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Tsukasa’s still holding Natsumi’s limp form in his hands when Daiki arrives. He can’t help it. Yuusuke’s corpse had been mangled, boiled around his waist from the Amadam’s destruction and black from some side effect of his power’s destruction Tsukasa can only guess, but Natsumi’s is all but whole. Energy attacks don’t always leave visible marks. She look all but asleep, save for the total stillness.
He’s so lost in observing her for the last time, in capturing her every ounce, even in death, and committing it to memory like a photograph, that he doesn’t realize Daiki is there until he says “She left her Driver…”
Tsukasa looks up, at that voice, at the utterly broken expression on Daiki’s face.
“She’s dead.”
Someone says it. It might have been Daiki asking a question he clearly already knew the answer to. It might have been a member of the rebels. It might even have been Tsukasa himself.
Regardless, it’s a cold, hard fact. The Rebels open a path to Tsukasa’s kneeling form and Natsumi’s still one, for Daiki, who walks it slowly, Natsumi’s Sengoku Driver in hand. He drops it before he reaches them, falling to Natsumi’s other side.
(It’s like some twisted mirror image, but why has Yuusuke been the first to die twice? So good and powerful why wasn’t that enough?
But it was your fault, last time , a voice whispers, though Tsukasa ignores it. And you knew he would come back. )
(He supposes he’ll have to get used to ignoring it.)
“Natsumelon,” he says, as Tsukasa let’s him gently take hold of her too-still corpse. “You weren’t… I told you not to go.” He says it again. “I told you not to go.”
One of the Riders puts his hand on Tsukasa’s shoulder.
“Decade,” he says. “We will provide you anything you need for your journey. You have already sacrificed too much for us.”
And Tsukasa… cannot find it within himself to say anything. His Heart already dead for a month, his home dead in front of his eyes, her body in Daiki’s arms.
Her hand still in his.
“Just… help us bury her.” And it’s Daiki who says this. Daiki who has to guide them home. Perhaps this is his attempt at penance for leaving them the first time.
An empty world that used to hold his home.
Tsukasa doesn’t talk as they move the studio to a new world. Neither does Daiki. He’s larger than Natsumi and yet their bed feels more empty than it had before. Neither sleep.
It’s day three that one of them speaks.
“I told her not to go,” Daiki whispers. “I told you, too. Why didn’t we just leave that world? Why didn’t you ?”
They’ve finished lunch, but they’re still at the table. Tsukasa looks up enough to see Daiki looking down at his own bowl.
He thinks about asking Daiki to keep them both safe. He thinks about the new grave in the yard. They move with him to every world, or at least that of Natsumi’s grandfather had. Every World they’d gone to since Natsumi’s took care and let the grave be integrated along with the building.
“Why didn’t you just leave it alone?” Daiki continues.
And Tsukasa think “I don’t know. Why didn’t I? Was saving others more important than saving them … no, of course it was. They would agree. But that isn’t enough.”
But he says. “And run away like you?”
Daiki flinches as if struck. Then, slowly, he looks up, meets Tsukasa’s gaze with his own, full of grief mixed with anger.
“That’s rich,” he says. “Coming from the one who snuck off in the night on a suicide mission. This… Natsumelon… she… that was your fault! And Yuusuke, he sure as hell didn’t want to be on that world! But none of you can stop… can stop being a hero ! And look what that gave us! Gave them!”
And Tsukasa almost says “I have never gotten anything from choosing this except for them.”
But instead he says “Get out of my home. You’re never here when it counts”, and he’s standing before he thinks. And so is Daiki. They meet each other’s gaze and Tsukasa wonders if he has the same grieving fury in his eyes as there are in the thief’s.
“Do you mean that, Tsukasa?” Daiki asks.
“I don’t know,” Tsukasa says. “You’re the one who leaves.”
“And you’re the one who leaves them to me,” Daiki replies. “Or maybe you forgot when you killed him and made her kill you.”
And that… that’s too low a blow.
“And you’re the one that leaves them to me,” Daiki growls. How does Tsukasa not see? But then, he hadn’t been the one protecting Natsumi from monsters each time he broke the multiverse. He hadn’t been the one who Natsumi had asked “Daiki, please. Where is he?”
And it hurts too, the accusations. He hadn’t asked for them to go into this fight the Riders of that world had been so terrified of. That had been the others.
You’re the one who leaves .
You’re never here when it counts.
Tsukasa had said it over and over.
(Maybe, if they were a bit more in synch, he would have noticed Yuusuke moving…)
So he gives an equally low blow back.
“Or maybe you forgot when you killed him and made her kill you.”
It hurts, the way Tsukasa flinches. They all don’t… they all didn’t talk about the Rider War, if it wasn’t necessary. But all Daiki has in him to respond with is to laugh.
Dodge Tsukasa’s punch.
“Don’t worry,” he says. “I’m leaving… this was always more your home than mine.”
He doesn’t let himself give Tsukasa time to respond. Tsukasa could always pull him back in. And Tsukasa never stays angry for too long, either. He’s not sure if he’s more angry at himself or Tsukasa, but he has to leave, now.
He doesn’t belong in this hollow home. Perhaps Tsukasa is right and he never has.
(Tsukasa collapses to the ground not moments after Daiki leaves. Why… why does it hurt? He feels suddenly off-center, empty.
(It’s because of the fight, a part of him murmurs that he isn’t quite ready to respond to.)
He takes a look at the now truly, fully empty world that no longer feels like home.
And he knows he can’t stay here any longer.
He leaves not hours after Daiki, and he’s confronted by Dai-Shocker not two weeks later. They say… they say Riders are dying because of the Super Sentai.)