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Every morning, Xeno wakes with a gasp, searching for Stanley’s shape beside him. And every morning, the silent truth meets him at the bedside… one side of the mattress holds only a cold imprint, a crater of memory. He doesn’t wash the sheets; they’re soaked with years of his refusal to let go.
He won’t call it mourning, because mourning has an end. What he lives is beyond that. Something that lingers deep in the heart and never really goes away
Stanley was carrying some of the lab materials to and from the main lab and the storage room. Xeno called out.
“Stan, watch the chemicals!”
That was his last warning.
He was too far when the vial shattered. The explosion wasn’t loud, not like fireworks. It was like the world fractured. And in that fractured world, he reached. And failed.
Stan’s eyes, once gentle, were already gone.
His body was too destroyed to piece back together using why man.
He retreated. His colleagues passed through, Senku, Chrome, Suika, all with a horrible look of pity in their eyes.
He stopped speaking. Let the others handle Senku’s growing science revolution. He pretended he was okay… until he wasn’t. And that night, in the hush of the quiet cemetery, he whispered to the grave… “I’m sorry, Stan.
He never changed the mattress. Every night his body leaned toward the side where Stanley once slept. His hand fell naturally there… even though it was always met with cold empty air.
He talked to a grave. Told it about the sun’s light, about Senku’s elegant machines, what he had for lunch that day, anything he could thing of and about hope he couldn’t quite feel.
He lost track of days when science became burden, not solace. Time, so petty, marched on, and Stanley didn’t.
Years passed… decades. The Time Machine project offered Xeno a sliver of escape. If he could reverse the events of that night…maybe he could hold him again.
He threw himself into equations, quantum resonance experiments, temporal flux proofs. Each data point was a prayer: let me find him again.
He watched the stars with Senku sometimes… though mostly in silence. He turned his grief toward problem-solving like an engine, calculating circuits, recalibrating trajectories, adjusting any variable that might be the key to… the impossible.
Senku knew what drove him. When he asked softly, “Do you think you’ll succeed?” Xeno could only look at him, the old hurt shimmering in his dark eyes.
“I have to,” he said. “No… I must.”
His shoulders stooped, he got frail, his body hurt, but his eyes stayed sharp. They watched Senku take charge of rebuilding the world, villages sprouting, young faces curious, children learning again.
And he watched the world without Stanley.
He missed Stanley’s laugh in the morning, the way he tied his hair back, the way he smoked outside, the purple lipstick on his lips, the way Stanley spooned him at night. These days, he’d wake with tears streaming down his cheeks, regret tasting like a lingering memory in his mouth.
Time still pressed on.
Into old age, he worked tirelessly. He faced Senku, once a young boy with a passion for science, now a leader weighed with responsibility.
“Finish it,” he rasped, voice ravaged by time.
Senku gave Xeno a curious look
“Because this life,” Xeno shook with grief, “will swallow me whole if I don’t give it a purpose.”
He reached for Senku’s hand. “When you finish…when it works…you have to…give him another chance.”
Xeno lay in bed now, old and broken. The Time Machine hummed faintly across the hall. Its circuits glowing blue.
He felt someone looking at him. When he opened his eyes, he saw Senku.
“I…I think it’s time to rest… it’s something Stanley would’ve wanted me to do…
I lost him years ago. A lab accident. Sudden, stupid, senseless. I was the one who told him to handle those supplies. I was right there… but too far to stop it, too slow to save him. And yet, somehow, time moved on. The clocks kept ticking. The world kept turning like it hadn’t just collapsed.
But I didn’t move on.
I stayed.
In the same double bed, with the same dent on his side of the mattress, I never did get a new one.
I still see him there sometimes… clear as breath in winter. Lying beside me, smiling like he never left. A cigarette caught between his painted purple lips, the smoke curling like vines that never reach the light. His lips purple. His hazel eyes that I used to see my whole world reflected in them. I still do. Even if it’s not the same.
And when I close my eyes, I swear I feel the weight of his gaze, like something stinging, sacred. He always looked at me like he saw something I couldn’t. Something worth staying for.
At night, I look at the stars. They haven’t changed.
Cold. Distant. Eternal. Elegant.
And still, somehow, comforting. Because I know everyone, everywhere, is looking at that same sky, same moon, even if they don’t realise the beauty in it at the time.
And I think, if he were here and I were gone, he’d be doing the same…
watching, remembering, reaching out as if he could come back to me…
So I have to ask you, Senku.
When you look at the stars…
or run your fingers along the worn spines of books,
or sit in the stillness between one breath and the next…
do you ever feel someone looking after you…?”
Xeno’s voice was hoarse and weak, they both knew it was time.
Senku didn’t give an answer to Xeno’s question.
“In a moment…I’ll be gone,” he said. “Just…promise me. For Stanley. For science. For humanity and For me. Don’t stop. Make sure your successors are prepared to keep going...
Senku drew his lips close to his ear. “I swear.” Then he whispered, “Now rest, Xeno.”
And he closed his eyes.
The first thing Xeno felt was weight, his own breath heavy in his chest, his limbs slow and distant, then a feeling of weightlessness. The second thing was light. Blinding, white, and soft around the edges like morning fog through stained glass.
He blinked.
A hospital ceiling. Crisp white sheets. A distant murmur of monitors and voices, Senku writing down a time of death.
Then…
A voice, low and dry as desert wind:
“Took you long enough, old man. Thought I’d have to start collecting your pension.”
Xeno’s head turned. There he was.
Stanley Snyder. Ethereal. Elegant. Beautiful and smirking.
Hair still tousled, eyes still hazel and laughing and sharp. That familiar cigarette dangling unlit between his fingers. No paint stains. Just the glint of amusement on his lips and a slight wrinkle at the corners of his eyes.
Xeno’s breath caught in his throat.
“Stan…?”
Stanley leaned down, light framing him like something halfway between divine and impossible. “You really let yourself go, huh?” he said, mock gasping as he eyed the wrinkles in Xeno’s face. “Next thing I know, you’ll be yelling at clouds and misplacing your quantum equations.”
Xeno couldn’t respond. Couldn’t move.
Stanley dropped the cigarette to the floor and knelt beside the bed. His voice dropped with him.
“Hey. I’m here.”
He reached out and pulled Xeno into a hug, his ghostly form literally leaving his body.
His arms were warm and strong.
“I’ve got you, Xeno,” he whispered, his smirk fading into something raw and open. “This time, I’m not going anywhere.”
And for the first time in decades, Xeno let himself fall into the embrace.
Not a memory nor a dream.
But Stanley.
The stars outside the window blinked like old friends watching over them.
And Xeno, buried in Stanley’s arms, let the tears fall.