The next time Akira came for her appointment with Seto, she was surprised by how much he ended up speaking.
"I want you to talk to Mokuba today instead of me. He's been kidnapped several times now, and I need to make sure that he's not significantly scarred for life." His tone initially came across as callous, but she knew that he wouldn't have said such a thing unless it mattered to him that Mokuba not be permanently traumatized.
"Of course," she responded. She'd met Mokuba briefly before. He was Seto's little brother by blood, neither of them Kaiba by birth. He was a good kid, but hearing this news made her worried for him. "Can you perhaps give me the details of these events?"
Seto seemed vaguely annoyed with this request, but he complied without complaint. She took notes on what he said, and actually managed to learn a lot more about Seto than she normally did in their therapy sessions.
Then it came time for her to sit and talk with Mokuba in one of the conference rooms while it wasn't being used.
By the end of the hour, she had more questions than ever about Seto Kaiba. She knew the basic facts of his past, but very few of these facts indeed were available to the public, and he seemed disinclined to talk about himself, even though he was paying her for their therapy sessions.
Mokuba needed help, that much was clear to her. No, he wasn't in a crisis state, but if she didn't intervene now, he could have serious problems in later life. Once she returned Mokuba to his schoolwork, she went to speak with Seto.
"Mokuba needs more social interaction with children his age," she began, only to be interrupted by his curt reply.
"Not gonna happen."
She stared at him for a moment, then asked cautiously, "Why not?"
He looked up from his spreadsheets to meet her gaze. "Because there are no private schools that I could send him to in Domino City, and there are too many bullies at public school. I would never send him away to a boarding school, so the only option for him is homeschooling."
She could tell that he'd thought this through. "He needs more social interaction with younger people, Seto. Even if it's people closer to your age than his. He'd probably find teenagers and college students more interesting to talk to since he's so intellectually ahead of other kids his age."
They went back and forth about it for a little while longer before they ran out of time, and she promised that they'd resume the conversation next time.
Akira sat back in her armchair that evening with a hot cup of tea and a fuzzy blanket as she went over her notes on Seto Kaiba. Six months, and finally a breakthrough. She knew that he couldn't be a hopeless case. Everyone cracked eventually. She'd learned so much about him today that she needed some extra time to organize her thoughts on him.
He was a devoted older brother who'd always done what was best for Mokuba in the long run, even when he was a child. She'd teased the story of his chess match with Gozaburo out of his brother when he was recounting the story of when he was kidnapped by their step—brother Noah. Seto'd refused to abandon Mokuba in the orphanage, even when it meant forgoing his own adoption. He'd threatened suicide in Duelist Kingdom, because he couldn't live with the reality of having failed his brother and dooming him to a soulless life as a puppet of Pegasus and the Big Five.
He lived for his little brother, and this she had discovered from Mokuba's story about their childhood in the Kaiba mansion. Mokuba had relayed to her the confession Seto had made to him: "There's something I never told you, Mokuba. You once saved me. By making that card for me, you encouraged me not to give up. You gave me something to strive for." Which implied that he'd had nothing to strive for before that point, that he had been close to giving up. Seto Kaiba may be a goal-oriented man driven by ambition, but if his goals and his drive were taken away, he would be left feeling rather empty.
Additionally, she'd diagnosed him with a severe superiority complex, so she would need to break that thought pattern in their next appointment. That would be a challenge, but she was up for it. Besides, she had time to prepare. She was finally catching a glimpse at the heart of gold that Kaiba kept hidden and guarded behind his ego and his accomplishments and, she dared to say, his fears. Nobody was without fear, and Seto Kaiba was no exception.