Three days.
That's what Dante had before the class packed up for the mountains.
He had three whole days to get himself and little Dante (excluding Rinji) actually working together instead of just colliding in an emergency and hoping for the best.
He stood in the center of the training room, Rinji sat cross legged on a crate nearby with his notebook (his own now, a cheap spiral thing Dante had bought him, filled with terrible doodles of Dante fighting Nomu). The whiteboard behind them still had the old to do list scrawled across it. Dante had crossed off "fully control sludge disconnected from my body" two nights ago. It hadn't felt like a win. It had felt like almost losing.
"Alright," Dante said, rolling his shoulders. "Let's actually talk this time. No surprises."
"Fine by me." Little Dante's voice came from everywhere and nowhere, the way it always did when he wasn't manifesting. "What, you want a strategy meeting?"
"I want to not find out what you can do mid fight." Dante crossed his arms. "You separated from me without me knowing. Fought Aizawa without me knowing. That's not a partnership, you just basically grabbed the wheel while I was driving with no warning."
A pause. Longer than usual.
"…Fair," little Dante admitted, and something in his tone had shifted, less sneer, more genuine. "I got excited. Hadn't had a body of my own before."
"I get it." Dante exhaled. "I do. But if we're doing this… actually doing this, together, I need to know your range. How much sludge can you hold independently? How far from me can you go before you destabilise?"
"…Don't know. Never had reason to test it properly."
"Then let's test it."
They spent the first hour just on distance.
He watched little Dante forming outside his body, walking the training room's perimeter while Dante tracked how much mass he could hold together and how far he could wander before the connection got thin and shaky. Twelve feet, it turned out, was the wall. Anything past that, cohesion started to fray, sludge sloughing at the edges like wet clay.
"Twelve feet," Dante muttered, writing it in the notebook. "We'll work on that."
"You're taking notes on me now?" Little Dante sounded almost amused.
"I take notes on everything, don't worry." Dante didn't look up. "You're not an exception just because you've got opinions now."
Rinji chuckled from his crate, ignoring Dante, who liked to talk to himself.
By the second day, they'd built something like their own little language. Not through words, through timing. Dante would tense his left shoulder before splitting mass off; little Dante learned to read it and move without being told. They ran drills against practice dummies rigged with sensors, two bodies moving in the same fight without ever getting in each other's way.
"This is different," Dante said quietly, catching his breath after one particularly clean run… little Dante flanking left while Dante went high, the dummy in pieces before it even registered two attackers. "This feels like it's actually mine. Ours."
"Yeah," little Dante said, and for once there was no bite in it at all. "Feels like that to me too."
…
On the second night, Dante flew out alone, without his scarf, without his mask.
Just a hood pulled low, to the hospital wing Kaijin's old contacts had quietly arranged. Kazuya's room was small, sterile, the machines beside his bed humming in a rhythm that had become weirdly comforting over the weeks.
Dante sat in the plastic chair without a word. He didn't talk, not really. just watched the slow rise and fall of Kazuya's chest, gold flecked scarring still visible along one forearm where he'd turned himself solid to save Kaijin.
"I'm so relieved… that you're alive. I know you can't hear me but… I'll fix things." He said before sitting in silence.
"I'm getting stronger," Dante finally said, mostly to fill the silence. "You'd probably yell at me for the way I'm doing it, though. Too reckless. Not enough discipline." A pause. "You'd be right."
The machines kept humming. Nothing changed.
"Wake up soon, alright?" Dante stood, resting a hand briefly on the blanket near Kazuya's shoulder. "There's a kid who wants to meet you. Thinks he's fast. He's not wrong."
He left before the nurse's rounds could catch him there.
…
Across the city, in a house that smelled like coffee and hairspray, Kendo was throwing clothes into a duffel bag with more force than strictly necessary.
"You're gonna rip that zipper," her mother called from the hallway.
"It's fine." It wasn't. She yanked it shut anyway.
The tracker sat in her jacket pocket, small and cold against her hip, and she'd caught herself checking it was still there four times in the last hour alone.
She didn't know what she expected it to do. Just that it felt like the only thing tethering her to something real right now… camp prep, packing lists, Monoma's insufferable pre-trip energy in the group chat… while some other, quieter part of her brain kept circling back to a rooftop window, a dark red hand, a device pressed into her palm without a single word.
Why didn't you let me see you.
She hadn't gotten an answer yet.
She zipped the outer pocket, slung the bag over her shoulder, and headed downstairs, telling herself, not for the first time, that she'd get one soon enough.
AUTHORS NOTE : Hey guys, this is the first chapter of this fic in about a year 😭 I'm really sorry for suddenly disappearing but hopefully I'm here to stay long enough to finish this fic… I'll only be releasing about two chapters a week due to me being more focused on a different fanfic of mine, but I didn't just wanna never finish this story, especially with how many people are actually reading… but yeah, I'm back. Hi!