Work Text:
He finds the note wedged in between the roots of two dangerous-looking plants he had stolen off some lady wearing a feathered hat earlier today. It smells like her, photo inks and fresh lemon, and it only slightly bothers him that she’d gotten there before him.
Daiki—
Tsukasa’s doing something stupid again. I’m sure you already know.
Just remember if you don’t save him, he’ll never let you live it down.
—Natsumi
She is, unfortunately, too good at manipulating the both of them by this point. Daiki scowls down the note and goes to crumple it up, but some age-old instinct stops him and he shoves it into one of his jacket pockets instead.
It was good, Yuusuke had told him once, to keep a reminder of where you come from and why you’re fighting. It helped you stay sane.
“From the girl who killed him,” he announces, flopping onto the couch—it’s new, plush blue, almost like she’d bought it to match his color—and kicking his legs up onto the coffee table, “you’d think you would care less.”
Natsumi barely glances up from the photographs she’s sorting through. “You know what happens if he dies, Daiki,” she says, in a tone ever so lightly admonishing that he feels as though he’s been grounded.
“We all finally get to make fun of his hair?” Daiki guesses.
Natsumi’s lips quirk. “It’ll tear reality apart.”
“I feel like it’s a net positive.”
She doesn’t bother to reply to this, instead taking out her stack of envelopes to put the photographs in. Daiki watches her work for a few minutes, baffled as always that she’s stuck by what seems like such a boring line of work for so long. It was one thing to take photographs of all the worlds they go to; it was another to take photographs of other people, who were not, in his opinion, nearly as interesting as him.
One of her cameras is lying on the coffee table, so he picks it up and takes selfies with it until he gets bored of waiting for her attention.
“So, are you gonna come with me to this… world of Zi-O?”
“Nope.”
He frowns. “Why not?”
“I have better things to do than follow Tsukasa around the worlds.”
Daiki takes a moment to figure out if he was insulted or not. “And I don’t?”
Natsumi raises an eyebrow at him. “Do you?”
Admittedly, she has a point, but she doesn’t need to know that.
“Don’t you miss him?” he presses.
Natsumi is quiet for a moment, as if this a question that requires a great deal of thinking. Daiki wants to call her out—he knows damn well that all three of them miss Tsukasa when he goes out on one of his stupid adventures without even bothering to leave a goodbye note, but he also knows that of the three of them, he’s the one who is most ill-equipped to deal with Tsukasa leaving.
Yuusuke and Natsumi have figured things out on their own. On days that he’s alone in a new world, it aches in his stomach that they’ve settled down, carved out a space for themselves amongst the endless streets of all the worlds. He hates that Yuusuke has put roots down in a small town, always protecting it from danger, that Natsumi has expanded her grandfather’s business so far that her pictures are all over the worlds. That neither of them feels the need to run after Tsukasa, world after world, waiting for something they won’t ever get.
Sometimes, it leaves him feeling like he’s on a wild goose chase around the multiverse, hunting for a hope that Tsukasa might one day slow down long enough to let him catch up.
“Only as much as I miss you,” Natsumi says finally, and when he looks back up at her, there’s a secret smile on her face. The kind of smile she reserves just for the three of them.
It soothes the churning in his stomach, like she knows what he’s feeling, like she knows what she would say if he ever expressed it to her: Get over yourself, he loves you.
Daiki manages a laugh and swings himself up onto his feet. “Guess I’ll go save his dumb ass again, then.”
“Good luck,” Natsumi says mildly. “My sources tell me he’s made a real mess of things over there.”
Daiki stops in front of her worktable and looks down at her, confused. “What sources?”
“You’re not the only one with friends in other worlds.”
He snorts and leans down. “Fair enough. Make me Grandpa’s ramen next time I come by, okay?”
“Don’t steal anything from Zi-O and maybe I will.”
“As if.”
He presses a kiss to her forehead and is rewarded by her wrinkling her nose at him before he heads off to the world of Zi-O.
When he gets there, there’s another note, taped to his DiEnd Driver. How she had gotten it there when he’s pretty sure he’d had his gun on him the whole time, he might never know. He’s starting to suspect Kiva-la, but Natsumi’s not the type to make other people do her dirty work.
Daiki—
If you go evil again, I’m not letting you in the studio for a year.
Love, Natsumi
P.S. Yuusuke says you can stay at his place next time. But only if Tsukasa doesn’t kill you.
“Like Tsukasa has the ability to kill me,” he mutters out loud, as if they can hear him through the note. But he puts it in his pocket, too, before he goes to track down Zi-O and his friends.
Tsukasa had once told him it was good to have insurance for every fight. A back-up plan. Something to be sure that you would survive.
Daiki had told him he didn’t need back-up. But they had been younger then, and he hadn’t understood, then, what it meant to have a place to come home to. To know that Natsumi would let him take the bed in the spare room of Hikari Studios, or that Yuusuke would always have a mattress in his home for him.
The insurance was that they would come, if he needed them. If Tsukasa needed them.
Of course, that didn’t mean he couldn’t have some fun along the way. The new Riders had some very intriguing-looking watches for him to steal.