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“It’s mine,” Tsukasa says, in what she knows is supposed to be comfort.
It is, just a little. Tsukasa carries the guilt so heavy and painful for everything he has to do and everything he thinks he does, and when it tears him apart, he acts like it’s less heavy. And Tsukasa isn’t hurt anymore under all the dried blood, so whatever hurt him, he healed from it.
And yet.
Natsumi’s hand tightens in his hair. Tsukasa jerks.
“Hey, Natsumi! Don’t pull out my hair!”
“Ah!” Natsumi says. “Sorry, was just…”
“Thinking?” Tsukasa asks. He stares at her. He stares through her. They’re both good at seeing through others, but never quite each other. Two camera lenses pointed at each other, mirrored and warping, deeper and deeper.
“…Yeah,” Natsumi says.
“And worrying.”
“Of course I worry about you, Tsukasa!”
“I won’t waste your gift to me,” Tsukasa says, taking her hand. The water is still running red.
That’s not enough , Natsumi thinks.
“It’s not the first time he said the world was solved and we didn’t know why.”
“Last time was time travel,” Natsumi points out.
“Maybe it is this time, too,” Yuusuke says. Tsukasa stumbled out of the shower, deposited himself across Yuusuke, and fell asleep at some point since. Natsumi made sure there was no blood left in the shower.
“Maybe,” Natsumi says.
It’s mine.
(It was his, too, when Natsumi put a sword through Decade and stared in horror as Tsukasa explained what it meant.)
“But I’ll keep an eye out,” Yuusuke says. “If there really is another fight at our scale coming, I don’t want it to be a surprise… and we’ll face it together, this time.”
Natsumi stares at Tsukasa’s camera. There’s a streak of burnt blood red on the magenta paint.
“I know,” she says. “I won’t let it happen any other way.”
She dreams and she feels like the world is eating her. Vines pull her down and black ink slowly consumes her body like fate and narrative want her to die for her endless defiance. Shards of glass with curved edges dig into her skin, the watcher who dare broke through to the other side.
It’s not like her old visions - visions were for an observer, not for the person who broke through.
When she sees anything now, it’s in those fragments of glass.
Faces of her old friends, screaming and shadowed.
Yuusuke leaking shadowed gasses like his home world, sobbing and screaming and tearing at skin that looks rotten.
Explosions taking her and Yuusuke and Daiki.
Tsukasa fading away alone.
The worlds imploding again.
Dai-Shocker, over and over and back again.
There’s an explosion, and children screaming for their parents, and when Natsumi lifts up that shard of glass, the boy looks through with Tsukasa’s gaze. This one already happened.
“These are just possibilities,” Natsumi says. She grips the glass so tightly she bleeds, and it hurts even though she knows this is just another dream.
She drops the shard and looks. And, no matter how hard she tries…
She always drowns.
She wakes up, and the sheets are stained with black. None of them ask her about it. She doesn’t know what she’d say.
“You worry too much, Natsumelon,” Daiki says.
“ Drowning in ink and camera shards. ”
“Nightmares.”
“I saw the Rider War.”
Daiki freezes.
“…what?”
“Before,” Natsumi says. She never told anyone the details of her dreams. “I saw the other Kuuga and Tsukasa fight - that’s how I found him. And I saw the Rider War. Up until you shot him.”
“…What the hell , Natsumi?”
“…what if these are like that?”
Daiki stares, laughs, stumbles back and leans against the balcony the photo studio currently has - Tsukasa and Yuusuke have half-adopted the teen running around as this world’s Kamen Rider and are trying to see how his friends will react to him being a monster.
It’s mine.
“Then you can change them,” Daiki says. “Fate is bullshit. You proved that.”
Natsumi picks at her nailed, what flies out from behind them is pitch-black.
“I know,” she says. “But if we started a story, what’s the ending?”
“It’s still the real world, Natsumelon,” Daiki says. “There is none.”