Work Text:
Gone are the moon and the Pleiades.
And, in the middle of the night,
Time passes
And I sleep alone.
- Sappho -
The stars had moved in three-thousand seven-hundred years. That was something Senkuu realised pretty quickly upon being reborn into the stone world. It was odd to see the north star too far over to one side and not lining up with the magnetic north, or the fact that a star from the Ursa minor constellation had moved up far enough that the little bear was now missing a hind leg. Senkuu was glad they hadn’t moved so much that the night sky he once knew was completely unrecognisable though. Slowly but surely, he started documenting the new positions of stars. It was hard, he didn’t have a telescope or Kohaku’s eagle eyesight, and he was always busy working on other projects to keep his kingdom of science functioning.
Senkuu was ten billion percent happier than he let on when Gen and the villagers showed him the observatory they’d built for him. Sure he would have to do some fine-tuning of the telescope, one of the lenses would need to be reforged to get a clearer view, but he was enthralled. Senkuu spent the first half an hour just staring at the moon in awe, like it had been a millennium since the last time he looked at it with his own two eyes. Because it had . He’d been awake all that time in darkness, not a single star to light his vision. For the others, it’d been a short, blissful nap, but he’d been awake for three-thousand seven-hundred years in the agonising void of his own mind.
Senkuu could just make out new craters in the surface of the moon, studying it intently and shifting the lenses every now and then to see if he could get a better image. At some point though, he stopped thinking and analysing, just staring at the one place he longed to reach more than any other. It was still the same moon he’d looked up at with Byakuya, the same one which followed him around, the same one his father had been so close to when he finally left earth.
The night was quiet. Senkuu had almost fallen asleep at his telescope twelve times, eye still pressed to the lens with his sights set on the moon. Droplets of water blurred the image but he made no effort to remove them.
The night was lonely. The only sound in the observatory was his breathing, the rustling of his clothes and the creak of bamboo as he adjusts the telescope one last time before leaning back and looking up at the sky as a whole. The sound of a heavy sigh and a painful swallow.
The night was painful. The aching burn in the sides of his throat, just under his ears, the stinging tiredness in his eyes, the deafening silence outside of his immediate being.
The night shouldn’t be painful to experience, Senkuu argued. It’s illogical. The night does not have a physical form and therefore cannot inflict pain on humans. Only it can, because the memories it brings make his throat burn, his eyes water, his heart ache with longing for that which he has lost, and at the same time quiver in fear of the darkness that encased him for so long. The night was illogical because it made Senkuu feel upset , and he wasn’t used to that.
Senkuu looked away from the stars, laying down on the wooden floor of the observatory and pulling a blanket over himself. He vaguely remembered Gen delivering it a couple of hours ago.
The stars made him finally realise how much time had passed. He was immune to the numbers and dates he threw around, who wouldn’t be after three-thousand seven-hundred years of endless counting? But the shift of the stars was something he never would have seen in his original lifetime. Something he never should have seen. It was not the same light that he’d looked up at with Byakuya, they were not truly the stars he knew. These were stars he was never supposed to see.
These stars reminded him only of what he had lost. These stars reminded him that he was alone.