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Ishigami village is visible off in the distance- not much farther to walk now. Good, since Senkuu’s legs are already aching and trembling with the strain of carrying their precious treasure from the skarn.
It’s cold and snowy and Senkuu’s legs hurt and Magma keeps yelling at them to pick up the pace. There’s no space in Senkuu’s head for anything except the ever-rising count of the seconds and a constant stream of ’just a little farther, just a little farther, you’re almost there,’ as the village approaches.
Once they’re almost there, he hears the crunching of snow beneath Magma’s feet speeding up, and moving directly behind him. Chrome makes an exclamation of surprise as a soft strip of leather is placed in front of Senkuu’s eyes, and then pulled back and tied into a blindfold.
Senkuu’s heart rate picks up, adrenaline flooding his body as the knot is pulled tight.
“What’s the big idea Magma!” Chrome calls out. Senkuu stays silent- Magma’s stronger than both of them, by a lot. No point in fighting back, it’s not going to make a difference.
(He thought Magma had come to genuinely like them, or at least what they can provide, even if he was reluctant to admit it. He thought they’d bonded at least somewhat through their mining adventure.)
Magma starts pushing Senkuu along, and he complies- even as his heartbeat starts to race at insane speeds, even as it’s a struggle to keep his breaths from turning into hyperventilation, a struggle to keep his hands from visibly shaking.
“Where’re you hauling Senkuu off to!” Chrome calls, his feet crunching through the snow just behind and to the left.
As Chrome gets closer, Magma just picks up Senkuu, carrying him through the snow faster than what Chrome can keep up with.
(This is it. They’re going to turn him over to Tsukasa. It’s the safe move- the smart move, even, but why now? Perhaps they decided that Chrome had all the information he needed for them to reap the benefits of science without endangering themselves by protecting Senkuu. Perhaps they finally realized just how outmatched Tsukasa has them.)
(Hell- maybe the mining expedition was all a ruse, maybe Tsukasa will have already arrived by the time he gets back. Maybe Tsukasa will kill him on the spot. Maybe he’ll be dragged back to the Empire of Might and killed slowly and publicly.)
Senkuu hopes his shaking hands look more like he’s cold than like he’s afraid.
(He wasn’t enough. Wasn’t enough to keep the villagers counting on him safe. Wasn’t enough to be worth the danger. He’s not good enough to be worth risking their lives for.)
(He’s scared he’s scared he’s scared-)
(It’s the rational choice to give him up but still he doesn’t want to die-)
Magma sets him down on solid ground exactly 621 terrifying seconds later. Chrome follows close behind- Senkuu had lost track of his footsteps once they’d moved out of the snow and onto the path, but he can hear Chrome panting behind him now. He may be more athletic than Senkuu (a very low bar) but running after Magma while carrying so much material was clearly pushing it.
“Greetings, dear Senkuu.” Gen’s voice cuts through the haze of panic and desperate planning in his mind. “At last, you return!”
“Hah! There’s no way out of this now, Senkuu.” Kohaku’s voice rings in his ears. So she’s in on it too. She decided he wasn’t worth the risk to keep around, that his only worth to her was in saving her sister, and that now that he’s done that, he’s just a danger to them. “Gen’s got everyone in the village in on this!”
(He’s been betrayed, he’s going to die, his allies have turned on him, decided he’s not worth the risk- not that he can disagree with them.)
Senkuu forces his breathing to remain even, forces his hands to stay still and not tremble, and forces his voice to stay steady. He refuses to show any fear, not even in the face of certain death.
His heart is pounding, his palms slick with sweat, his stomach twisting with fear so badly he’s scared he might throw up. “Heh heh heh….” It takes more time and effort than he’d like to force himself to speak. “Should’ve known you guys would realize, eventually…”
He has to pause, has to force himself to take a deep breath, has to crush down his fear as tightly as he possibly can before he can force himself to speak again. “That, if you gave me up to Tsukasa and swore off science,” (breathe, breathe, he has to force himself to breathe slowly.) “the village would be safe. It’s the rational way out of all this trouble.”
(They shouldn’t put their lives in his hands like this, it’s not a rational move, not a smart move. He’s just one person, not even an adult yet, and the entire village was counting on him to protect them. Letting him die is the only smart move.)
(He’s so scared he doesn’t want to die-)
“I swear I haven’t a clue what you’re on about.” Gen says, as Senkuu is pushed up to something, his head guided into place. (He waits for a blade to rake across his throat, for a blow to the neck, for a spear through the chest-)
He feels a pair of tiny, tiny hands against the back of his neck, fumbling with the knot holding the blindfold on. (Suika? It has to be, but, why would she be here if they’re selling him out-)
“Today’s January fourth, which means it’s Stone Day!” Kaseki says.
(What?)
“And we heard it’s your birthday, Senkuu!” Kohaku adds.
(What does that have to do with any of this-)
“Ta-da!” Suika pulls the knot free, and the blindfold slips off.
A lens.
His eye is up against a lens.
He can see Saturn through it, the rings clear as day.
It’s beautiful.
Senkuu takes a step back. “You built a telescope?”
He casts his gaze around the room- the dome-like shape, the opening in the ceiling, remembers the ladder Magma had to climb to get here that he’d nearly missed in his panic. “No… A whole astronomical observatory!”
(The stars are out of his reach now, more so than ever before. He’d wanted to go to space so badly for so long. Wanted to follow in Byakuya’s footsteps. Now, he can at least see the stars again clearly. The unfamiliar skies seem like a welcoming adventure instead of a painful reminder, now that he has an observatory from which to chart them.)
(He remembers a time, over 3,700 years ago, when a father sold his car and rearranged his entire schedule to get his son the lab he needed to develop his full potential. That lab may be long gone, Byakuya may be thousands of years dead, and yet his descendants teamed up to give Senkuu a gift just as amazing.)
“Well, working off of my limited understanding, we threw together a makeshift telescope with two lenses in a tube.” Gen explains. “Since the entire village came together to make the observatory, you can modify the telescope on your own later.”
Senkuu runs his hand along the side of the telescope, feeling the carefully-polished bamboo surface, marveling at the craftwork that went into it.
It’s beautiful. It’s incredible. The village put so much time into this, into making something for him.
(What has he done to deserve this? His presence puts them in danger every second that he’s here. Tsukasa could strike and kill them all at any time if he and Gen were wrong about his plans. What has he done to deserve this level of faith?)
(There’s no time for beauty, no time for him to simply marvel at the stars. Not while he has a war to fight.)
“Not bad… Not bad at all!” Senkuu says. “It’ll give us an edge in our war against Tsukasa’s army, that’s for sure!”
“Uh. That’s true.” Kohaku comments.
“That reaction… as rational as ever.” Gen adds.
(None of them notice how Senkuu’s fighting to keep himself from shaking as the adrenaline bleeds away.)
“Gen.” Senkuu asks. “How did you know it was my birthday? I know I didn’t tell you, or anyone for that matter.” He scans his memories for a moment, wondering if maybe he did and it slipped his mind. “Oh.” He remembers Gen asking him how many days he’d lived, and with that information… “You were baiting me with that question back then. But still, calculating in reverse wouldn’t be possible without also knowing how long I was petrified.”
“You don’t recall?” Gen asks. “How you wrote down the date you broke out of the stone?” He smiles, looking upwards through the hole in the ceiling past the telescope. “In truth, from the very start, before we even met, I was a big fan of yours, Senkuu. That’s more important than any pros and cons list. The whole village feels the same way.” He turns to Senkuu, with that mischievous smile he always has when he’s plotting something. “Though I’m sure you’re a little grossed out after hearing that.”
(They care about him, they believe in him, just like Byakuya always believed in him. His dad may be gone, but his descendants are still here, still supporting Senkuu, still believing in Senkuu.)
(They trust him enough to put their lives in his hands.)
“Yep. Gonna be sick.” Senkuu deadpans.
“Called it!” Gen responds.
Senkuu stares up at the stars, at the alien sky thousands of years removed from the stars he knew. Alien and strange and isolating, but also a whole new world to explore.
Gen chuckles. “We’ll leave you to your astronomy for tonight, it’s getting late anyways.”
The whole village shuffles out of Senkuu’s tower- the last two to leave being Chrome, who just gives him a fistbump and makes him promise to get some sleep, and Suika, who excitedly waves him off as she leaves.
And then Senkuu is alone again.
(He was so scared, terrified that they were going to turn him over to Tsukasa or kill him on the spot, the back of his neck tickles like a hand is ghosting just over the surface of it.)
(He still thinks they wouldn’t be wrong to turn him over to Tsukasa. The Empire of Might could kill them all. They absolutely will kill at least some of the villagers unless Senkuu manages to stop him.)
(They’re counting on him. They’re counting on him. All of the villagers are depending on him. All of humanity is depending on him.)
Senkuu slides down onto the floor, pulling his knees up to his chest and wrapping his arms around himself.
(He wants Byakuya to be here and take charge, to be able to promise Senkuu that it’ll be okay, that he’ll make sure nobody gets hurt. He wants Taiju to be here, to promise to protect him, to make sure Senkuu is safe. He wants Yuzuriha to be here, to promise to stand by his and Taiju’s side no matter what comes, to offer him the silent comfort of just being there. He wants Xeno to be here, to offer him advice and tell him he’s doing a good job and he’s stronger than he thinks.)
(He may have been awake for 3,700 years, but he’s still a teenager. He’s only just turned 17 and there’s seven billion lives weighing on his shoulders and there’s nobody he can turn to, nobody who can take the load off of him, nobody to tell him it’s okay to go back to just playing with rockets and learning as much as he can. He has to be the one in charge, has to be the one who leads. All of humanity is depending on him.)
(He doesn’t know how much longer he can take it.)
Senkuu’s careful to keep his sobs quiet, to make sure he won’t disturb anyone. He sits there, alone in the freezing winter air under an unfamiliar sky, bearing the weight of the world on his shoulders.
Tomorrow, he’ll put his mask back on until it doesn’t even feel like a performance anymore. Tomorrow he’ll get to show the village what they’ve acquired from the mining trip and what they can do with it. Tomorrow he’ll get to build and create and teach and forget, if only for a moment, everything that’s riding on him and his success.
But for tonight, he sits here, curled up in the corner of the observatory, cold and frightened and alone, silently mourning everything he’s lost.
Eventually, his tears run dry. Eventually, exhaustion claws at him so much that he can barely keep his eyes open. Eventually, his hands really are shaking from the cold instead of from fear.
He climbs down from the observatory and walks over to Chrome’s hut, mind blank of everything but the unceasing stream of numbers as he trudges through the snow.
His hands are nearly too cold to grip the ladder properly as he climbs into Chrome’s hut.
Chrome’s fast asleep, one leg sticking out of his pile of blankets. Senkuu clambers into the pile of blankets set aside next to him, waiting for his body heat to warm him up enough to fall asleep.
A weight falls over his side- Chrome flailed out an arm in his sleep, an arm that wraps around Senkuu’s chest almost protectively.
(For a second, it almost felt like Taiju’s arm.)
Silent tears well up again, even now after Senkuu was convinced he didn’t have any left.
“No…” Chrome mumbles in his sleep. “That’s my fucking rocks.”
Senkuu’s mood pivots on a dime at the absurdity of it, and he bursts out laughing.
He’s still tired, still misses Taiju and Yuzuriha with all his heart, still wishes Byakuya could be here. But he’ll see Taiju and Yuzuriha again. He has Chrome. He has Kaseki, and Gen, and Suika, and Kohaku, and the entire village at his back.
There’s still so much wrong, still so much he has to do- but maybe he can convince himself that it’s going to be alright.
That he’s going to be alright.