Work Text:
The night in the jungles of South America was never truly quiet. Even in the aftermath of blood, sweat, and petrification, life carried on in endless hums and murmurs, crickets trilling from the darkness, frogs croaking by the streams, the restless flapping of wings above the canopy.
The air was heavy, damp with the breath of the rainforest, carrying a mingling scent of soil, moss, and lingering ash from the brief fires of battle. But for the first time in seven years, seven years that passed for them in an instant, Senku and Kohaku were breathing that air again.
It was disorienting. Their last clear memories had been blinding flashes of violence, of screams and gunfire, of a desperate gamble to petrify themselves rather than let death claim them. Then, darkness. Nothingness. And now, the world again. Seven years had come and gone while they slept in stone.
Not with the usual hush of nightfall, but with the strange, layered quiet of a world half-asleep. Somewhere in the distance, leaves whispered under a faint breeze, and the call of an unseen bird cut briefly through the dark. Yet here, close to the ruins of their battlefield, the air was heavy with another kind of silence, the kind born of absence.
Senku sat on the edge of a toppled boulder, his arms propped on his knees, gaze tilted skyward. The stars sprawled overhead in staggering clarity. They hadn’t dimmed in seven years, hadn’t shifted, hadn’t paused in their eternal rotation. The same stars that had watched him awaken after 3,700 years watched him again now, unchanged.
Behind him, a soft rustle. He didn’t turn. “Figured I wasn’t the only one who couldn’t sleep.”
Kohaku’s footsteps were soft against the grass as she approached. She had shed her armor for the night, wearing just the simple blue dress that let the cool breeze brush against her skin. Her golden hair, loosely tied, gleaming like threads of sunlight even in the darkness.
“Of course not.” She said, voice low, but steady. “How could anyone sleep after… after that?”
Senku gave a dry huff of agreement. “Fair point. Waking up after a catnap of seven years doesn’t exactly set the body clock right.”
Kohaku lowered herself onto the boulder beside him, close but not touching, her hands braced on either side. For a long while they said nothing, only breathing in the crisp night air, listening to the quiet rhythm of the world Suika had preserved for them. The forest, vast and unbroken, felt as if it were holding its breath, waiting for humanity to return to its rightful place, or perhaps wondering whether it ever would.
“It feels strange.” Kohaku murmured finally, eyes on the horizon, where the silhouette of mountains cut against the sky. “To wake and find seven years gone. My sister, my father, everyone at the base… still waiting. Unchanged, and yet… everything has changed.”
“Yeah…” Senku said, his tone lighter than his eyes. “Funny thing about petrification. Doesn’t matter if it’s seven years or seven millennia, the moment you crack out, it’s like no time passed at all. But the world doesn’t stop. It keeps grinding on without you.”
She turned to study him. “You don’t sound surprised.”
“Surprised?” He gave a crooked grin. “Hardly. It’s science. A biological pause button. We’re the test subjects proving it works.” He tapped his chest with one finger. “Still breathing. Still ticking.”
Her smile widened faintly at his matter-of-factness. But there was a shadow behind it too, an ache that no grin could chase away. “Suika… she carried us all this time. Alone. For years...” Kohaku’s hands clenched lightly on the stone beneath her. “When I think of it, her wandering, searching, holding on to hope that she could save us… my chest feels tight. She was so young, Senku. Younger than I was when I first found you in the forest. And yet she bore everything.”
Senku’s smirk softened, fading into something more genuine, quieter. “Yeah. The kid’s ten billion percent tougher than we gave her credit for.” He tilted his head back, letting the starlight wash over his face. “If not for her, none of us would be sitting here. She rebuilt the science kingdom brick by brick, molecule by molecule. Kept the flame burning until we could pick it up again.”
Kohaku nodded, swallowing hard. “She must have been so lonely.”
Senku didn’t answer right away. He imagined Suika, small hands working clumsily at first, then steadily, doggedly, until they became sure. The hours stretched into days, days into years, each sunrise finding her still moving, still refusing to give in. A single child against the vast silence of the petrified world.
Finally he spoke. “Yeah. But she made it. That’s the kind of scientist’s spirit you can’t measure on a scale. Pure, stubborn will.”
Kohaku’s expression softened. “And now she has us again.”
“Damn right.” He leaned forward, elbows on his knees. “We’ll make sure she never carries it all alone again.”
They sat in silence after that, the night sounds wrapping around them. The faint trickle of a distant stream. The gentle groan of trees shifting. For the first time in years, for the first time in their memory, perhaps, the weight wasn’t battle or survival, but the strange ache of realizing just how much time had slipped through their fingers.
Kohaku drew her knees up, wrapping her arms around them loosely. “What do you think the others will say? When we revive them, I mean. Seven years…” She laughed, but it was breathless, almost rueful. “Kinro will scold me for every reckless thing I’ve done. Yuzuriha or Minami may cry. Ruri… she’ll…” Her voice faltered just a moment before she steadied it. “She’ll smile like nothing ever changed.”
Senku chuckled softly. “Chrome’s really pissed he missed seven whole years of science. You’d better believe he’ll grill Suika for every detail she managed to scrape without him.”
The image coaxed a real laugh from Kohaku this time, warm and rich against the chill air. Senku glanced sideways, catching the way her shoulders eased, the way her eyes softened in the starlight. It was rare to see her without that edge of readiness, of vigilance. Rare and… grounding.
“And what about you?” She asked suddenly, tilting her head.
“Me?”
“Yes.” She leaned toward him, playful curiosity threading her tone. “Seven years gone. The great Senku Ishigami, genius of the Stone World. What will you do when we return to America? To the base?”
He smirked. “Same as always, science. We’ve got a planet to reboot, and seven years of wasted time to make up for.”
“That’s all?”
“What else would there be?”
She gave him a look that was equal parts exasperation and fondness. “You’ve been frozen in stone for years, Senku. Surely even you have something you look forward to. Something beyond calculations and plan of future inventions. Something that doesn’t have to be essential.”
He lifted one brow, feigning thought. “Well… maybe I’ll make a decent cup of coffee. Been craving that since the moment we landed in South America. Wonder if Chelsea could find some Coffea canephora with her knowledge to try and make it.”
Kohaku laughed again, shaking her head. “That’s very you.”
“Damn straight.”
Their conversation meandered then, slipping into lighter currents, and at one point, Kohaku leaned back on her hands, eyes tilted toward the sky. “Do you think the world has changed much? While we were frozen?”
Senku followed her gaze. The stars shone sharp and cold, unbothered by human absence. “Not the way it did before. Seven years is nothing compared to 3,700. But ecosystems shift, rivers change course, species rise and fall. We’ll have to do a new survey.”
Her lips curved faintly. “Always the scientist.”
“Someone’s gotta keep track.”
“I don’t mind.” She drew in a deep breath, letting it out slowly. “But I wonder… how strange it will feel, to step into a world that has moved without us. Even if it’s only a handful of years, I feel like we’ve been left behind.”
Senku’s gaze lingered on her, on the way her voice dipped low with that quiet vulnerability she rarely let slip. “We may have been left behind.” He said finally. “But we’ll catch up. That’s what humanity does. We rebuild, we leap forward, we make up for lost time.”
She met his eyes, and something flickered there… trust, perhaps, or gratitude, though shaded by something heavier, unspoken. She held his gaze for a long moment before looking away.
The night deepened around them, the chill settling sharper into their skin. Yet neither moved to leave, neither made the first excuse to retreat into what shelter they had. Instead they lingered, suspended in this fragile sliver of peace, aware that the dawn would bring movement, decisions, the march forward.
Senku hesitated for only a beat before he asked the question that had been knawing at him like a loose gear in a machine. The hush between them felt like the last few seconds before a fuse burned out, fragile, charged, impossible to ignore.
“Hey.” He said, keeping his voice low so it wouldn’t disturb the sleeping stones that lay like a scattered city beyond the treeline, “How did it feel? Being petrified… to you, I mean.”
She blinked, an instinctive, straightforward movement that made the moonlight catch on the edge of her lashes. For a moment she looked almost surprised that he’d asked. Kohaku was a woman of action, conversation about inner states had never been her favorite battlefield.
But under the plainness there was none of the embarrassed flinching that sometimes came from being asked about things the rest of them fussed over. She folded her hands into her lap, shoulders relaxed, and let the silence stretch for a second before replying.
“Why do you want to know?” She asked quietly, more curiosity than defense in her tone.
Senku shrugged like he’d do it to a lab sample. “Scientific curiosity.” He said. “Well… that, and compiling anecdotal evidence for interindividual differences in subjective response to petrification.” He made it sound official, tossing the phrase out like a shielded test tube.
Then he let his voice drop into something more honest, less lab-slicked. “But between you and me? Mostly curiosity. I didn’t get time to ask while we were on the island, Whyman had us breathing down our necks and the whole America project… well.” He gestured, a slight sweep of one hand toward the dark that held the outline of the old base. “We were busy surviving.”
Kohaku’s face softened a fraction at that. The relief in it was small but real, relief at not being interrogated under the microscope so much as being asked because someone cared what it felt like. She took a breath that fogged the cold air for a heartbeat and then began.
“Honestly, it’s nothing like I thought.” She said, low and measured. “I tought it would be like sleeping. Like taking a nap. I expected to feel… soft. Like falling into a bed.” She let out a short, humorless laugh that dissolved into the night. “I was wrong.”
Senku’s eyes sharpened, the scientist in him leaning forward on its invisible elbow. He braced his chin on his hands and listened.
“It starts with panic.” Kohaku said. Her fingers flexed once, a tiny shutter of a motion. “The first minutes are the worst. You try to breathe and you can’t, and that makes it worse. But the strangest thing, you don’t need to. It’s like the body knows something your mind doesn’t agree with. Your lungs want to pull in air, but nothing happens, and then slowly, after the struggle, the panic thins out and you realize… you’re not dying. Not in the way you think.”
She paused, searching for the right words, for metaphors sturdy enough to carry that particular kind of freight. Senku watched her profile in the starlight, the pale, steady plane of her cheek, the way her throat moved as she swallowed. He could see the tension in her jaw and the small smile that came when she landed on a phrase that fit.
“It’s like being underwater.” She went on finally, voice quieter, more intimate now. “Imagine the whole world is a thick, cold ocean pressing in on you while you sink lower and lower. Sight goes first, everything blurs until there’s only a steady, empty dark. Then sound comes last, like when you’re deep and the noises from above get slow and far away. But you’re still there, you can still think.”
Senku’s fingers drummed an absent pattern on his knee. He could picture it, but he also knew it first hand, the claustrophobic pressure, a drowning that was mental more than physical, and he felt a prickle of cold at the back of his neck.
“What did you do with your mind?” He asked. “How did you stop it from tearing itself to pieces?”
Kohaku’s eyes turned inward, as if she were watching the memory unfurl from the inside. The firelight from the distant camp painted soft orange highlights across her face, making the moonlight seem metallic by contrast. She spoke slowly, as though handing over fragile things.
“At first you can’t stop thinking about the breath.” She said. “So in those first minutes I was only aware of air and the lack of it.”
She touched the stone with the heel of her hand, an absent small motion like one might make when the memory was still hot. “Then something like acceptance comes, you try to remain conscious by thinking about anything, I would recite little pieces from training, names of people I cared about, sounds I remembered...”
Senku, who had spent a good portion of his life translating qualitative experiences into variables and categories, felt an immediate, professional interest. “Using memories as a coping mechanism.” He said, almost to himself. “A fixed mental task to anchor subjective time.”
Kohaku’s mouth quirked. “You make it sound like an experiment.” There was warmth in the teasing, but the edge was still visible. “It helped though. Even if sometimes I almost lost thought.” Kohaku watched him with an expression that mixed something like admiration with the stubborn, practical face of the warrior she was. “I’m assuming you counted again?”
He released a small, humorless chuckle. “Pretty much.” He said. “It’s so odd, but when you count every beat, every second becomes longer than the last.” He paused, then added in a more vulnerable undertone. “It’s like time dilates because your brain can parse it into pieces. So counting can be a double-edged sword. It keeps you from slipping into panic, but it also makes each second weightier.”
The silence that followed was thick and full, the kind that could have broken either with a word or with a laugh. Instead, the night took their breath and kept it indifferent. Senku let out a long exhale and watched the puff of vapor dissolve into the dark.
Kohaku turned her head to face him more fully, and the look she gave him peeled back some of the warrior’s armor. It was a rare, unguarded thing, the face of someone who had been very near something like oblivion and had come back with pieces of that closeness still lodged in her chest.
“When I was stone.” She said quietly, “I had time to think. Dangerous things sometimes. Not just about counting or names.” Her fingers moved, tracing an absent pattern across her knee. “I thought about how fragile everything is. About choices. About the people I love. About what kind of person I wanted to be if I woke up again.”
Senku’s pulse ticked a beat faster. He had hoped for data, for the clean lines of an experiment. But he had not expected the blunt, human edge that followed. The night seemed to lean in with them.
“And what did you decide?” He asked, careful.
Kohaku’s laugh then was hollow, but not without courage. “That I would not be a burden.” She said, the words were simple, fierce. “When the world took so much, I didn’t want to come back and be the one who required saving. I resolved to carry strength enough so others wouldn’t have to carry me. It sounds stubborn, but it’s true.”
Senku’s mouth flattened. He understood that kind of resolve, he’d seen it in too many people, in too many forms. It could be noble, but it could also be a path to places people returned from with jagged pieces missing.
“You were thinking like that even before you were stone.” He responded, voice gentled by the weight of it.
The thought hung between them like the fog of their breath, sharp and lingering, too heavy to dissipate in the cool air. Senku let it sit for a heartbeat before breaking it, his tone deceptively casual, though the gleam in his pale eyes betrayed something sharper beneath. Something he had time to reflect on while he was petrified.
“So.” He said. “I’m assuming that's the reason why you sprinted headfirst at Stanley with bullets flying? Did you even stop to think what you’d do when you encountered him?”
Kohaku blinked, her expression tightening. She tilted her chin up, caught somewhere between defensiveness and honesty. “I… didn’t have a plan. Not really.” Her fingers curled loosely against her knee, restless. “François and Suika were there. They were in danger. All I thought about was reaching them before it was too late.”
Senku’s lips twitched into something that looked like a smirk but sounded like a grindstone. “Figures.”
Her eyes narrowed. “Figures?”
“That’s textbook you.” He replied, voice cool. “Zero forethought, one hundred percent instinct. You see someone you care about in trouble, and you just throw yourself at the problem like it’s a wild boar you can take down with your fists.”
The words landed heavier than he intended, the air between them shifting. Kohaku stiffened, amber eyes flashing. “You make that sound like a bad thing.”
“Because it is.” Senku snapped before he could stop himself, and his voice ricocheted against the stillness of the forest. “Damn it, Kohaku, there’s a difference between letting yourself be petrified and letting yourself be shot. Did that even cross your mind?”
Her jaw clenched, but she shot back without hesitation. “Of course it did. I knew the risk. But I also knew I couldn’t just stand there while Suika and François…”
“You didn’t know a damn thing!” Senku cut in, leaning forward now, voice sharp as the crack of a branch underfoot. “You didn’t know if the medusa would activate in time. You didn’t know if we’d even get the signal through before Stanley’s bullets shredded you. And if the fight had dragged longer, if your body had decomposed past the threshold, then what? You think petrification’s a magic reset button?” His eyes burned as he spit the words. “You’d be dead. Stone or not. Did you think about that even for a second?”
The flush of anger rose in Kohaku’s face, hot and alive. She turned toward him fully, her golden hair spilling around the air like flame in the low light. “Please. The two of us know you wouldn’t have lasted long against armed soldiers either. The firepower was too much, Senku. I saw it up close, I felt the shock of it. You and the others barely had time to get the medusa working, and I knew it. But I also knew you’d find a way.”
“Don’t twist this into some kind of faith sermon.” He shot back, teeth gritted. “This wasn’t you putting trust in us. This was you gambling your life on a slot machine that hadn’t even been tested yet.”
She leaned closer, heat in her words, in her breath. “If taking a bullet or two is what it takes to save the people I love, to save humanity itself, then you can bet your life I’ll take them straight to the chest!”
Senku jerked his head away with an incredulous scoff, a rare slip in his controlled armor. “God, can you not say crap like that?! Do you even hear yourself? You had no idea what you were doing! You just hurled yourself forward and prayed someone else would clean up the mess if you didn’t get obliterated.” His fists tightened against his knees, knuckles white. “That’s not bravery. That’s suicidal recklessness.”
Kohaku’s breath caught, then came back as fire. She rose to her feet, standing over him now, the shadows of the trees thrown wild across her figure. “And what would you have had me do, Senku? Sit back while Suika was gunned down? Let François be slaughtered in front of me because the genius scientist said we didn’t have enough data?!”
He stood too, abruptly, their faces now level, the air between them a spark away from combustion. “You think you’re the only one who wanted to protect them?!” His voice cracked with rawness he couldn’t mask. “Everyone in that fight put their lives on the line, Tsukasa, Hyoga, the whole damn crew. But they knew the full risks. They’ve lived in the modern era when there were still weapons, they understand what guns mean. You…” He jabbed a finger toward her chest. “You’ve known firearms for, what, less than two years? You have no concept of the destruction they can unleash, of how brute strength is nothing to it.”
Her eyes blazed. “Don’t talk down to me like I’m some child who doesn’t understand it. I saw it, Senku. I felt the force of those bullets tear into the earth. I knew what I was running into!”
“Knowing in your gut and knowing in your head are two different universes!” Senku roared back. “And don’t pretend otherwise.”
Kohaku’s voice cut sharp through the tension, her tone trembling with fury. “You keep saying I didn’t know what I was doing, that I just ran in blindly, fine, maybe I did. But in the end, it worked, Senku. We broke through and I smashed their line, shattered their radio. That gave you the opening you needed to reach the base and use the medusa. Without that, Stanley would’ve cut us down before we even had a chance!”
Her chest heaved with the force of her words, eyes blazing in the dim light. “Tell me that wasn’t worth it. Tell me that didn’t change everything!”
Senku whipped around, his eyes sharp as flint, voice raised now with something between rage and disbelief. “Worth it?! Don’t give me that revisionist crap, Kohaku. That wasn’t a plan, that wasn't a strategy, that was dumb luck!”
He stepped toward her, every syllable hitting like a hammer. “Yeah, you smashed their radio. You could’ve just as easily been riddled with bullets before your sword even touched it. A hundred other outcomes and ninety-nine of them end with you face down in the dirt. And then what? We don’t get that signal out. We don’t buy time for the medusa. We lose everything.”
Kohaku bristled, fists curling tight. “But it didn’t happen that way! I didn’t die, Senku. I tore through their line and gave you the chance you needed. You can stand here calling it luck all you want, but I was there. I made that choice, and it made a difference.”
Senku’s laugh was jagged, almost bitter, the sound cracking through the air like broken glass. “A difference built on a one-in-a-thousand shot! You think I can build a future for humanity on odds like that? That I can tell people to throw their lives at impossible gambles because once in a blue moon, it pays off?!” His voice dropped into something harsher, lower. “That wasn’t victory by design, Kohaku. That was a coin toss with humanity’s survival as the stakes. And you’re calling it success.”
Her voice shook now, not with hesitation but with sheer intensity. “Sometimes the coin lands the right way because someone’s willing to throw it! If no one moves, if no one risks themselves, then the odds stay at zero. Maybe I gambled, but it was a gamble that bought us all another chance to live!”
Senku’s hands clenched at his sides, his pale eyes lit with fire. “And what if you’d lost that gamble? What if your body hit the ground before petrification caught you? What if Suika had been forced to watch you bleed out instead of being saved?” His voice cracked at the edge, raw with something he didn’t dare name. “Don’t you dare tell me that’s acceptable collateral.”
Kohaku’s hands balled into fists at her sides. “Why is it different when I do it? Tsukasa, Hyoga… they charged forward with the same kind of plan, the same certainty that they might die! You don’t stand here calling them impulsive.”
Senku’s laugh was short, bitter, cutting. “Because… it’s different. They’re people who have seen what guns could do to a person. They made calculated sacrifices. You…” his voice cracked into something raw, unguarded. “…you didn’t even stop to think if you’d come back out alive.”
The words cut, but she didn’t flinch. Her voice rose, strong and furious. “Don’t pretend your precious science is built on caution, Senku! Every single one of us in the Kingdom of Science has gambled with our lives for your projects. We’ve sailed oceans, we’ve fought enemies beyond our strength, we’ve stood in storms we didn’t understand… All for the sake of science. Don’t you dare tell me it’s different because it was me this time!”
Senku’s throat tightened, his reply caught between anger and something he couldn’t name. His eyes flashed, but his voice came out low, dangerous. “It isn’t the same. The people at the base… they already knew we had a functional medusa. They had contingencies. They risked their lives knowing we had a chance in hell of pulling it off. You ran in blind.” His fists trembled now, not just from rage. “You didn’t know if the medusa would work at all, Kohaku. You staked everything on nothing.”
Her eyes widened at the crack in his voice, but her pride didn’t let her soften. Instead, she shot the words like arrows. “You seriously think I wanted to die? Don’t you realise why I was able to risk so much?” She took a sharp step toward him, the heat of her breath colliding with his. “Because I trusted you more than anything else at that moment. I trusted that if anyone could make it work, if anyone could defy the impossible, it was you. I put my life on the line because I believed in you!”
The confession rang in the night, raw and unwavering.
For a split second, Senku froze. His lips parted, but no sound came. His chest heaved with words unsaid, with emotions he didn’t have a formula for. The silence roared between them, louder than the argument had been.
Then his voice came, sharp and splintered, more fear than logic now. “You think I wanted you to bet your life on me like that?!” His eyes flared, unguarded, raw. “Do you think I could’ve lived with myself if you had been one of the bodies left in the dirt?!”
Kohaku’s lips parted, breath stuttering, her fury clashing with a sudden sting of hurt. But before she could form words, Senku turned sharply away, dragging both hands through his hair as if he could tear the storm out of his skull.
The forest around them was suffocatingly silent again, the echo of their raised voices swallowed by the night.
Neither of them moved. Neither of them softened. The line had been drawn, jagged and deep, and neither was ready to step across it. The forest seemed to hold its breath. Only the faint rustle of leaves stirred, carried by the restless wind. Their shouts still lingered in the air, even though both had fallen silent, as if the echoes themselves refused to die down.
Kohaku stood rigid, her shoulders rising and falling with uneven breaths, fists still clenched at her sides. The raw sting of Senku’s words clung to her chest like burrs, sharp and impossible to shake off.
Senku, only a few paces away, looked as though the ground itself had shifted beneath him. His hands were still tangled in his hair, his head bowed, jaw tight. The air around him felt charged, volatile, and yet the heat of his fury had burned into something quieter, something harder to name.
Finally, Kohaku’s voice cracked it, quieter than before, though no less firm. “You think I didn’t know what I was risking. But I did, I just couldn’t do nothing.”
Senku let his hands fall, fingers flexing as if stiff from clenching too long. He didn’t look at her yet. “Doing nothing doesn’t mean failure. Sometimes it means living long enough to make the right move.”
Kohaku’s lips twisted. She turned her gaze toward the distant outline of the mountains, dim under the fractured moonlight. “If Suika hadn’t moved when she did, where would we be now? Still statues in the dirt. Waiting for someone else to gamble.” Her voice wavered, but she steadied it. “Back then I couldn’t let that be the end.”
Senku finally lifted his head, his pale eyes catching hers in the dim light. There was no mockery there now, no sharp edge of scorn, only exhaustion, threaded with something rawer. “You think I don’t get it? That instinct to protect? I get it better than you think, but this isn’t about who’s willing to take the hit. It’s about knowing whether the hit means everyone loses anyway.”
Kohaku’s breath caught. For a moment, she almost faltered. Almost. Instead, she shook her head, hair brushing her shoulders. “Maybe I don’t run the numbers Senku, I don’t weigh every variable, but I know what I feel. And in that moment, all I knew was that I couldn’t stand by. I couldn’t let them die, we don't know what Stanley could've done to them.”
Something in Senku’s chest tightened, pulled taut between anger and a different ache he didn’t want to name. He dragged in a slow breath, forcing his voice steady. “You’re not wrong about wanting to save them. Hell, nobody’s going to argue with that. But charging into bullets with no plan, it’s not just reckless for you. It screws the whole equation for everyone else too. If you die, Kohaku, that’s not just one person gone. That’s one of our best fighters, one of the few people we can trust to hold the line. You gamble yourself, and you gamble all of us.”
The words landed like stones. Kohaku stared at him, her breath shallow. Slowly, the fight in her eyes softened, not extinguished, but tempered. She sat back down, the motion heavy with exhaustion, as though the fury that had fueled her was finally burning out.
Her voice was quieter now. “I don’t think like you. I never will, but… maybe that’s why we’ve gotten this far. Because some of us throw ourselves forward, and some of us pull the reins.” She exhaled, long and tired. “Maybe both are needed.”
Senku watched her, his jaw tight, but the edge of his posture eased. He lowered himself back onto the ground too, though not as close as before, resting his elbows on his knees. “Yeah. I know that, but it doesn’t make watching you throw yourself into gunfire any less infuriating.”
That earned him the smallest huff of a laugh from her, dry and humorless, but softer than their shouts had been. She rubbed at her temple. “You always have a way of making me feel like the dumbest person alive, you know that?”
Senku raised an eyebrow, the corner of his mouth twitching. “I’m an equal-opportunity insulter. Don’t take it personally.”
That coaxed the faintest smirk from her, though it didn’t last long. Her gaze fell to the dirt at her feet, her expression unreadable in the shadows. “When I ran forward… all I could think was that if I moved fast enough, if I put myself between them and danger, maybe I could buy everyone else the time they needed. It wasn’t a plan, it was just... me being me. And maybe you’re right, maybe that was selfish in its own way. Because it left you all to deal with the fallout if I didn’t make it.”
Senku’s throat worked, though his voice came quiet when he finally spoke. “You think too much of me if you believe I can just patch that kind of fallout together.”
Her eyes lifted toward him, softer now, less fire, more weariness. “I think the world of you, Senku.”
The words struck harder than her earlier shouting. Senku blinked, caught off guard, his brain stalling for a fraction of a second, which, for him, was an eternity. He masked it quickly with a dry scoff, but the words clung, echoing louder than the forest around them.
Kohaku shifted, her body finally sagging with the weight of everything, the argument, the memories, the exhaustion that had been chasing them since they woke from stone. “I don’t want to fight anymore tonight.” She murmured. “We’ve fought enough.”
Senku leaned back, bracing his hands behind him, staring up at the fractured starlight through the trees. “No arguments here.” His voice was lighter now, but not careless. “We’re not exactly built for sentimental late-night therapy sessions.”
That earned another small laugh from her, soft, almost fond. She pushed herself to her feet, brushing dirt from her legs. “I’m exhausted. More than I thought. After everything, I think I need to try to rest.”
Senku looked up at her, his pale eyes steady in the dim glow. “Makes sense. We all deserve a good night’s rest after everything that’s happened.”
She smiled faintly at that, weary but warm. “Goodnight, Senku.”
He gave a short nod, his smirk faint but genuine. “Night, Lioness.”
She turned, her figure slipping into the shadows between the trees, her footsteps fading until only silence remained.
Senku stayed where he was, the cool earth pressing against his palms, his gaze tilted toward the sky. The stars spilled across the darkness, indifferent and ancient, the same stars he had counted under stone for endless years.
But tonight, they felt closer. Or maybe it was just that his chest felt tighter.
The argument replayed in fragments, the anger in her voice, the fire in her eyes, the way she had shouted she trusted him. He tried to parse it like data, but the numbers refused to align. His chest burned with something unquantifiable, something raw and unscientific.
The whole exchange had been… off. Irrational, completely unlike him. He had snapped, shouted, lashed out in ways that weren’t calculated, weren’t precise. He’d lost control of his own voice more than once, logic cracking under the weight of something else.
Why?
That was the question. The one gnawing at him now. He replayed the sequence, dissecting it like an equation: Kohaku charges against Stanley. Risk level: astronomically high. Outcome: unexpectedly favorable. His reaction: fury, fear, a tightness in his chest that had nearly choked him.
He should have been satisfied with the result. She’d broken their line, damaged their comms, bought them time. The scientist in him should’ve been cataloguing probabilities, filing the data under anomalies, moving on.
But he hadn’t. Instead, he’d snapped at her with a desperation he couldn’t quantify.
He frowned, dragging a hand through his hair, the cool air biting against his skin. So what was it? Why did he react like that? Why couldn’t he treat her risk like he treated anyone else’s?
He thought of Tsukasa, Hyoga, Taiju, even himself, all of them had gambled with their lives before. He had accepted those risks, accounted for them, even respected them. But with Kohaku… the very thought of her body falling under fire had made his chest seize, made every rational defense short-circuit.
His mind chased it, logic tripping over itself. It wasn’t strategy, it wasn’t efficiency. It wasn’t science.
It was something else. Something irrational.
His eyes narrowed at the stars, as if demanding they give him the formula he was missing. But the truth pulsed louder than calculations, undeniable, unscientific, and yet absolutely real.
The reason he had lost control. The reason the thought of her dying twisted like a knife in his ribs. The reason his voice had cracked when he shouted at her.
Because it was Kohaku.
Not just a fighter, not just an ally. Kohaku. With her unshakable loyalty, her reckless courage, her maddening impulsiveness, her laugh that rang sharper than any blade they could forge. The one person who had charged ahead with him through every impossible storm and never once wavered.
He thought of her saying she trusted him more than anything. Of her saying she thought the world of him.
He exhaled slowly, his throat tight, the weight of the realization settling on him like a stone. He didn’t need a formula for this one. There was only one conclusion left.
“Shit…” He muttered under his breath, the word falling from his lips before he could stop it.
He wasn’t supposed to feel this way. Not him. Not when there were ten billion problems still unsolved. Not when the weight of the world still demanded his full attention.
And yet…
His hand lifted absently to his chest, as though trying to measure the erratic rhythm there. His eyes burned against the starlight, caught in the gravity of it.
It hung there in the night, quiet and undeniable. The one variable he couldn’t control.
The one truth he couldn’t calculate away.