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Floating feels wrong—
No, it doesn’t.
Natural. It feels natural.
(That’s what makes it feel so wrong.)
There are so many things he finds himself getting used to .
“It’s not all bad,” a faded girl says after Takeru fights a different form of dead. “And I’m sure you’ll find a way, too. Us ghosts can sense it, you know.”
“I know,” Takeru replies. It comes a bit different for everyone, but not usually the ones he fights.
“I need to go, though,” the girl says. “Father belongs in a darker place, even if I love him.”
(Takeru thinks about that. And about Kanon and Makoto’s complicated situation he wants only the best outcome for.
He knows he’s lucky. He’s not stupid; he’s just trying to be optimistic.
How screwed would he be if he wasn’t?)
He tries to ignore it when it’s not useful. It’s not all bad, after all. Most of it is, and the time passing feels twice as long as it should, but still.
Pros and cons.
He wants to live. He wants to be human.
He’d say he’d do anything to get there, but he knows there are people far less moral than he is, in these fights.
(That’s what scares him the most. When do his miracles run out, and he has nothing left to give, will he finally come back? Or will he die in an even more permanent fashion?
He does know.)
Surely, there is an end.
(He is not alone.
If he was, he’d already have fallen to some dark place in his mind that he couldn’t recover from.
He has so much help and support, so many people to fight for.
He tries to hold onto that, but it’s hard.)
Death becomes familiar. Not literally, not quite. Takeru is prepared for the loss of a human death as much as anyone is.
(Which is to say, completely ready, and also not at all.)
The ghosts are different, and he’s one of them.
The ghosts are: he’s not quite alive with the power of his father’s soul. He fights alongside heroes.
(He just turned 18. He will be 18 forever if he doesn’t do what’s needed. He is not sure if he would call himself a her.)
The ghosts are: Makoto and Kanon are his childhood friends, and he cannot begin to comprehends the many traumas and joys they experienced in the interim.
(He gave up a chance, for her. For Kanon, who never even made it to 18.)
The ghosts are: he does not dream. Pain is a strange thing.
(No one knows that under his clothes, the wound is still there. It does not bleed, but he can stick his hand inside, and it terrifies him.)
The ghosts are himself.
He is Kamen Rider Ghost.
Kamen , masked. A hood over an alien face that feels more like skin than a helmet. He can float, he can phase, he can disappear. And he does not want to .
Rider , but he rarely uses his bike. That too is a trapped spirit. He doesn’t know how to live with that.
Ghost, because he is dead .
He died, and he survived, and he died again and again, and all he wants is to live again.
He keeps growing more used to this new reality, but the time passing is killing what’s left of him, and no one understands, not really.
No one understands quite how it feels to be dead and dying both.
My name is Tenkuuji Takeru, and on my 18th birthday, I died.
He wonders if he even can go back to being human. To living. To being a person.
He wonders what will happen if he fails at everything. If the world ends. If his last chance runs out.
And I will let my life burn bright.
…He wonders what will happen if he wins, too.