues but do not know how. It is her job to be the beacon in their dark night to lead them through the valley of despair to the other side. Humiliation caused a wave of nausea to flow over her when she recalled her thoughtless actions earlier of hugging him and coddling him. It is not her job to do something stupid like allowing her emotions to lead her astray and ruin both of their lives; that is just immature and irresponsible. Hopefully she can help this man get through his predicament without having another lapse in reasoning and self-control like that.