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“Daiki?”
Daiki smiles and knows it doesn’t reach his eyes. How could it, now? He’d let himself believe for just a few moments in friendship and heroism and it had ended exactly as expected.
“Hey, Natsumelon,” he says.
He really should leave for real. It’s not like he cares. It’s been nearly two months.
Whatever is happening in that world, whatever happened after Daiki shot Tsukasa, watched his form glitch and shift , just slightly, as he was knocked back, out of his henshin…
Whatever happened after Tsukasa looked at him and said “please”, and then Daiki had suddenly been back in the photo studio, with Natsumi, in another world…
It shouldn’t matter.
Natsumi doesn’t say “what are you doing here?” this time. Daiki hates it, it means she’s used to his appearances.
It makes him want to cling to her in a different way than the pull of Tsukasa, the blatant heroism in Yuusuke that makes him want to hate him even though he can’t, it’s too true and it had gotten through to Tsukasa in some odd fashion and no!
He doesn’t want to be thinking about them.
He doesn’t know why he’s here.
And yet…
(“Please.”)
It hadn’t been a beg for his life, had it? And Tsukasa knew him well enough to know he’d run.
It had been…
“How are you?” Natsumi asks, cutting through Daiki’s thoughts and the weighted silence.
“Just passing by,” Daiki says. “Sure have been here a while, haven’t you?”
Natsumi doesn’t reply, though she doesn’t look back at the backdrop. Merging worlds, the fate of existence.
Daiki had tried to run from it all, but he could never escape Tsukasa.
“I guess so,” she says at last, turning back to him. “Would you like to stay the night?”
(Yes.)
(No.)
(In their room?)
Daiki merely shrugs, clinging even more tightly to the object behind his back.
“If you want me to, I guess I could stay,” he says. “Then I’m off to another world, you know, plenty of treasures in worlds without Riders to get in my way.”
Natsumi gives him a look that says she can see right through him but is kind enough not to admit it.
He’s glad she doesn’t. He couldn’t return if she did.
He knows himself enough to know that he really would leave if she said it.
He should let her say it, let himself leave.
He knows he has to, and he has to soon lest he become too comfortable again.
(Lest he fail again.)
Daiki keeps coming back.
She’s glad for it, she supposes. Even if it’s only been a few times. Random, short times, even.
Daiki is Daiki, and it’s a comforting thought in its own way.
Yuusuke and Tsukasa are still gone, off in that world. Whatever is happening there she couldn’t even begin to fathom.
(She tries hard not to think that, soon, they’ll have been in that world longer than she’d journeyed with them.)
Daiki isn’t with her often, or in any sort of order, but he’s not just gone .
She keeps trying to move on, but she doesn’t know how. Her life had changed from the moment she had met Tsukasa and it had only gotten more complicated as Yuusuke and Daiki joined them. And yet…
And yet she wouldn’t change a single choice of her own.
Even if half of them are forced into fighting in that world, Yuusuke in that form that looks like the demon Sayo had pulled from under his skin in Tsuksa’s world, Tsukasa in whatever altered state Natsumi had seen before the Veil had swept her away back here.
So she’s here. Constantly reminded in little ways.
Oddly comforted by the way Daiki keeps wandering back in.
“Oh,” he says, smiling again. It’s still brittle and fake. “I brought you a present, Natsumelon.”
He moves his hand from behind his back.
“Is it really…”
“His camera?” Daiki asks, looking the thing over. “I’d say so, since I found it in the right place. Just left in the sands.”
He tosses it to her. Natsumi catches it with surprise.
“Yours to keep, now,” he says.
Natsumi doesn’t thank him. She knows it’s not what he wanted, nor why he did it. She catches his eye for just long enough to know he gets it.
He looks away.
“Don’t think this is a gift,” he says. “It’s just my way of saying I’m leaving, after this. For a while.”
The “maybe forever” is easily heard.
Oh.
“I understand,” she says. “You’re still welcome to stay the night.”
Daiki’s smile is a little more nervous this time.
“I know.”
He does leave in the morning. Early, so he doesn’t have to say goodbye.
He’s bad at goodbyes. There’s a reason he’d run from his world, run from Tsukasa.
But he’s never been good at keeping to them, either.
Natsumi wakes up to the realization that she’d set Tsukasa’s camera on her bedside table and wishes she knew how this all would end.
Wishes she knew it would end with everyone coming back.