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He wakes up chained to a metal slab in a cell. This isn’t exactly the most unique experience for him. He’s been at it as a hero for, what, two years now? Occasionally someone among his group gets captured.
He’ll give his captors this, at least said cell is a literal cage in the middle of a larger cell, everything bolted so he can’t actually just walk out through a Veil.
He wishes he could remember how he got her, though. A fight, yes. A… he’d pulled them all through a dimensional wall, away from the fight…
There were too many Mooks, they surrounded him. He couldn’t… couldn’t fight them all back.
“Decade,” a familiar voice says. Tsukasa turns to find Narutaki standing outside his cage, behind him. “This world has finally captured you! Your journey ends here!”
Tsukasa merely glares at him. He doesn’t bother to respond.
Surely he’ll find a way out of this, right?
(Hopefully, the others don’t try to rescue him, because if Tsukasa lost, they don’t stand a chance.)
Still, he doesn’t much like the two feet of give only that he’s been given. It makes him antsy and desperate to escape.
(At least he isn’t Daiki. Daiki would be panicking right now.)
He decides to stay and wait for whatever this world’s monsters have planned for him.
They come in a few hours after Tsukasa awakens, and apparently they have control over the chains, because they pull him from the metal slab onto his knees. He follows because for one thing, he currently has no escape route, and for another, following along has always been how he received information.
“Kadoya Tsukasa,” the obvious ringleader says. He looks human, but Tsukasa’s been to enough worlds to know that means jack shit. “Tell me, Kamen Rider Decade, do you know who I am?”
“Not particularly,” Tsukasa replies, meeting his gaze.
The man backhands him. Ow.
“You conquered my world, you know,” the man murmurs, quite obviously leaning in so the others can’t hear. Oh. “And then you became some hero, but you never cleaned up the mess.”
… oh .
There’s a dangerous look in the man’s eyes when he tilts Tsukasa’s chin towards him.
“You’re going to pay,” he says. “For what you’ve done.”
“Go ahead, then,” Tsukasa says. “You’ll find I’m hard to kill.”
The man chuckles.
“Even better.”
They aren’t particularly original with their tortured, but it still hurts like hell.
Tsukasa gets through it mostly because he know the others will come for him. And it doesn’t hurt as much as the rage in the ringleader’s eyes, the way he still flinches whenever Tsukasa can’t help but cry out in pain.
The monster who might once have been a hero, that he’d created.
He thinks it’s been two weeks since they caught him, but he’s not sure. He’s beginning not to care.
“What exactly do you want?” Tsukasa Asks, one day, and his kidnapper freezes.
“I…”
“Revenge never helps anyone,” Tsukasa says calmly. “It’s temporary satisfaction.”
“Shut up!” His kidnapper growls.
“I’ve had worse, too.”
His kidnapper screams in rage and throws a knife which lodges Tsukasa’s shoulder into the thick metal bars of the cage. Tsukasa can’t help his own cry of pain.
“You don’t know me,” the kidnapper growls.
Tsukasa hmms.
“Perhaps,” he says. “Tell me, have you tried to fix your world yourself?”
The kidnapper looks away.
“That just got people hurt,” he says. “It’s easier to work with the monsters.”
It’s only after he leaves that Tsukasa realizes he can’t reach the knife with the shackles’ current length.
They actually leave him alone for the next two days or so. Which is a shame, a shoulder embedded in the bars of the cage by a knife gets almost boring, after a while.
It hurts like hell, but again, he’s had worse.
Still, he is both grateful and unsurprised when the rest of his group arrives a few days later, and the immediate reaction is to go for removing it from his shoulder. He can survive blood loss fairly easily.
“Get it out already,” he huffs, as Daiki pulls it out and Yuusuke catches him when he collapses. “Thank you.”
“We should go,” Natsumi says, cutting the shackles free. “Before they realize we’re here.”
“What about—”
“Camera and Driver?” Yuusuke asks. Daiki holds up the both of them.
“I am a thief,” Daiki points out. Tsukasa gratefully takes both before realizing that after two days stuck on the bench unable to sleep on the annoyingly timed nights where he actually feels the need because of that damn knife, he’s swaying on his feet. Luckily, once again, Yuusuke is there to catch him.
“We should probably get out of here quickly,” Yuusuke notes.
Tsukasa is way too lucky to have them all.
“Decade, wait!”
Tsukasa stops. Ah, it’s his kidnapper.
The one with the grudge.
He turns to him.
“You want something?”
The kidnapper raises his hands.
“I’ve shut down the alert system,” he says. “That’s all I wanted to say, so… you should get out fast.”
“Ah.”
“You were right, too,” the kidnapper growls out. “I wasn’t helping anyone. But I will now.”
“Good,” Tsukasa replies.
It’s only when he’s home, with the safety net of the few people he actually trusts, that he takes a deep breath and lets himself feel the reality of a world left with the aftermath of his mistakes.
He doesn’t say anything or cry, but neither do they.
It’s so good to be home.