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“Yuusuke?”
“Yes?” Yuusuke asks, a smile on his face, and oh, there is a glint of brightness that isn’t always in there, not now, so just what does he have planned?
“Where are we going?”
They’d been on this world over a week now, and the others were currently otherwise occupied, leaving them alone. Not necessarily something Tsukasa minded. They’re all his and each other’s but sometimes he wants alone time with just the one for… all sorts of reasons.
Especially when they have a plan, like Yuusuke so clearly does.
“Somewhere,” Yuusuke replies, vaguely. Tsukasa shrugs it off. He can trust Yuusuke - even when Yuusuke is secretive he’s so very bright, regardless of the years in between.
“Oh~” Tsukasa replies smirking. Regardless of the busy street, hep pulls Yuusuke into his arm and dips him. “Being mysterious?”
Yuusuke blushes and then rolls his eyes.
“I can be,” he says. “If you’ll just follow me.”
“Of course,” Tsukasa replies. He’d only done that for Yuusuke’s reaction, anyhow.
Just in case, Tsukasa runs over their Calendar in his head. They’ve set it to fit the World of Heroes once more, as best they can, but that makes certain days five different potential ones.
It’s a day which he doesn’t think means anything. He doubts he’s forgotten.
Call it paranoia when he knows by now why he’d done it, willingly losing his memories. Better to remember than forget, though. It will all be part of his story either way.
He’s accepted that, now.
“You know,” Yuusuke says, pausing in a park they’re passing through. “There are certain days that stay with me forever.”
Tsukasa pauses next to him, considering.
“I understand,” he says. He can always sense key moments when they return to his mind, occasionally and over the years, and he has the clear ones, as well, like the sound of dozens of familiar voices saying his name before he returned to existence or the day on Ryuki World where Yuusuke had praised his heroism to Ren and Shinji. “Is… there something I should know?”
Yuusuke blinks, looks confused for a second.
“Oh,” he then says. “No, nothing big. I was just thinking. We’re almost there, by the way.”
He starts up again, and Tsukasa follows.
Tsukasa blinks at the name in the door. The background to this World had been plain, but…
“This is a Kuuga World.”
“Of a sort,” Yuusuke says. “I caught this World’s hero out the night before last - she’s a magical girl, it seems.”
“I see.”
Tsukasa opens the door ahead of Yuusuke as the other continues.
“I heard her call herself Cure Kuuga, so I just wanted to see if this was around here,” he says. “And then I thought I should take you here, because we haven’t gone out just the two of us in a while.”
Tsukasa nods, walking now with Yuusuke to the counter, to order.
The unmistakable supposed “Kuuga” of this words comes in shortly later with a smile, a thumbs up, and bright red eyes, followed by an equally unmistakable partner that said Kuuga calls “Kaoru”, eyes a bit more serious, though they light up when Kuuga smiles at her.
Tsukasa snaps a picture of them, but mostly he looks at Yuusuke, talking happily but with an edge to the owner. He wonders what joy it brings Yuusuke, to talk to echoes of his World, because he’s never stopped.
He’s never tried to stay though, either, not since the World of Agito, but he always visits, and he always seems… happy isn’t quite the word. At peace? Yeah, he seems more at peace, after.
He deserves to feel that way, after all that’s happened.
“That was nice,” Yuusuke says, as they leave, and yes it’s definitely a kind of peace on his face, leaning into Tsukasa’s side as they walk.
And for once, Tsukasa asks him.
“Why do you visit?” He asks. “It’s not your World.”
Yuusuke sighs.
“Maybe not,” he says. “I’m certainly not Godai Yukie, magical girl. But… I guess it’s just nice to know there are people like me, and like the people I care about, who are… doing well.”
He squeezes Tsukasa’s hand tightly, and Tsukasa has not forgotten all the reasons why Yuusuke had nothing to go back to, in his World.
“Do you think she’ll need our help?” Tsukasa asks, and Yuusuke takes a breath and shakes his head.
“If she did, we’d be involved by now,” he says. “But I’m glad I saw her, all the same.”
Yuusuke really is something special in the multiverse. Something to hold on to. Except, seeing them…
“Let’s hope so,” Tsukasa says. “She seems like a good kid.”
He hopes, wherever that girl goes in life, she finds a happy epilogue of her own.