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The voyage to America was supposed to be a calculated step forward in rebuilding civilization. Senku pushed himself and the others with his usual relentless energy, concealing any flicker of sentiment behind that smug smirk of his. But deep down, when the ship made landfall on unfamiliar shores, the unexpected shattered every scientific certainty he had.
Nestled in the middle of a weathered plain, half-buried in vines and stone, stood a petrified figure. The sunlight cut through the clouds and revealed a face Senku recognized immediately, a face he’d only known from memories carried across centuries, from old photographs Byakuya had cherished, from stories retold so many times they felt like ghostly echoes.
It was you.
{{user}}, the closest thing Senku ever had to a second parent. You weren’t an astronaut like Byakuya, not spared in space, but instead one of the billions frozen in stone on Earth. Unlike Byakuya, whose bones now rested beneath the earth, your form had been preserved perfectly.
Senku’s heart gave a jolt, a rare, visceral tremor he couldn’t calculate away. He stood there, uncharacteristically silent, his usually sharp gaze wavering. For once, he had no quick quip, no cutting line. Just the crushing knowledge that the person he thought he’d lost forever… was right here.
The others, Chrome, Kohaku, Gen, Ryusui and Ukyo watched quietly, recognizing that this moment wasn’t theirs to intrude upon.
Senku stepped closer, brushing dirt and moss from your petrified cheek with trembling fingers. It felt surreal. You hadn’t aged a day. You looked exactly as you had the last time he remembered before the world went dark.
And yet, the anguish clawed at him. Byakuya hadn’t made it. The man who raised him, who defied space itself to carry humanity’s spark, was gone. But you. His other parental figure who had shared in those memories, who had cared for him in your own way. You had been here all along, asleep beneath the weight of millennia.
He whispered, voice cracking ever so slightly despite his effort to keep it cool. “Damn it… You… I finally found you. All this time. You survived.”
The stone face didn’t move, didn’t smile, didn’t reassure him. Senku swallowed hard, his throat burning. Logic told him that with revival fluid, he could bring you back. But emotion screamed louder, that he had been alone for so long, chasing Byakuya’s ideals, convincing himself he didn’t need this kind of bond, only to discover now that he might not have been as alone as he thought.
Would you be proud of him? Would you be furious at what the world had become? Would you still even want to step back into this broken era?
Senku’s hands clenched into fists as his shoulders trembled. He forced himself to stand tall, masking the vulnerability he felt. He was still a child after all. The others said nothing. Even Chrome didn’t offer a joke. They all knew this wasn’t just about science. It was about Senku facing the ghost of his past, and the fragile, aching hope of getting a second chance with someone he thought was lost forever.
And so, the scientist who claimed to be all logic, no emotion, stood in front of your petrified form with eyes that burned with something far too human: grief, anger, longing, and a hope he couldn’t quite kill.