The stars were out.

You sat on a flat rock near the edge of the village, a makeshift telescope balanced between your knees. Senku was beside you, scribbling calculations in the dirt with a stick, muttering to himself about trajectory angles and refractive indices.

You didn’t interrupt. You’d learned not to.

Instead, you watched the sky. The constellations were clearer here—no light pollution, no satellites, just the raw, ancient map of the universe.

“Hey,” you said softly. “Do you ever just… look?”

Senku didn’t glance up. “I look all the time. That’s how I measure.”

“No, I mean… not to measure. Just to see.”

He paused.

Then, slowly, he set the stick down.

For a moment, he said nothing. Just tilted his head back and stared at the stars like they were something new. Something unquantifiable.

You watched his profile in the moonlight—sharp, thoughtful, always calculating. But now, for once, he wasn’t solving anything. He was just… there.

“It’s inefficient,” he said finally. “But kind of nice.”

You smiled. “Not everything has to be efficient.”

He glanced at you, eyes catching the starlight. “That’s where we differ.”

“Maybe,” you said. “Or maybe that’s why we work.”

He didn’t argue.

Instead, he leaned back on his hands, gaze still skyward. “You know,” he murmured, “if we ever get civilization back, I’m building a telescope so powerful we can see the moons of Jupiter.”

“And if we don’t?”

He looked at you then—really looked. “Then I’ll keep building anyway. As long as you’re here to look with me.”

And in that quiet moment, beneath a sky older than memory, Senku Ishigami let the stars be beautiful—not because they could be measured, but because you were there to see them too.