Work Text:
He could pat his labcoat pocket to check that his conference speech notes are still in there, but there’s really no need; he knows every word and pause of his talk by heart, skims through it in his head for the nth time since arriving at what counts for a green room in a stone world lecture theatre. Able to seat over a hundred people, he’d designed it to deliberately emulate the circular lecture rooms seen sketched in historical medicine textbooks, the stage expanding from a focal point upwards and outwards. The construction team had done a fantastic job, and it’s a vast improvement on the catwalk and performance space they’d made several years ago to debut Yuzuriha’s first fashion line and raise spirits in favour of the Perseus’ construction through song and dance and whatever masterclass in acting Chrome had been doing.
Behind the thick curtain separating him from his audience, Senku grins, listens to the murmur of the crowd as everyone rustles around to get to their seats. After him, it’s Ruri’s thesis on the systems of hierarchy that govern the village, then Tsukasa’s philosophy 101 analysis and closing with Suika’s review of the botanical situation in the surrounding area. He can’t help but be excited - it’s the inaugural stone world academic symposium!
A flicker of sadness sinks his heart when he imagines all the faces in the crowd, knowing that - despite all logic - he’ll still scan the room for the old man’s stupid grin to no avail. Someone sentimental - like Taiju - would probably say the guy is still watching over him even now and has a front row astral seat to his first science conference, summoned purely by the magic of love, but Senku’s going to need some sizeable evidence before he’s to be convinced that there’s a genuine ghost in the audience.
All the same, during scheduling the big oaf had pointed out that a full moon was due to hang perfectly overhead on the night of the event, which had to be a sign of something!, and Senku had to hope that he didn’t notice Gen’s immediate, smug eyebrow raise, or was at least unable to distinguish it from his usual shit-eating smirks.
“If I didn’t value my own life, I’d say you’re making a choice that feels…sentimental, Senku-chan~♡”
Kohaku had given him a knowing glance when she realised too, but Senku had only shrugged cooly and kept a blank face.
So sue me, maybe I did it on purpose to signal to the old bastard after all.
Oh, wait. We haven’t reinvented suing yet. I’ll make sure to dissuade Ryusui from the idea…
Senku smiles despite the pang in his chest, the edge of his grin snagging on a tooth, and tightens his hands into fists. The old man’s probably dreamed of this moment, too, and he’s not about to waste the opportunity. It’s going to be awesome. It’s got to be perfect.
If it’s not perfect, people die. The boat could sink, the antibiotics will fail, there could be wind we didn’t account for and the plane will float off-course and explode a person rather than a tree, I might wake up in the middle of winter and-
There’s a clammy film of sweat on the back of his neck - that spot…where…and he’s on the other side of the curtain - and a tight pinching feeling in his chest - that spot…where…but I’m safe now- and he blinks back a sudden wave of dizziness. The electric light in the backstage area is giving off an insipid whining sound, the bulb buzzing and suddenly too bright. He unfurls his fingers and twists the shell of one ear, worrying the skin and leaning his head into the heel of his palm, squishing his cheek and rubbing at the grain of his teeth underneath.
He’s biting into the skin of his mouth when Gen shimmies through a gap in the curtain, clipboard in hand, smiling in greeting. His two-toned hair is longer on both sides these days, grown far past his shoulders and twisted into a braid that snakes down his back. A single glimmer of clarity streaks through Senku’s confusion when he enters: he’s got silver at his temples now, on the dark side. Are we really that much older?
Time compresses, impossibly, in a breath, with a squeeze of his stomach. A second ago, surely, we were kids. How long has it been? Not that many seconds, that many years? Did I lose count, somehow?
“What’s up?” Senku asks, tense. That buzzing light is the worst.
Gen gestures to the clipboard. “There’s a change in the running order for tonight, I’m afraid. Suika would like to have her talk first, before yours, so she can get to bed early.”
Senku shrugs, drops his hands to his sides and away from his face. “I guess that makes sense, little kids shouldn’t stay up late. She’ll just be cranky in the morning.”
“Little kids?” Gen laughs. “You know, you’re right, even though she’s a teenager now she’ll always seem like a baby to me. ‘What do you mean you could’ve gotten your license back in the old world by now?!’. Time flies.”
“Right,” Senku stiffens. Right. She’s just a bit older than I was when I woke up, now.
The thought of waking up from that tomb sends a bad chill up his back and he struggles to surface from the dark chokehold it threatens to seize his mind in. It sneaks up on him more than he would like to admit these days - when attempting to fall asleep in bed, alone in the dark; when his hands brush an ordinary rock or he catches sight of a pebble on the shore and can imagine the texture encasing his skin; even closing his eyes a bit too long while taking a bath. It used to be easy to beat the thoughts back, to focus on the success and the rewarding burn of muscle in the face of danger and terror. It had sucked, but he had prevailed! They all had. They all were, to this day.
And yet. The grey in Gen’s hair. Suika behind the wheel of a stone world car, able to see over the dashboard without a booster seat, able to reach the pedals without comically unsafe stilts. It should bring him peace, this proof of life. But when did it all happen? Had he been looking away, inexplicably, too focused on whittling the next gear and formulating the next potion to notice?
“Is that okay?” Gen asks. His brow is furrowed, the smile fading. “Senku-chan?”
“No.” Gen startles, and Senku catches himself, feels as though he’s standing on a sheet of ice rather than a sturdy wooden floor. “I mean, yeah. It’s fine.”
Suika delivering her talk first is, of course, completely fine. He doesn’t have an ego about going second, thinks that it would be fitting to let her present before him to demonstrate how the new generation of science fans are growing up, and follow them in the schedule as their mentor. And to be followed, then, by Ruri and Tsukasa maintains a neat running-order pattern, only instead of it being old-worlder-then-islander it’s now islander-then-old-worlder. Which is probably more balanced and respectful instead of bookending the evening, inherently dominating the conversation, with old-worlder thoughts and ideas.
But… that wasn’t the order he’d scheduled. It wasn’t the order that meant the full moon would be witness, at its peak in the sky, to his kickstarting of the event. It’d be off by the smallest, most insignificant measurement. Which hardly mattered. But now the values of the evening are out of sync and everything has to be reshuffled. The formula is different, now. It isn’t perfect, as he had planned it. And if it wasn’t perfect, then people -
Die. They die. Even when I’ve tried so hard to keep that from happening.
The whole evening crumbles. He must make some sort of noise because Gen reaches out for him, expression the perfect picture of concern, fingers glancing his arm. Senku recoils at the touch, ears ringing, lifts his elbow too sharply, the back of his hand almost catching Gen’s face in a quick swat.
“Don’t touch me,” he says harshly, hoping that an apology of some kind had made its way out of his throat before the bark. Senku scrambles mentally to count something - anything - but the thought of numbers, usually so comforting, is sour and crushing. For a moment, he feels incapable of even remembering the simplest of multiplication tables, addition, head too full of electric fire and the phantom grain of seaside pebbles.
He’s on the floor suddenly, on his ass, sweating, chest full of acid and breathing short. Nerves? No, I don’t get nervous. But…A panic attack? He wonders, but the diagnosis feels off. Cardiac arrest?
Gen is trying to speak to him, and Senku hopes that all his gloating about being a mindreader isn’t bullshit for once and that Gen can understand that when Senku curses at him to fuck off, damp-faced and hands trembling on the ground, he’s really asking for help: a blunt object to the back of the head, frankly, to knock him out of this.
The mentalist must grasp some physic mindwave somehow, because he disappears to the other side of the curtain again, leaving the clipboard behind in his purple-gowned wake. Senku screws up the running order into a tiny paper ball, pressing the rough creases of it into his palms and rolling it around, squashing it flat with enough pressure to make his wrists ache.
It’s just a schedule, he tries to reason with himself, but it feels as though there is the weight of an entire planet on his back, pinning him to the floorboards, or a star in his gut that’s about to go critical, go supernova. He realises, as Gen returns with Taiju at his side, that he hasn’t felt this way since he was a kid. He recalls a time when he was small and some distant family member on Byakuya’s side, a complete stranger, had asked for a hug and the overwhelming stench and grip of them had caused Senku to push them away, throw a plastic sip cup at their feet when they tried to advance again. And a more recent time, maybe a few months before Petrification, when he had gotten off the train at an earlier stop and walked to school rather than suffer another moment in the humid, crowded vehicle, knowing immediately and without a doubt that he could have thrown hands with the next idiot who breathed stale morning coffee breath in his face.
But I’m, like, twenty-nine, he thinks desperately. Shouldn't I be able to get over it by now?
Desperation and confusion melts into fury and embarrassment when Taiju crouches in front of him, and Senku feels cornered, what with him boxing Senku against the wall and Gen hovering near the gap in the curtain - the only escape. But it would be escape onto the stage, into the line of sight of everyone. Taiju has grown into a proper beard, eyes still bright with compassion and joy, shoulders broad and one hand still soft despite the days he spends out on the farm. The other, metal and plastic up to the shoulder, a stone world prosthetic, the flesh and bone lost - despite their efforts - in Ibara's waters. There aren’t any greys in his hair, but there are lines along his forehead and around his mouth, and Senku needs to build a time machine right now to go back and make sure he was able to get this way the normal way, smooth those lines to finer ones, erase the stress of all this stone world stuff.
“Why’d you bring the Big Oaf in here?” Senku asks Gen, considers hurling the paper ball at him. “You charging a fee to see the show?”
“No way, Senku,” Taiju reassures. “Gen thought that I’d know what to do, cos I knew you back in the day.”
“You can help me by going away.”
“Well, we’re not doing that,” Gen crosses his arms. “I left Chrome up front to do some, um, tricks, to keep everyone entertained while you calm down. Like a warm-up act!”
Chrome? The schedule is even more messed up now. Why even bother plan anything anymore? Why not just give in to the chaos of this stupid universe?
“Your dad once told me that when you’re having a meltdown, we just have to wait and be patient while making sure you’re safe,” Taiju says, as though reciting an old rulebook. He sits down on the floor, thankfully some inches away from Senku, back turned to him, cross-legged and seemingly content. “It’s nice in here so that’s easy!”
Easy? Nothing about this feels easy. He’s fully convinced that he’s about to explode. He’s going to take out Taiju and Gen and the entire theatre in one fell swoop, doom them all to fire and hurt. His face is already burning with shame, sick with the knowledge that Gen is seeing him like this, that Taiju is here and sitting peacefully and quietly like the saint he is, beside the person who got him into all of this mess, the person he should be throwing boulders at.
“Take however long you need,” Taiju says gently.
“What do you mean my dad told you?” Senku asks, after a moment.
Taiju laughs. “Oh, it was ages ago! I was round at your place for a sleepover and your dad said that you might become irritable later in the night, cos we were hanging out on a school night and you’d have had a long day. And he’d picked up karaage that was too soggy that night from the takeout place, which you didn’t have much of. So he said you might get upset - all the stuff from the day and then the bad food. You might have a hard time sleeping or something, and told me what to do and to not be scared and to come and get him if it got too much. I think you were brushing your teeth at the time.”
Senku stares at his back, hand tugging on his ear again. His face is wet. Fucking hell, am I crying?
“But you were totally fine!” Taiju continues. “I think it’s cos we watched episodes of that Mythbusters show before bed. You started telling me about how we could try that stuff too and it cheered you up! I never told you cos I knew you’d say something like-”
“I don’t get upset,” they say in unison.
Nodding, Taiju wags a finger in the air. “Exactly! I was a billion percent correct!”
“About something that’s a billion percent wrong,” Gen mutters into the curtain, having taken Taiju’s cue to turn away from Senku.
They lapse into silence, Senku turning over the thought of the old man confiding in Taiju, Taiju holding this secret code the whole time they’d been friends. It dawns on him that Byakuya had passed on much more than just those platinum particles and the recording, had been sending them all into the future with precious data and resources even before knowing the Petrification event was going to occur. He hated to admit that Taiju’s sentimental idea that the guy was still with them was holding an increasing amount of legitimising water.
Senku wipes his face with his sleeve, the rage ebbing out of his blood. He takes a breath, then another, confesses to the floor between his knees.
“I still think we’re about to die, all the time. I’m still thinking fifteen steps ahead, because if I don’t then it could all collapse, I could miss something, we could lose someone,” his eyes get hot again. “Science is all trial and error, trying and trying, over and over, but I have to get it right or- or the guilt… ”
It’s victory for the mentalist, he knows, expects to hear the quirk of Gen’s smile but is met with heavy, sad silence instead. Exhaustion crashes over him, wiping out the fury and the mortification of being seen in this state. He hunches forward, dropping the paper ball, legs drawn up and arms dangling over his knees, head bowed, hair strands flopping down over his eyes. The buzzing sound of the light peters out and he’s aware of a shuffling sound and a presence to his left. After a long second that stretches hours, words dried up on his tongue, he leans against Taiju’s arm. His best friend smells of fresh earth, tomato vines, a summer’s day harvest. The gravity of the fact that he’s still here, still by his side, over a decade on, suddenly no longer feels like an uncomfortable, incomprehensible anomaly but a relief.
Weren’t we just kids a second ago? Billions and millions of seconds ago? Basically yesterday.
Taiju lets him stain the shoulder of his nice theatre shirt with silent salt tears.
“Take as long as you need.”
When he opens his eyes, dry, Gen is watching them, expression far from triumphant. His long, wide sleeves cover his hands but Senku can see him twisting his fingertips together beneath the neat hems. When they make eye contact, Gen’s gaze is the first to dart away.
“I was brought back in Tsukasa’s territory,” he says, addressing the corner of the room. “When I know I’d been frozen in the middle of my old set at the TV station. Sometimes I worry I’ll wake up and have been whisked away again. But I think, even if I was… I’d know where to start walking back to.” The rest comes out in a rush. “You haven’t made this world on your own, not totally. I know you’ve got a big head but thinking, Senku-chan, that you alone could bring it to ruin is not only false but scientifically inaccurate! I didn’t do all that work with the bellows and destroy my arms for you to imply we don’t make our home turn together, that we don’t share the weight - the literal weight, sometimes, mind you! - of it.”
Eleven. Eleven strands of silver in his hair. Senku takes a breath, sense and reason returning to him, the fog of panic dissipating.
No one's dying. He's safe. Twenty-nine and still going.
“Asagiri talking about sharing…” he manages a crooked smile, weary but there. “Hell’s frozen over, Taiju, get your skis.”
Taiju scooches away from him, giving him space to stretch out his limbs again. He eventually offers a hand, which Senku refuses. He gets to his feet himself, brushes down his clothes, smooths out his hair. Reaching out, he bumps the knuckles of one hand against Taiju’s arm, the closest thing to an affectionate hug he can muster. Taiju almost bursts into tears of his own.
“I’m so glad you’re feeling better, Senku!!! You know that you can tell us how you feeling any time, right?!”
"Yeah, yeah." Forget the moon, some other celestial body must be causing havoc with him because he actually considers the idea.
Senku gingerly hands Gen the paper ball, at which the mentalist pulls a sardonic face and uncrumples it.
“Like it never happened,” he says with a sunny grin.
The three of them listen to the crowd applaud for Chrome and Taiju bunches his hands up under his chin. “Tonight’s going to be awesome!”
“According to your chart, the moon’s going to be full and bright all evening, Senku-chan. You haven’t missed your shot.”
Senku arcs an eyebrow at him. “You know my chart?”
Gen taps his finger against the clipboard thoughtfully. “I have a great memory! So, can we approve the order of operations for the evening?”
Senku nods, the familiar thrum of excitement returning to his head. The inaugural stone world symposium! It’s really happening!
“Of course Suika can go first,” he says. “It won’t be the end of the world.”