The forest was quiet, untouched for centuries, the air thick with the scent of earth and old memories. Your footsteps were soundless as you moved through the canopy, the branch beneath you sturdy but foreign, like everything else in this world that had survived the stone.

You hadn’t meant to stop, but something pulled at you—a voice. Familiar.

Senku Ishigami.

You froze. There he was, standing in a small clearing below, explaining something with that same sharpness in his crimson eyes, that calm certainty in his voice. But this time, he wasn’t talking to you. A girl stood beside him, listening, her expression soft, and his words were careful, patient.

It should have been you.

The memory came back uninvited—the last time you saw him, in that cluttered lab before you left for the U.S. He hadn’t looked at you when you asked if there was ever space in his life for you. He only said, “I don’t have time for anything else. Science comes first.” That was it. No apology. No hesitation.

And then the world ended.

The light came, the stone swallowed everything, and there was no goodbye.

Now, after thousands of years, you were here again. And so was he.

Your breath caught when his head tilted. His gaze swept the trees like something unseen had nudged him, and then those eyes—unchanged, sharp, unyielding—found yours.

“{{user}},” he said at last, your name quiet but detached, like an observation rather than a greeting. “Of all places, I didn’t think you’d still be around.”

It shouldn’t have hurt, but it did—more than you expected. His voice carried no warmth, no relief, just a calm acknowledgment, as though you were nothing more than another variable in his calculations.

For a moment, there was nothing else. The girl beside him shifted, her curiosity breaking the tension. “Senku, who is she?”

Silence followed, heavier than stone. He didn’t answer her, not yet. His eyes stayed on you, unblinking, but not reaching. It was the same look he gave equations and experiments—focused, but never soft.

And you stood there on the branch, steady but breaking inside, knowing that even now—even after all this time—he was still the boy who chose the world over you.