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You always stood up high.
You always found a place to hide in plain sight.
Above everything, looking down on everyone else and yet never forgetting yourself.
Senku stared at the green grass, at the white flowers bending under the strength of the wind –his only company in this isolated hill he found himself in.
Surrounded by greenery, surrounded by ghosts, he reminisced.
Gen had always loved the heights.
He was always looking up towards the sky.
With his nose firmly buried in the billions of things they had to do, weaving words faster than Senku could breathe. His jokes were earthly, his tastes mundane.
But his eyes had always been locked onto the clear blue sky.
Every time danger arose, Gen found the tallest, most obvious place to be in. And perched on top of the world, he would smile and bow and perform his show.
A nightshade craving the light.
With his lavender attire, and his easy lies, many had compared him to the deadly flower he so loved to use.
But a nightshade was an earthly thing. And Asagiri Gen belonged to the sky.
Senku sighed, as he let himself fall, his back cushioned by the grass and flowers he was crushing under his weight. He stared up at the sky, covered in lazily flowing stratus clouds.
Merely mist under the morning sun.
He wondered.
Would his fake nightshade be able to fly?
Be able to be free up in the sky?
Would his fake nightshade be able to live under the sun?
“Gladly,” he had said once. That fateful night before. “I will gladly lie for my thousand skies.”
“ That’s not what I asked.” He had said, already knowing that Gen would smile and magic away the inquiry.
But he didn’t.
He looked at him, only at him, just like he looked at the blue sky above.
“This little flower of yours won’t die under the sun.” A smile, a caress. A promise. “Flowers over war, remember? I am meant to be free under the sky.”
Senku couldn’t give that to him.
The thousand skies were stone-bound, calloused hands buried in the soil, and head heavy with thoughts. With ideas, with sorrow, with responsibilities.
When Senku looked at the night sky, he did not see freedom.
He just saw wisps, memories of has-beens, he saw everything he needed to do, and everything he hadn’t.
For Senku it was nothing but an illusion.
Unreachable, untouchable.
He saw everything he could not have. Everything he had lost.
When he looked up into the morning sky, he saw Gen.
“Will you miss me?” He had asked of him, as he prepared to leave for Tsukasa’s kingdom. With that smile of his– just an illusion, disappearing under the light.
Stone was solid.
Stone was a certainty, something that would remain immutable as time went on.
Stone were his promises, his words.
Stone, would also shatter the illusion.
“Why?” He had said instead. “You will never be gone.”
Gen had laughed. A sound of joy, in their lightless night. A sound of comfort, of hope in the face of the inevitable.
He had not said otherwise.
Morning had come, and Gen disappeared as if swallowed up by the sky– like mist under the sun.
“Did you know?” Senku mumbled at the sky above. “Nightshades belong to the family of the Solanaceae.
“Did you know,” he repeated to his public of one. “Solanaceae comes from Solanum, that which lives under the sun.”
The wind continued to blow, carrying his words away. Senku would like it to carry his sorrows away as well.
And then, the unthinkable finally happened.
A wisp of lavender crossed his skies again.
Blocked his eyesight.
That and the tears in his eyes.
“Welcome home,” he mumbled to his illusion. As if it had been a day instead of a hundred nights.
A warm hand cupped his cheek, his flower looking away from the sun– away from the sky.
“I’m always home, under the thousand skies.”
Stone, could break as well.
Stone, could cry.
And in the tears, little sneaky flowers could bloom anew– giving life back to the stone.