Work Text:
The air smells right in an indescribable way and before Daiki can even look, that’s what makes him realize where he is. In fact, opening his eyes doesn’t reveal much, since he supposes his wanted posters have been taken down.
Were Daiki a better person, a stronger person, he’d look around, see what had become of his World since he stopped Thirteen so long ago. But he isn’t, and that’s why he hasn’t been back here in all of this time.
He’s standing in the middle of town. Several people stopped to stare at him. Mostly children and teens. He hopes this means his World is doing well, but he doesn’t want to think of it. So he summons a veil, and he goes home.
Dying sucked, though at least it was quick. Driver knocked away from him, he’d fallen. Zi-O went up in an explosion. He couldn’t see Yuusuke or Tsukasa, but he’d managed to drag himself closer to Natsumi.
They’d barely had their happy ending before the Worlds ripped it away again. But that’s fine. Daiki could never hope, not fully.
Tears blurred his vision as his eyes fought to close.
I don’t want to die. Please.
“Natsumelon,” he had said, feeling himself dissolve into light. “We’ll be oka—”
And then everything went dark.
His Driver, next to Kivala in her strange key form, sit on the table. The studio, dark and empty. He wonders how long it’s been.
He wonders if it matters, taking it and sitting down on the couch for what feels like an eternity, unmoving.
The front door opens, and Daiki doesn’t move. He’s finding it hard to care. It feels like he awoke from a finality, and he can’t begin to explain that feeling. Wrong, is what it is.
Daiki isn’t the one to die. He survives, escapes, runs away. He’s human but he’s alive.
“Daiki?”
Yuusuke’s voice. Daiki still doesn’t move. Yuusuke walks in fully, visible on the edge of what Daiki can see.
“…You’re okay,” Yuusuke says. “I was worried. I…”
“Still came back here?” Daiki asks.
“Where else would I go?” Yuusuke asks, sitting down on one of the chairs. “I needed to know if…”
He trails off.
I needed to know if anyone else survived.
“Tsukasa made it out,” Daiki says blankly. “Or the bat wouldn’t be on the table. Natsumi didn’t, but she might come back, too.”
Clinical. Facts.
Better than to think about any of it.
“Oh…” Yuusuke says. “Yeah, I saw Tsukasa. Right at the end. But I don’t know if he…”
I don’t know if he lasted, without us.
So much not saying things. Easier that way. Daiki can’t. Not now.
The air had just begun to clear, in the studio, and now it’s heavier than ever. Daiki goes about the motions. Wishes he had a proper hobby, because he doesn’t have a heist to plan and can’t possibly leave, not for now.
He has skills and a job he loves. But other than that…
“The garden is probably overgrown,” Yuusuke says. “You want to help me in it?”
It’s something to do.
Natsumi finds them there, exiting a Crack and not a Veil.
“It’s been a month,” she says. “Just a month.”
Of course, because for them both, it had been so long. But a month… so long. So long for Daiki.
He drops his gloves and runs to her, Yuusuke doing the same, and finally they just hold each other. Still incomplete. But now that it’s most of them, at least, something breaks in all three.
And they hold each other, and they cry, falling to their knees together in the dirt. And things aren’t better yet, but at least they can talk, when it’s over.
God, Daiki doesn’t know how he made it without these people who love him at his worst for so long, Before.
“Kouta and Mai says a piece of Helheim stayed where I died,” Natsumi says. “They tried to get involved, but Tsukasa blocked them, threatened to defeat anyone who stood in his way, and used the Worlds’ powers to stop any Cracks. They say that world between worlds disappeared, right before I appeared.”
She doesn’t say I appeared on Helheim, not World of Gaim . She doesn’t need to.
It wouldn’t make things better.
“Do we have any leads?” Yuusuke asks. Somehow the most put together. But then, it wasn’t death that most hurt him, it was what came after.
“Zi-O was there,” Daiki offers. That he remembers. In the few moments that the fight lasted, Zi-O was there.
“I guess we know where we’re going next,” Natsumi says, but no one moves.
They stay that way, for a while. For days. A sort of half-life. All to scared to leave again, but note, Daiki suspects, for themselves.
Tsukasa doesn’t return. Daiki knows he’s not the only one with a suspicion that Tsukasa won’t . Because it ended, and Tsukasa isn’t here. They’ve been here before. But no one can be sure.
A silence thick and heavy, because they only work together, all four in balance.
(The only one who leaves is Natsumi, each day for no more than an hour, to Helheim. But that’s hardly any true absence.)
“Okay,” Yuusuke says one day. “It was about time we met Zi-O even before this, so let’s go.”
His optimism is needed, now.
They go.
Zi-O is busy, something about Foundation X and new Another Riders. And having been missing with his school for a month.
“Most of the students don’t remember,” Geiz says. “From what we can gather, those who died were deposited back here with no memory of what happened and scars from how they died.”
“And Tsukasa?” Natsumi asks.
“…Gone, I’m afraid,” Woz says. “I am truly sorry to you all. Though I suspect his story will not end here.”
Daiki looks to the others, who look back at him. Nothing to do.
“There’s no photos?”
“Not more recent than 2011,” Daiki says. He doesn’t need to say why. Daiki was never the photographer, and without the others…
Natsumi picks up the photo on their bedside table, the one of the four of them at the end of their first adventure, where Daiki had first allowed himself the hope of a future.
They hold it to the sky, and they hold Tsukasa in their hearts.
…But miracles only happen once.