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She exists wrong at the edges. Like her very outline ripples. An indescribable array of colors and yet none.like the edges of a photo.
Skin a shade too pale, fading to a black on her bare hands and feet which Kouta can now, quite accurately, compare to the dark depths of space. The same blonde as himself and Mai.
He thinks about her.
He thinks about his conversation with Decade.
I don’t know if I could do it, really.
It’s too fresh, fresh in his mind, in his heart.
To meet one of the very people Decade spoke of, that fateful conversation… and how similar is she, even the name…
Who did you lose?
You remind me of them. Both of them.
“She helped me, you know,” Mai says. “I mean, as much as she could. I don’t think there was anything we could do to stop it all.”
“I know,” Kouta says. “It’s just a lot to take in, when we just…”
He trails off. Can’t think about Kaito going still in his arms. Nonetheless… seemingly content. But how could he be? And how could he not be angry to die by Kouta’s hand?
Did you have to kill them?
He can’t do it yet. But she left it to him.
Hikari Natsumi, his soul twin, the one Decade lost… is here, a ghost, and he doesn’t know what to do. And he’s…
He’s terrified of the answers he’ll receive.
She appeared slowly, in her strange form.
“Who…”
“My name is Natsumi,” she had said. “I’m Kamen Rider Gaim of another World.”
“She’s been here the whole time, I think,” Mai added, and when had she learned of this woman’s existence, to be so calm about it?
“I watched the two of you take the Driver. I’ve been near, since.”
“…You say you’re from another World?” Kouta asks. “Then, did Helheim…”
Natsumi merely shook her head.
“We fought it off,” she said, voice odd as she said we, as though the thought itself hurt. “It chose your World, instead. I am sorry, for that. Chinatsu had mentioned a way to close the Forest off forever, but I guess she didn’t figure it out in time.”
Kouta didn’t know what to say, and neither did Mai, it seemed.
“I have been here,” she said. “I didn’t expect to be here at all… in fact, I died, over two years ago.”
She said it so calmly. Kouta still could find nothing to say.
“Someone dear to me once called his counterpart brother,” she continued. “I just want to tell you both that I will be on this planet with you, should you need me.”
And then she faded elsewhere.
Not, Kouta somehow sensed, away.
She does go to him, eventually. It’s a bit later (Kouta’s said let there be light (ha!), but has yet to figure out how to turn it off and doesn’t particularly care to), and he’s looking over one of the animals he’s created. Trying to make the life varied. A true world, not just the parasitic nature of Helheim as it was.
“Hello,” she says, and he jumps. Wondering how he didn’t notice her, even with all this power…
But then, in the end, he’s still just Kouta.
“Hi,” he says. “You’re…”
“I traveled with Tsukasa,” she says with the weight of a hundred words impossible to define. Perhaps the same way he still couldn’t explain what fate tied him to Kaito, to Takatora and Micchy and Mai, each in different ways. “Before.”
“Then you…”
Then you killed Decade?
Natsumi closes her eyes and breathes.
“Five or so years ago, for the World of Heroes,” she says. “They said Tsukasa’s existence would destroy the Worlds. They were right, but we all still fought it… They were still right.”
Another long pause.
“I had to choose between Tsukasa and the Worlds,” she says.
They had to kill me .
Kouta understands, now.
“I watched,” Natsumi says. “Your own final battle, I saw it. It was the only way, and I’m so sorry.”
“It’s okay,” Kouta says with a smile that he doesn’t feel.
“No, it’s not,” Natsumi says. “It’s horrible, and beyond less than you deserve.”
“I…”
A deep breath. The words she was holding in.
“I saved my Kamen Rider Baron,” she says. “It was a miracle. But I did it.”
“Oh…”
“It was Tsukasa who died in my arms,” Natsumi says. “I was 20, and desperate, and he was egging me on. And that means nothing… not to me. So I understand. And it wasn’t your fault , Kazuraba Kouta.”
Kouta blinks.
“How…”
“Because I know how it feels for fate to back you into a corner,” she says. “Whatever it was you had with Kaito, it wasn’t anyone’s fault but the Forest itself.”
Kouta looks away. Trying to think. He’s not the best at that. He’s a doer.
Still not knowing what to say to her.
She comes up to him… and pulls him into a hug.
“And I’m sorry it had to be you,” she says.
Kouta doesn’t move for a long time.
Natsumi doesn’t talk about herself much, after that. Scattered pieces she seems scared to touch. Kouta’s fine with that. She comes and goes. Always on this planet he and Mai are creating.
Still, he’s glad she’s here.
“I already have an older sister,” he says one day, and Natsumi looks up from where she is messing strangely with a Fruit. “But I guess I wouldn’t mind a second.”
A rare smile on Natsumi’s face.
Kouta thinks his might be more real than it has been in a while as he responds in kind.
“Also, I have a question…”
“Yes, I’m also trans.”
“…Did we somehow manage to SWITCH NAMES?”
“We did, yes.”
“…Cool.”