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Zack runs the steps through his mind before his feet, considering in split seconds how he’ll need to adjust, now.
His leg is healed, mostly, and like he said, it was an excuse. It became an excuse some time between waking up in the hospital after the end of the world and waking up in the hospital after a strange probably-a-dream of Kaito back, Kaito dancing with him alone as music floated in the air.
It’s an easy thing to work around, if he tries.
With the fall of Yggdrasil, they’d needed to completely redo how the Beat Riders operated, in the aftermath. Zack remembers, Chucky and Peco leaning over his shoulders as they all revamped their team pages, bought a new website where it wasn’t based on competition and took stalk of what other teams had survivors who still wanted to dance in their broken city.
“Why even keep the team?” He remembers Rat had asked. And Zack understands, he does. Gaim lost its entire leadership in this fight, to death or insanity or whatever happened that left Kouta and Mai gone when the dust settled.
(Zack had reached out to Micchy, out of desperation. One of the few who understood, in a way, Zack’s own grief. But he’d refused any attempt.)
He’s moving in synch, with the others, back here in Zawame. Back where he belongs. And it’s about the dance, again, which feels right.
The dance ends.
He’s still thinking ahead, waving at the audience, glad it’s not Baron’s turn to give a speech at the end. Instead he turns to Peco, beside him.
“We’re keeping the teams because they mean something,” Zack had been the one to say, surprised at himself. “Because Gaim had a heart we never could. Because Baron’s strength is true.”
Had to be, or Kaito’s death would become too much to bear. His fall too out of place with the man Zack had so admired.
“I like the teams,” one of Pop-Up’s girls said. Most of them came back, after. “It doesn’t have to be about separation, but it’s not like we all started sharing a base before, either.”
“Well, we did when the world ended,” Peco snarked.
“But that doesn’t count,” Chucky argued. “We’re putting things back together now, after all.”
He doesn’t stand again for several hours, when they return to their base. Better, he says, but sometimes…
(It doesn’t help that he almost died again, got so close he could see Kaito, and yes he’s at the tree, but he’s not… he’s really dead. Zack can never know if it was real.
Kaito faded before the dance ended, either way.)
He leans on Peco’s shoulder as the others wander in and out. Some of them have returned solely because they need a place to stay, he knows, but he doesn’t fully mind.
He’d been still in the hospital when an official looking woman had showed up and told him he now officially had the deed to Baron’s base. Too overwhelmed to reply properly or read the legalese, he signed it anyways.
A gift from Kaito, after.
Kaito was Kaito, but what left Zack the most surprised after was that unlike the other teams, Kaito had bought the base outright instead of simply renting it.
It makes sense though, he told Peco after the lawyer left. Kaito could always exist on his own strength, he chose to join a system, and he always did it his own way, for better or worse.
“Do you think he made us worse people?” Peco had asked. “He’s why the Beat Riders changed into something Yggdrasil could fully use. I cheated. You weren’t…”
“There’s reasons your sister left,” Zack said, and Peco nodded. “But I don’t think so. I think he knew what strength meant, and he thought we could reach it.”
Not that they ever could. It’s Kaito.
Peco wakes from nightmares now. It was rarer, in the immediate aftermath, but after what he went through while Zack was in America, it’s worse. Zack wants to help with everything in him, and the both of them have begrudge agreed to therapy, but when one is tossing and turning in the night, screams when Zack tries to come near…
“I’m sorry,” Peco says.
“It’s not your fault.”
“Yes, it was,” Peco argues. “You left me in charge, and I was worthless! I couldn’t do anything, not even call you or another team! We all agreed to do better!”
“You did the best you could,” Zack assures him.
“But I—”
Zack interrupts him with a kiss, which Peco freezes into before returning. A horrible time to take the leap, but hey, it is something. It gets Peco out of his spiraling thoughts.
He’d never had this courage, with Kaito. He thinks, if he had, Kaito might even have returned it, but he doesn’t know. Kaito was a complicated man, and, by the end, him and Mai and Kouta, and, hell, even Micchy were more tied up in fate than Zack, who ended it on a roof, in pain and having failed in his task.
But he’d considered it, watching Kaito dance, fight, simply speak, it was… mesmerizing.
There will only ever be one Kumon Kaito.
But then, there will only be one Peco, too.
“If we keep staying like this, we’ll never move on,” Zack says. “You know this.”
“Yeah, I do,” Peco says. “And isn’t that unfair?”
“Maybe a little,” Zack replies with a laugh he does somewhat feel. “But it’s true.”
“Lets reinstate competition.”
“What?”
The other senior Beat Riders all look at him.
“Not like before,” Zack says. “Obviously. But if nothing else, we know people still want fights. And we aren’t going back .”
“So… what do you suggest?”
Zack lays down the stage map and points to Baron’s central stage.
“Once a week, Beat Riders who want to come to this stage,” Zack says. “It’ll be a fight through dance. People vote on their favorites, but it’s about the individual improving not some… terf war.”
“It sounds like some sort of Idol thing,” says Pop Up’s leader, and Zack shrugs.
“Maybe,” he says. “But it’s not. It’s just a way to drive up interest again, and keep us from getting stagnant.”
“Well, I like it,” Chucky says, and soon a chorus of agreement follows.
A long time ago, Kaito first introduced a plan for Baron, and the Beat Riders as a whole. Zack was entranced.
But Zack is not Kaito. But he thinks… he thinks, if Kaito saw this, he’d be proud.
And he knows that Peco, who’d helped him plan it, is.
It’s enough.