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“You said you’d protect her.”
Chinatsu feels, somewhere in her mind, bad about this. She does.
The obnoxious and confident and obnoxiously competent man she met isn’t the one in front of her. Not when she meets his eyes.
His eyes are always haunting to meet, though. No soul, just power . And yet…
They can’t hide his grief.
“I know,” he says, expression blank. “I left her behind. So she would be safe.”
Chinatsu slaps him.
“She sacrificed everything for you,” she says. “Over and over, because she believed in you. Because she loved you. And you thought she’d stay behind?”
Kadoya could easily shrug off that slap. It takes him a solid minute to look back at her.
“Would it have been better, then,” he says. “If I never met her? If I faded away?”
Yes , is Chinatsu’s first thought, because the whole thought of losing Natsumi again, knowing this man was at fault… it’s too hard to bear.
And yet…
“Unfortunately, no,” Chinatsu says. “You’re good at your job. And… she did love you.”
There’s a look, at that, something twisted.
“‘Our World too’,” Tsukasa says. “That’s what I used to believe.”
Oh no. She is not comforting this man.
“It would have been true, if you really stayed,” she says. “Don’t think I forgot.”
They ran into her World one more time, after the not-so-final battle with Dai-Shocker…
Natsumi looked broken. Not outwardly, too much. Worried. Lonely. Onodera was bright and kind as always, but Kaitou and Tsukasa were both noticeably absent.
“How are you?” Natsumi asked, before Chinatsu could.
“I’m doing much better,” Chinatsu said, and it was true. “Sato’s healed. And Yggdrasil is being entirely restructured. Thanks to Kadoya’s powers…”
Natsumi flinched, ever so slightly, and Chinatsu instantly stopped.
“Is something wrong?” She asked.
“It’s nothing,” Natsumi said. Yuusuke sighed.
“Tsukasa’s going out on his own more,” he said. “We’re just worried for him.”
Chinatsu growled, anger that was healing coming to the surface.
“That bastard—”
“Chichi, please.”
Natsumi really did look heartbroken.
“You said you were happy,” Chinatsu said. “Is that still true? Is this worth it for you?”
“YES!” Natsumi said, immediately. “This is where I belong, I’m just…”
Oh. Oh that was not just sadness. It was a quiet sort of anger. One Chinatsu knew well.
“It’s not fair of him to do this to you,” she said. “You do see that, right?”
“I don’t care,” Natsumi said. “I can’t do anything on my own. And he’s hurt, too. You know what happened.”
Chinatsu sighed. She did.
“I’ll never understand why you love him,” she says. “But I know it’s not my place to say what you do.”
Natsumi’s smile was small and brittle.
“I can protect myself, you know,” she said. “I’m just… so tired of his bullshit.”
Chinatsu took her hand without thinking, and Natsumi’s smile became a little more real.
“I know,” she said. “But if I can help…”
Natsumi collapsed back against Yuusuke in decidedly more active frustration.
“Just once,” she said. “Just once, I want to come back to my World and have everything be okay.”
Kadoya’s face doesn’t have much further to fall, but it does anyways.
“Natsumi loved you like the air she breathed,” Chinatsu says. “So did Onodera, and Kaitou, and I don’t get it , but you clearly don’t, either. So when you regret, regret leaving them behind, not taking them with you.”
“…Kaitou’s alive,” Kadoya says. “Because he left. Because he knows when to run.”
“Because he’s like us,” Chinatsu says. “Broken. Natsumi and Onodera were heroes . It was just their nature. And it’s the job of the people like us to protect them.”
“And I couldn’t,” Kadoya says. “I know… I’ll be leaving, then.”
Were Chinatsu a better person, were she not bitter and grieving herself, she might have stopped him.
She doesn’t.
When she leaves, she manages to tell her new Secretary she’s leaving. Then she all but runs to the garage so she can open her bike and head home.
Unlike Kadoya, she manages to make it somewhere private before she lets the grief consume her.
Natsumi is dead, for real this time.
And there was nothing she could do.