just a little blurb! you're guard is always up. sleeping doesn't come easily. your boyfriend defies that.
Senku forces himself into sleep when necessary. Between days spent at his lab, he always makes sure he has a place to go to finally crash. His body holds him back in that way.
Often, it ended up being at yours.
You spend your days working at a hospital only so many blocks from your apartment. Long hours as a resident led to odd sleeping patterns. You'd find yourself sleeping on cots in storage rooms, floors of empty (or so overly stuffed) closets.
But even these brief moments of rest to just keep your body moving are less than what you need.
You come home one night to find Senku passed out on your couch, something that happens surprisingly frequently. Your keys are thrown onto the counter, trudging towards your room to finally change from your scrubs.
The exhaustion doesn't matter. You don't sleep.
You pace around the kitchen for a bit. Drink water. Sit in bed. Stretch. Sit outside and smoke. Pace around the kitchen again. Groan in agony when you lie in bed for the nth time, unable to shut your eyes.
Your body is fighting you in so many ways at once. Simultaneously trying to force you into slumber, as well as keep you awake. Because for whatever reason, anxiety is what keeps your from rem.
You don't know when it started.
Maybe as a teenager?
You'd sleep in intervals. Getting back from your waitressing job late, sleep for two hours, be awake for one. Sleep another two hours, awake for one. All. Day.
Something just doesn't sit right with you, being unconscious for so long. You force yourself awake any time you've been out for too long without even realizing.
You're lying on the floor of your bedroom at this point when an oddly vegetable-shaped man appears in the dark doorway. It's like--3am. Why the fuck is he awake?
"You're being loud.." he mutters, shifting the heavy blanket he carried from your couch.
Ah. You're the culprit.
You kick your legs in agony, trying to fight of your restless leg syndrome. Then let your entire body flop limply. He raises an eyebrow.
You roll onto your side, looking up at him. He's smiling. Barely. "Bitch." You curse at him sarcastically.
He sighs, shaking his head before approaching, kneeling right in front of you. "Don't give me that shit, you aren't as quiet as you think you are." He makes another exasperated sound before scooping you into his arms, the blanket engulfing both of you. He collapses into your bed, keeping your back tight against his chest. "I got a couple hours in. It's your turn." He whispers, tucking your hair behind your ear so swiftly you don't feel it. He presses a simple peck to your jaw. "Sleep."
With Senku simultaneously acting as a weighted blanket, a heater, and your watchdog, you find yourself drifting to sleep rather quickly. For... hours. Completely unconscious. Dead to the world.
The room could've been burning down around you. You sleep like a baby.
So I've been thinking about a couple of these things because Senku's whole thing is that he's like detached from romance until the world is back to normal, and even in the pre stone world he didn't seem to interested, so it got me thinking what he would be like. Anyways here's what I'm thinking. also this is my first, fic? not sure what to call this. No content warnings, just pure fluff.
So first I think his love language would be a mix between quality time and gift giving. I think he'd be the kinda guy to just throw money at you. Like oh you want your nails done? here's 200 dollars. He'd express his love... fiscally.
I don't think he'd be much of a hugger, but I definitely think he'd love cuddling and stuff given he might be one of the most touch starved anime characters on the planet.
I think he would accidentally hurt your feelings a lot. Like it wouldn't be on purpose but he'd just be too blunt sometimes and might offend you. Like he'd accidentally call you fat or something but indirectly and completely innocently.
If this is during the stone world he'd absolutely make you things from the old world that you miss. Like he'd go and try to (successfully) surprise you with it.
Unfortunately he'd probably forget to check in on you and would be too focused on whatever he's preoccupied with whether that's saving humanity to being a NASA engineer to a video game he's invested in.
He's DEFINITELY not a PDA guy. Don't even try it, he'd get genuinely upset at times.
I also think he'd probably be a bad kisser tbh, like he'd get it eventually, but the first couple times manage to both be too dry and too wet at the same time.
Given that he's been a child prodigy his whole life i think he's like a tad lonely, and I think you'd be his safe place. You would 10 billion percent be the first person he goes to when he's happy, sad, scared, you name it.
If you're as smart as he is, he will 10 billion percent mansplain things sometimes and sometimes you just have to sit there and act like you don't already know what he's talking about .
Contains: fluf, clingy Senku, wife au, tell me if I missed anything.
Word count: 571
The room was still dark when Senku stirred awake.
Not because of sunlight. Not because of noise.
Because the warmth pressed against him was moving away.
“Mmm… oi,” he mumbled, voice rough with sleep as his arms instinctively tightened around his wife’s waist. “Where d’you think you’re going at…” He cracked one eye open toward the clock. “Four-thirty in the damn morning?”
She laughed quietly, already halfway sitting up. “I told you yesterday. I have to leave early.”
“Yeah, and I ignored that information on purpose.”
His face was buried against the back of her shoulder now, white hair a complete mess while he stubbornly refused to let go. For someone who usually woke up alert and calculating, morning Senku was significantly less dignified.
“I’ll be back before noon,” she whispered.
“Unacceptable.”
“You’ll survive.”
“Maybe biologically.”
She tried to pry his arm off her waist, but he immediately dragged her back down against the mattress with surprising strength.
“Senku—”
“Five more minutes.”
“You said that ten minutes ago.”
“Then clearly the system’s working.”
A sleepy groan left him as she shifted again, trying not to laugh too hard at the rare sight in front of her. Senku Ishigami, genius scientist, conqueror of impossible odds, currently clinging to his wife like a needy baby.
“You’re being dramatic.”
“Correct.”
“You don’t even like sleeping in.”
“I like you being here when I wake up.”
That made her pause.
Even half asleep, Senku noticed immediately.
He cracked an eye open again, catching the soft expression on her face before clicking his tongue. “Don’t look at me like that. I’m not repeating it.”
“You’re cute in the morning.”
“I’m filing for divorce.”
“You’d miss me.”
“Ten billion percent.”
She smiled and brushed messy strands of hair from his face. “I really do have to go.”
Senku stared at her for a long moment, clearly debating whether science had advanced enough to invent teleportation solely so she could leave later.
Then he sighed dramatically and pulled her close one last time, burying his face into her neck.
“One minute,” he muttered. “That’s the final offer from the Kingdom of Science.”
“One minute?”
“One extremely efficient minute.”
She stayed.
The room fell quiet again except for the faint hum of early morning wind outside. Senku’s breathing slowed, arms loose but still around her, like he was trying to memorize the warmth before she left.
“…You know,” she whispered, “normal people would just say they’ll miss their wife.”
“I did.”
“No, you said ‘unacceptable.’”
“Same thing.”
A tiny smile tugged at his lips when she laughed softly again.
Then, after another few seconds, he reluctantly loosened his hold.
“Fine. Go do your mysterious early morning thing.”
“You mean my job?”
“Still suspicious.”
She leaned down to kiss his forehead, then another kiss to the corner of his mouth. Senku made a quiet noise of protest when she finally slipped out of bed, instantly reaching toward the now empty space she left behind.
“Text me when you get there,” he mumbled into the pillow.
“You’ll be asleep.”
“Doesn’t matter.”
She grabbed her bag near the door and looked back one last time.
Senku was already half unconscious again, sprawled across the bed dramatically but one arm was stretched toward her side like he expected her to come back any second.
“…I love you,” she said softly.
His response came instantly despite how sleepy he sounded.
one-man epoch | ft. ishigami senku
wc: 2.9k
cw: gender-neutral reader, themes of grief and longing, he reallyy misses you, can be interpreted both platonic and romantic
ao3 link
note: dedicated to @chericos! happy (early) birthday. i believe we were not made siblings irl because we would've been too powerful together. i hope you have a great day ahead!
pag-ibig ay kanibalismo by fitterkarma
'ibabalik kita nang buong-buo (i'll bring you back whole)
pangako 'yon sa'yo (that's my promise to you)
sa'yo lang ang puso ko (my heart is only yours)
kahit kainin mo' (even if you eat it)
"You've got yourself a nice pile of rocks, Senku dear," Gen mutters aloud. "For an experiment, perhaps?"
Senku only gives the intuitive mentalist a small grin.
"You could say that."
The 'nice pile of rocks', as dubbed by Gen, sits obediently on the corner of the laboratory, just beside the wooden shelf housing a bunch of machines made from scrap metal and Kaseki's fine handiwork. There's almost something characteristic about the way they are arranged; very Zen garden-ish. It’s deliberate, almost suggestive of a figure.
It would've done lovely on a contemporary art museum as an installment, the mentalist supposes.
Senku's been busy like always. He heads from one place to another, never swayed by a moment of distraction, not even by the ruckus Ginro makes to protest. He never did like training. He never did like doing anything that made him even remotely useful in the village, for that matter.
On the rare occasion of rest and leisure—on a blustery night, or when he's done the initial work ahead of time—Senku allows himself to think about it. Ginro and never wanting to do anything.
It’s nearly unimaginable.
In the end, it is Ginro's shoes he strangely cannot put himself in. Not the resolute and headstrong Tsukasa, nor is it the sly and cunning Ibara and their ideals, but Ginro. Village guard Ginro.
Twenty-four hours is minute to a scientist, but it must be a complete and utter drag for someone who complains about the one thing he's supposed to do.
Is there nothing that compels him, interests him?
(Aside from women and being the Chief, of course.)
The next day, Senku returns to his nice pile of rocks. It is the first thing he does when he wakes up. He gets on one knee and dismantles the nice pile of rocks to his side—every hunk, eroded pebble, and sharp, chiseled chunk—steady and precise. There's no particular order, everyone thinks, and that it's just Senku being Senku, but there is, in fact, a method to his madness.
But there's no need to let anyone know; not everyone needs to. It's like trying to fit a camel's humps through a needle's eye.
He counts them so meticulously, his nice pile of rocks. People see how engrossed he is all the time, see the slight knit of his brows, and the odd, very odd gentleness he takes the time to be for it. For a nice pile of rocks.
Sometimes, Kohaku peeps in and says, "You're always moving all that rubble around, Senku. What's the big idea?"
Senku only gives the curious lioness a scoff.
"Big projects need big ideas."
The 'rubble', as dubbed by Kohaku, gives her a strange, little feeling. It's her gut. Kohaku could tell, because if there's one thing surviving in the forest taught her, it's that there’s a reason for every little thing that happens. Birds fly south in V-shaped flocks when the air gets colder and drier. Strange fishes rise up to the surface before the earth moves.
There's something about the way Senku touches those rocks that gives her the idea that it's not just any other rubble. It's not rubble from a dug-up cavern. It's not rubble from what remains after a landslide.
It's…
A very Senku way to warm himself up for the day, the lioness supposes.
Come to think of it, when did he start collecting rubble?
Ah.
It is on his first spring at the Ishigami Village.
When the snow thaws, it's reminiscent of the truth. Like turning over a rock, peeling away the covers, or pushing a shelf out of a dark corner—there's always something underneath; if not purposefully, then by accumulation, and if not by accumulation, then by chance.
The end of winter is an uncovering.
Senku travels a great distance on the first few days of spring, when the air is slightly warmer, and it's the pleasant kind of breeze that kisses his cheeks rather than the sharp, biting howls. The grass has barely grown to hide the warming brooks, and rabbits no longer have to settle for twigs and barks to keep themselves full. He knows where to turn, where to duck, where to climb.
Chrome says he walks as if there's a compass in his stomach.
But there's no such thing. It's not electromagnetic force that's pulling his gut towards places. It has everything to do with his brain and the sinews of his memories and nothing to do with compasses.
Nobody really knows when and where he found the first piece. There was only nothing, nothing, nothing, until someone pointed it out. That he has a nice pile of rocks, that he moves around all that rubble.
Even Ryusui is intrigued by the nice pile of rocks, the rubble. He rubs his chin thoughtfully.
"You don't think those are precious stones, do you, Senku?"
Senku frowns at the loudmouthed sailor. "Ha? Of course not."
"What are they, then?"
"They're regular rocks."
That confuses him more than anything. The 'precious stones', as dubbed by Ryusui, are everywhere! As far as the eye could see! It's what they walk on, it's what they skip across lakes, it's what they toss and kick around!
So what, pray tell, makes them any different?
But Ryusui is not a stranger to this kind of sentiment.
He thinks about Sai—Sai and his brilliance. His discerning eye knows there's a bright, bright light behind him, but he is aloof, and he likes to run away and hide himself like even a strand of hair, as long as it's from his head, is something to be ashamed of.
Ryusui finds the string of numbers Sai made for him, many, many years ago, important. He can't get behind the logic of those numbers, or where exactly Sai reaches in his brain to get it, but they made his vessels move as though it was afloat across the sea, and that is the closest thing Ryusui considers to be magic.
It's a rare thing. A one-time thing. Sai only made his ships part the waters once before he disappeared, but that has only made the memory all the more precious.
Everyone has their own hobby, Ryusui supposes.
There are times when people almost guess what Senku is trying to do. They skirt around the truth of it, that it's not just a nice pile of rocks, not just rubble, not just precious stones. Nobody looks that sad and pensive and hopeful all at once when looking at a bunch of cold, dark things. Nobody even cares that much about a bunch of cold, dark things. Unless.
He's not hiding it, not really.
Sometimes, when sleep lulls him over and it's dark, it's quiet, and he can't tell if his ceiling is made of steel or straw, he's able to go to another world.
Here, he is a sheep (though not exclusively; sometimes he's a macaque, other times he's a horse. There was even one time he was a krill in the Pacific.) Gravity is… not the same, he figures quickly, and he can feel the wind against his furry snout and thin legs a bit longer with every prance. He's got a funny-looking wool than other sheeps; the cap of fluff perched atop his head's greener than anything the flock has ever seen.
"Baa, baa!" they say.
(You eat too much grass!)
They're an ignorant bunch. It's not like carrots—carrots turn you yellow if you eat enough. You can't possibly dye your wool green from excessive chloro—
He doesn't really care after all.
"Baa—baa," he says, and flips a clove of his hoof at them.
He begins to walk the vast, sunny fields until he sees nothing but green and blue and the straight line in between. There's nothing else ahead of him but the same thing—no barn, no shepherd, and thank god, no bossy herding dogs to contest his authority. A border collie would be a pain in the ass to deal with, he thinks.
Their angry bleats go in his ear and out the other. They can hate him and his green wool for all he cared.
…
There is this one sheep though.
See, this sheep doesn't care why his wool looks the way it does, doesn't probe why he knows things sheep shouldn't, like why the sky's blue, or why they can jump over fences when they're not supposed to.
He flops onto his side, a fair distance away from the other sheep.
"Baa," he once bleated.
(That's how dreams work. It's not mandatory to follow the rules of physics.)
Here, he feels the lightest he's ever been in his entire life despite the dense, curly wool around his body. He can see specks of gold past his long, thick lashes with every leisurely blink. It's a clear day today in his dream, which is good, because he can't procure a roof above their heads for some reason, and it was a little disappointing the first time around when it rained.
The clouds graze the skies above, just like how they do down below.
Something rustles closer to him, and after a while, it lies down with a soft thud. He knows who it is. Of course he does.
"Baa?"
(You're not going to do anything today?)
The other sheep's voice stirs something in him. They've closed the distance. Their wool smells warm and homey, unlike his that smell like the dusty, metallic odor of ground up minerals and sour planks of wood.
"Baa. Baa, baa," he replies flatly.
(Nah. Just gonna lie around.)
There's a butterfly. He doesn't remember thinking about butterflies. Why can his dream have butterflies, but not a roof?
The butterfly lands right on his nose. It stares at him, but he cannot stare back at it.
"Baa!"
(There's a butterfly on your face!)
His ears twitch, and he flails a little. Sheep can't see what's directly on their nose, and he wishes he didn't have to comply with this evolutionary trait. Though having his eyes set in the front would probably only make him look weirder than he already is.
"Baa—"
(Take it off my—)
Their snouts knock together.
A soft bump. Warmer than he thought snouts could be.
The butterfly flits away, unnoticed.
(Typical of plot devices.)
The air in the dream goes still. The grass stops their singing. He blinks once, twice, turning his head to the side, just a little. Enough to get a look at them. The flecks of gold in the other sheep’s lashes catch the light just right, like tiny flecks of mica.
They're not moving away, and neither is he.
“… Baa,” Senku mumbles, a little quieter this time.
(… Ah.)
When Senku wakes up, the first thing he sees is the straw ceiling of the laboratory. The second thing he sees is that he no longer has dark, cloven hooves, but a pair of rough and worn hands. The third thing he sees is absence.
There is no other sheep.
Senku searches for another piece of the nice rock, the rubble, the precious stones, the pieces—when he can. He looks for them in certain areas only he seems to know just by plucking a few grass, or observing a tree's bark. He parts bushes, looks inside hollow logs, and digs every now and then like a hound dog following a trail.
There's a lot more of them out there, he's sure of it.
At times when the man, the lad, and the boy in him is closer to the front, he feels a distant, ghostlike ache somewhere beneath his sternum. Suddenly the air he breathes in feels incomplete—he could only take in so much—and his stomach picks up in ways it does when he eats something that doesn't sit right with him.
The feeling, he comes to know eventually, is dread.
But then—then the scientist, the visionary, and the dreamer in him—starts to bang against the walls in opposition. They kick, shout, and retaliate like a proud colony of ants when their hill is compromised, and it is mean, it is resilient.
It's ten billion percent unscientific, the three of them all say, the juries in court. You only conclude when there's enough evidence to support the hypothesis. And guess what?
He has them in the corner of his lab.
His nice pile of rock, his rubble, his precious stones, his pieces—and they haven't always been that many, have they? Before it was a pile, rubble, it was the vaguest, the most uncertain, and most importantly, the only of its kind. And then he finds another that, well, seems to look like there's a place for it someday, he hopes. And then he finds another. And another, and another—until he has a nice pile of rock, rubble. And everyone around him thinks it's precious to him, so they don't touch, don't assume it is shared to the rest of them.
Senku comes home empty-handed. No matter, he's seen plenty of those. He knows the feeling of a cold palm, a light pocket, a mouth dry from disappointment. It's part of the process.
He plops on the old wooden stools he nicked from Kaseki's hut. The old man made a new one for him, of course he would, but Senku likes this one. It's gentler on his arse when he sits for a long, long time.
There it is again. His nice pile of rocks, his rubble, his precious stones, his pieces. They begin to take shape.
Ah, there it is—
… the… shoulder?
The neck?
The chest?
He scratches his head.
What the hell am I looking at here?
Defeat is what he first feels. It's like there's a never-ending flight of stairs in front of him. The man, the lad, and the boy come out when he's alone and tired like this, perched on a worn, creaking stool, surrounded by his glass, specimens, and machines. They're an opportunistic bunch.
"Senku!"
It's Suika. She slips inside through the curtains. The sun's setting outside, he only realizes, but that doesn't matter for now. There's something, and she's hiding it behind her back.
Senku grins and rests his cheek on his palm. "Yo."
The leaf atop her shiny, watermelon helmet twitches a little. It takes her a while to muster the courage, but she eventually extends an arm, an open hand.
It's a rock.
A dull, chiseled chunk, but a chiseled chunk nonetheless. It's cold on his skin, heavy.
"Suika thought you might find it useful."
His eyes are on Suika and her lenses that make her eyes look twice as big. There's something in his throat, something in his head that clicks, like synapses reaching into the void, when he examines it up close.
“Huh. Erosion patterns from constant water flow. Surface’s been smoothed down with rounded edges where the original break was. No fresh fracture lines. This chunk’s been detached for a while."
And then—
"Where did you find this?"
Suika reflexively looks behind, past the closed curtains of the lab, where a figure had just retreated. Senku can tell. There's no wind, and poltergeists don't exist.
It's all up to her now, she thinks, and she gathers her courage.
"In the river!" she chirps with newfound confidence. "Suika was playing around and thought it looked different from the other rocks."
Senku gets up on his feet. The piece is in between his thumb and pointer, and he holds it up against the makeshift, pendant light. It's the one with the tungsten filament—a fond memory he thinks of every now and then when the odds seem to be against him.
A little rotate here, a turn there.
Suika fiddles with a thumb as she watches restlessly. She only got about half of what he's said, and there was nothing that indicated if he's happy about it or not. There's not a single deepening wrinkle on his sunbathed face.
"Did Suika get a random rock after all?" she asks eventually.
Senku chuckles and pats the top of her helmet.
"Give your little patrol crew more credit, Suika," he says, voice softening just a bit. "No, it's not a random rock. Far from it, actually."
Somewhere outside the lab, someone lets out a triumphant, Yes! and someone hisses, Be quiet! right after.
There's a reason why it's only Gen he can trust for cons; they're not fooling anybody, at any rate.
Senku stoops down to the nice pile of rocks, the rubble, the precious stones, the pieces—and hovers the fragment at an angle, moving up, down, left, and right. Like an artist with a pencil. His eyes skitter and dart, on the search for a perfect place to slot it in, a piece to the puzzle. He thinks, A cheek? A nose bridge? A lip? And more frustratedly: Why doesn't this thing come with a damn manual?
He hums for a long, long time.
"But… you don’t look happy.” Suika tilts her head. The longer he moves it around, the less faith she has in their work. “It's no good, is it?"
The scientist sighs, but it’s the good kind of sigh. Suika and the rest of them outside can tell, because they've known what a bad sigh sounds like for a while, although they are far and few in between.
Senku sets the piece on top of another. It's no match for what he has yet, but someday, all those pieces will amount to a leg, and then a hip, a back, an arm, and a head.
Someone.
"Let's just say it's ten billion percent incompatible," he mutters, the corner of his lips curling just so, "For now."
Page 1 -
- "So it really was needed." Next to an image of poison joke
- "Oh Fluttershy what a happy view! You may see my face true! You have no idea what i've been through..."
- She seems to "plant" herself in the soil for camouflage...quite literally so grounded.
Page 2 -
Potion of Holding
grounding trinket
memory stone
dream of change
attach to head
I can't believe that worked! Thank the stars I trusted that letter, if it weren't for zecora twilight would've been long gone.
They seem to have been planning this a while, had remedy ready as soon as I arrived
"A cut off, a feeling of joy, and think of a joke In the face of fear, keep your mind clear, and laugh at yourself. Think of friends, remember it true, when you're in danger, dream of change"
To be without fear, stuck in a memory. Oh I envy you, Twilight.
GUH! Two pages are done and yes this series is still alive I've just been...unholy levels of busy, but since the holidays are behind us, and I have a lot more time to focus on art I feel as though I can finally return to my plans and continue this thing! Thank you all for your patience, I know I've been a while. More is coming soon!
