Okay. Okay. I'm sorry.

I know I'm a bad person. I know I killed Yu. I hate myself.

Not really.

Because he's not really dead.

I WASN'T SUPPOSED TO TELL YOU THAT BUT I DON'T WANT YOU TO CRY...

I WANT YOU TO KEEP READING...

It will get better. Promise. But right now bear with me through the horror and heartache. It'll be ok.


As days passed, Kyouya felt like he was sinking into the background.

Kenta, Kevin, and Ryuga were trying to cope with losing Yu. Ryo and Hikaru were struggling to keep the WBBA office running without Tsubasa. Gingka was sinking into despair after not being able to save the little boy. And Zhou Xing's grief therapy class was growing by the day. Kyouya had dropped out to leave room for Kevin's family; he saw Ryuga and Gingka running past his window every morning, with Kenta and Kevin struggling to keep up, pushed on by Zhou Xing. Tsubasa always refused to join them, refused to even peep out his bedroom door.

He waved to them out his bedroom window and cheered them on in his mind. He visited the memorial often and talked a lot, both to the oak tree and the evergreen. That kid might've been annoying but he sure would miss him.

There was one more thing nagging at his mind, though.

It was the dreams. The dream about Tokyo and then the dream about the fire, and the dream about the swimming pool. Some psychological disorder? It was unlikely; visions that actually came true couldn't be the product of psychological disorders, but it was all he could come up with. Either that or he was crazy. Because there was no such thing as ESP.

And so he arranged to see a psychologist the following Thursday. If she couldn't diagnose him, at least maybe she could help him figure himself out. Like yoga for your brain.


It was cold in the waiting room; the chair covers might've been burgundy once, but were now faded to an ugly watered-down maroon. The wood of the armrests was scratched and tarnished, engraved with "Miley was here", and "Tyler stinks". It all sort of figured in because this particular psychologist counselled troubled high school students a lot.

Kyouya ran his left hand over the roughly scratched hearts and gang symbols, etched in ballpoint pen for all the world to see, a erratic and failing gesture of rebellion. With the other hand he fingered the leaf in the right pocket of Benkei's jacket, which he never took off. The leaf from the oak tree in the burnt lot. It had just fallen into his hair one day and stuck there, unnoticed until he reached home.

He hunched down now, happy he'd brought the jacket. It really was freezing in this waiting room. They needed their very own Zhou Xing to come and liven things up around here.

And as he stewed over the faulty room temperature, the door at the opposite side of the room opened and a lady poked her head through. She was short, grey-haired, squinting through her horn-rimmed glasses.

"KYOUYA TATEGAMI", she shrieked into the waiting room.

Relax, lady, I'm the only one here...

But instead of saying it, Kyouya followed her, hunched into his jacket like Igor, sticking his bottom lip out like a shelf.

Luckily the actual office was less of a disappointment than the waiting room had been.

A considerably younger and hopefully less screechy lady sat on the chair at the small sitting area towards the east of the room, with a great window that overlooked the street below. The lady had a small badge on her shirt that said "Natasha Hadinglass, doctor of Psychology."

Kyouya stood uncomfortably at the edge of the throw rug, staring through the slatted shades concealing the window, until Natasha gestured to the chair across from her. Then he got to sit uncomfortably.

"I BROUGHT YOU YOUR NEXT HOPELESS NOBODY", screeched the old lady.

"Thank you, Mildred. You may leave now."

"WHATEVER", she screeched, "HE'LL JUST END UP A HIGH SCHOOL DROPOUT LIKE THE REST, WITH NO JOB, WORKING AT A FAST FOOD PLACE..."

On and on she shrieked, audible long after her sizeable afro had disappeared down the hall. Natasha turned her embarrassed attention back to Kyouya, her cheeks flushing a slight pink underneath her makeup.

"SO, young man, what seems to be troubling you?"

"You'd never believe me if I told you."

"Then why are you here?" She turned to the window with a cryptic smile, standing now, glancing through the slats at the building across the way.

"I have...no idea."

"I think you have a good idea. And the reason you're here isn't because your friends pushed you here", she added before he could protest. "You're here because you genuinely believe that somewhere within the walls of this building is someone who can get you out of trouble."

"Uh...sure. Just keep telling yourself that." Kyouya shoved his hands deeper into the pockets of the jacket, the filmy lining clinging to his knuckles and the oak leaf crunching softly as it broke around the edges.

Natasha sighed. "Let's start with the jacket. Why are you wearing it?"

"Because your office is freezing over."

Natasha frowned, unamused. "Young man, it's nearly August. That jacket is purely for sentimental reasons, isn't it."

"My name's Kyouya. Not 'young man'."

"Okay, Kyouya, answer the question."

"I'm wearing it because it belonged to a...a friend."

"A friend."

"Yes."

And so Natasha pushed and pried, little by little, opening him up one question at a time like nobody had ever done before. Taking to him like a knife to a tin can.

All the details of Benkei's death came spilling out of him, and then how Yu had inexplicably drowned in a swimming pool. And then came the hardest questions of all - about why he was here, and not at the grief counsellor's down the street from his house.

"Because I've already gone there..."

"I'm not a grief counsellor, Kyouya. You know that, it says that on the business card. You're here for some other reason, it's something...something inside you that you've never revealed to anybody. You're hiding something deep in your heart that's eating you up from the inside, that you just can't reveal for the safety of your reputation and sanity...a secret that only your mind could hold and know. There's something connected to that grief inside of you. Guilt, or blame placed upon somebody else. What are you feeling, Kyouya? Tell me. You wouldn't be here if not to find somebody to open up to."

She had seen many grieving people in the past - those mourning for their husbands and wives, their children, their pets and the lives they'd once known, even for the children they used to be. Each one of them had come to her not because their grief was killing them inside, but because they somehow blamed themselves or the ones around them for the losses nobody could have ever prevented. She was prepared to give this time-honoured lecture over and over again until every last person in the city had spilt their grief over to her, Natasha Hadinglass, prepared to cure each one of them of the broken hearts of their pasts and help them return to a normal life.

But she wasn't prepared for Kyouya.

Was anybody ever prepared for Kyouya?

So when the secrets of his tortured dreams came flooding out of him, she sat down heavily in the chair across from him, listening with every nerve and fibre of her being. Because this case was unlike anything she'd ever heard of before. He wasn't schizophrenic, nor bipolar nor autistic. All these things she knew how to cope with and bring into the light, grow and trim and cut down to the standards of normal living, but no. Kyouya was not any of these things.

He was psychic.

The mind of a psychologist is attuned to certain things: science, the unbelievable, the unexplainable. But Natasha riffled through the libraries of her intelligence and came up with no other answer. And she knew she might've gone through every book on psychology in her library, every book in the universe, and find nothing medically possible to diagnose this phenomenon.

Any other doctor might've diagnosed it as grief-brought suffering; the loss of two loved ones and a national crisis, going to the head of a young self-conscious teenaged boy who swore he'd dreamt about it beforehand, finding another reason to blame himself for the grief he felt inside.

But Kyouya could not be lying. You could see it in the contours of his face, the sleepless nights and the leaf in his pocket, that what he'd been experiencing was purely and completely unfabricated.

It was not a matter of evidence. Natasha just knew.

Standing abruptly, and watching the clumsy boy follow haltingly in her wake, she trotted over to a shelf along the wall and took out a sketch pad.

"Take this, and go home. If you have any more dreams, write them down, and then call me right away. I'll be here. You've come to the right psychologist." She practically shoved him out the door. Mildred appeared as if by magic, pushing him along.

"YEAH, THAT'S RIGHT, GIT! GIT OUT OF HERE AND GO RUIN YOUR LIFE WITH THE REST OF YOUR GENERATION..."

Kyouya hurriedly pushed himself out of earshot of the shrieking old lady.

As he neared the house he was sharing the the Haganes, he could see Zhou Xing outside of the little apartment down the street where Tsubasa lived, tossing little pebbles at a window.

As he stood still on the street, sketch pad in his hands and a frown on his face, Tsubasa poked his head out the window.

"Hey, quit that, you!"

"Come down here!"

"NO."

Zhou Xing rested his hands on his hips and shook his head. "You're going to throw away the rest of your life, standing up there like that."

"Quit bothering me." Tsubasa turned away from the window, in answer getting hit in the back of the head with a pebble. He whirled in fury. "HEY!"

"Listen to me. Come down here. You're going to end up a skeleton and then you're going to look back on your life with more regrets than you could ever have imagined."

"You don't know what you're talking about."

"Tsubasa, I'm a grief counsellor."

"Go away." Tsubasa turned again, only to be pelted with gravel.

"QUIT IT!"

"You gotta come out and live a little. It's the only thing that'll help you." Zhou Xing flicked more gravel at Tsubasa.

"WHY YOU - !"

Zhou Xing chuckled. The sound of Tsubasa pelting down the stairs could be heard from within the apartment. And then he burst out in a rage.

"So long, man", Zhou Xing yelled at Kyouya, and then raced away with a furious eagle on his tail.

Kyouya shook his head and looked down at the sketch pad. Hopefully he would never have to use it.