Chapter Text
The day Gen found April 1st AD 5738 carved on the bark of a tree was also the day he was set to be a dead man.
This is the kind of epiphany that dawns on him as he's staring eye-to-eye at the barrel of a gun.
An actual gun. Imagine that. The thing works the same way for the same purpose yet somehow it feels more real than the pistol they knocked together in the Treasure Island cave.
It’s fascinating how much your perspective could change once you’re faced with the reminder of your mortality. He supposes he should feel scared, he knows that Chrome and the others would. They’ve witnessed how powerful a firearm could be, after all, during that whole ordeal with Tsukasa’s empire. And Gen, as a modern man, isn't a stranger to it either.
Yet he quickly finds that he feels fear not for the weapon itself, but for the reminder that he’s not the only one being held at gunpoint right at this moment.
There’s a persisting ache in his chest, annoying yet unfortunately familiar. Gen's mind wandered to the trek he’d embarked with Chrome and Kohaku as they were sent on the mission, each step—that he’d convinced himself to be painless—a distance farther from the Perseus.
A distance farther from him.
When Gen was young and curiosity was the only ace up his sleeve, he studied people.
‘Humans are selfish,” his dad would say in a drawl, half-buried in his receipts and halfway into his beer. To be fair, he was probably the least model person Gen should bring up whenever he reminisced about his formative years, but his dad was also the reason why five-year-old Gen was able to learn prematurely that not everything his parents said were true.
He remembers the realization falling on him like a lead balloon—‘Oh. He’s lying.’
This, he could say confidently, because he’d seen otherwise. He'd seen grown-ups like his mom hugging their children, pressing kisses into their hair after a long day. He’d seen the neighbor’s kids, little boys and girls like him, share snacks and toys with each other, even when they barely had enough for themselves. He’d seen a passing man stop on his way across the street to offer his arm to a woman with white hair and wrinkly skin, walking slow but steady.
His mom told him that the word ‘selfish’ was used for people who only liked to think about themselves. But these people weren't like that. To his bright, cobalt-grey eyes, these people thought of others. These people were good.
The contradiction never sat well with him.
And so, he learned to watch. To listen. To study the way people spoke, the way they moved, the little shifts in their expressions when they thought nobody was looking.
A few years later, when he’s just started learning how to hold actual physical aces on his sleeve, Gen is quickly made intimate with the line, “there is a truth in every lie.”
It was quite the revelation for a seven-year-old, but he soon got his first real clue of it when he saw his dad raise a hand against his mom for the first time, a stark contrast to the parents he’d see at school every afternoon to pick up their kids. It wasn’t that hard to make the connection. His dad was a human; and humans, according to him, were selfish people. Selfish people, as told by his mother, never cared for others. And as he watched her cower in fear, clearly feeling none of the care his father was supposed to give her, Gen figured it out.
‘Oh. He… wasn’t lying?’
So Gen resolved to play along. If people liked dressing their truths in prettier lies, then he'd give them what they wanted. He'd practice an easy smile and a charmed laugh, weaving the words that were asked to be heard—all the while keeping his cards close to his chest.
...But, if he could be allowed to hope, he wondered if there would ever come a time where he could lay his hand on the table and not be afraid of what someone might see. He'd like to see it happen, just once.
The memory then forked to one particular night, of him and his mom curled up under the safe space of his blanket with a lamp between their crossed legs. He remembered her laugh, a short twinkling sound, as he showed her the latest thing he’s mastered: a simple Pick-a-Card trick. Her smile had been blinding that night as they laughed and played under the innocent blanket thrown over their heads, and Gen remembered thinking: ‘This. This is it. This is what I’m going to do.’
Magic, he found, was a lie. But a good one—or at least it was for the people who needed it. His mother, at that time, did need it.
But for the citizens at the Corn City, magic was a nonexistent thing. There was no need for lies in this brand new world, where everything wasn't considered an impossibility. Not with Xeno on their side, at least.
No card tricks this time.
“Your crew won’t be going anywhere,” Xeno says as he strides across the room. “The scout plane made sure of that.”
Gen works on keeping the grin from falling off his face. If he was going to play this runaway traitor facade to a tee, he’s going to have to do a lot better than his performance at the polygraph test.
“But,” the scientist continues thoughtfully, “I’m afraid suppressing them by fear won’t be enough. If I want to bring these juniors to heel, we’ll have to take a slightly more elegant approach.”
Gen feels a nervous curl grow out of the corner of his lips. “That sounds ensible-say. What do you have in mind?”
He feels it—a lone trickle of sweat down his forehead. There’s a danger in the air that's even more severe than when he’d first walked in, palpable in way the tall lady beside him narrowly goes rigid, and how all noises from the nearby machines seem to have dulled.
“It’s simple.” Xeno swivels on his foot to level him with a steely look. “We’ll assassinate their leader.”
And his heart falls.
Assassinate?
“Indeed,” Xeno echoes, and Gen takes a second to realize that he’s actually said that out loud. “As you said, Mister Gen, they only have one leading scientist. This… Doctor Taiju. ”
Gen internally squirms.
“Great idea!” he chirps, trying to hide the strained edge of his voice. “I’d expect nothing less from you, Doctor Xeno. Though if I may be so bold, don’t you think you’re overestimating them a little? After all, they’re nothing but a rowdy bunch of kids and a stray flock of preliterate people. To someone who’s achieved all of this—” he gestures to the surrounding tower and invented machinery that unsurprisingly does not look like they belong in the stone world, “—they’re harmless.”
Xeno scoffs. “Mister Gen, when you’re at war, the one who respects the opponent always wins.”
Is that what this is? The mentalist dryly says to himself. A war?
“But it’s assassination,” Gen pushes some more. “Can you really pull that off?”
“We can.”
Gen freezes at the other voice. He’s been so quiet this entire exchange that Gen nearly forgot he was here. But as the mentalist turns to look at him, standing not far off the side with a newly lit cigarette between his fingers, Gen immediately feels his presence become more imposing than ever.
“We can do it,” Stanley repeats.
Gen dares to ask, “How?”
The sniper stares at him, unnervingly impassive. He takes another puff of smoke, gingerly blowing it out of his lips as he rectifies one final thing. “I can do it.”
That tone, nigh unchallengeable, shoots an icy chill down his spine. For a brief flash he imagines it: Stanley in the shadows, completely unseen and unheard as he trains a lethal weapon at Taiju’s—sweet, kind Taiju—unsuspecting back. The unease eats away at his stomach.
“Ah, yes, Mister Gen.” He hears Xeno walk up behind him, his menacing gait a distant sound to Gen’s semi-panicking mind. “If Stan says he can do it, then you have no reason to ask him anything else.”
Suddenly, hard cold metallic fingers are pressing around his head. Gen whimpers in pain as the pointed ends poke harshly at his forehead.
“It can be done.”
The image comes to him then, this time a bit different from the first. The soldier Stanley is still in the dark, a weapon aimed at the ready, but the one standing out in the open this time is someone else—someone notably smaller, with a lab coat on his back instead of a leather shirt. The coat is obnoxiously pale, like a target in the center of a dark room just waiting to be shot. In briefest second, he imagines it stained in blood and Gen physically recoils, the painful ache on his chest acting back up with a vengeance.
And for a minute, he feels sick—because at the back of his mind, he finds a modicum of relief that the target is not going to be Senku.
‘I’m so sorry, Taiju-chan,’ he whispers to himself, grim and stiff with dread.
Because at the end of the day, Asagiri Gen is nothing but a selfish man.
The first time it happened, during a bright and unassuming day in the Empire of Might, Gen thought it was a fluke. Looking back on it, it felt more like a small tug if anything. So naturally, he resorted to doing the one thing he usually did whenever faced with an anomaly he couldn’t afford to deal with directly—he ignored it. He continued doing his share of labor, kept on going around the camp with ears sharp for any sign of squabbles, and even maintained appearances on the gatherings Tsukasa would organize every now and then. He made himself busy with his usual day-to-day routine.
It was but a few weeks later at Ishigami Village, with the winter winds circling around, that he truly felt it.
The first was as a dull ache, one that made his eyebrow twitch as he walked back to the village promptly after sending Magma, Chrome, and Senku off to their scavenging expedition.
The second one hurt. Bad. It made him drop his cards from a maneuver he’d perfected when he was thirteen, all because his fingers suddenly decided to freeze up.
The next one… came later than expected. At first, he chalked it up to him getting busy again after Senku returned from the expedition, and when the excitement for the observatory had died down. But it wasn’t until much later that he managed to give it further thought.
The next one didn’t come… when Senku returned.
At the back of his mind, he knew what this was. The idea knocked against his brain even as he refused to acknowledge it with steady resolution. When he was a child he used to hear multitudes of stories about this; such like a fairy tale as old as time, this phenomenon was considered to be the crowning point of most romances and even fantasy storybooks. The clichéd version, much to Gen’s unexpected distaste, was when two people would accidently collide into each other at a random place. And when the bags were upturned and the papers started flying, they’d feel it as soon as their eyes meet.
In the Stone World, Gen heard no mention of it anywhere. But 3700 years ago, people liked to call it one thing.
A soul bond.
It was ‘fate’, as they described it. Divine and preeminent fate. The first time he learned about bonds was when it was being taught in school, and Gen remembered wanting one.
‘Many types of bonds exist,’ his teacher had explained. ‘To some, it could be a romantic bond, one they’d share with the person they were supposed to cherish and love. To others, it could be a bond shared with family. I even heard some people who found a bond between friends.’
‘But I don’t have one,’ eight-year-old Gen had said, immediately putting a hand atop his heart to see if it was beating oddly.
His teacher shook her head. ‘Bonds only develop after you’ve seen your soulmate for the first time.’
‘And when would that be?’ another kid had questioned, to which she only responded easily with, ‘That’s for you to find out eventually.’
‘But what if I won’t ever get to meet them?’ Gen added, a note of nervousness on the edge of his voice. ‘Or what if I do but they won’t like me?’
This raised another chorus of inquisitive cries, which eventually prompted their teacher to drop the topic. She soon declared that if they still had many more questions then they could save it for their parents to answer instead.
His mother, as it turned out, had a grim take on the subject.
‘It will hurt,’ she’d said. ‘Some would even dare say that it’s a fate worse than death to be separated from a soulmate.’
Gen remembered scrunching up his nose at that. ‘Isn’t that a bit dramatic?’
She’d chuckled. ‘Perhaps. But a bond exists for a reason, Gen. It’s supposed to guide us to the person holding the other end of it—someone we’ve been destined to spend the rest of our life with.’ Her smile then shrunk into a thinly pressed line. ‘Bonds can also be extremely volatile. People say that distance can make the heart grow fonder, but it’s with distance that a soul bond suffers. The farther you are from your soulmate, the more agonizing it could become for you.’
His younger self had frowned. ‘Was dad on the other end of your bond, mom?’
She grew quiet at that, only returning a small smile that oddly lacked her usual warmness.
So life went on. And then the petrification happened in a blink.
In hindsight, he should probably tell Senku. Other than the glaring evidence—which he still refused to see—Senku was the closest thing they had to a doctor. He was someone who wouldn’t think twice to look into Gen’s ailment, with a wholly unbiased intent on solving it.
But the root of the issue boiled down to how Gen simply couldn’t come to terms with the fact that he’d also been cursed by the same person in the Stone World who could give him a fighting chance. Everything added up, in fact. As much as he wanted to deny it, he did understand what had formed inside him and why; and he knew how it was going to end if he didn’t seek to resolve it soon.
Life still went on.
At dawn, he got up right as the first light streaked across the sky, casually powering through the small pricks in his chest with pursed lips as he donned the façade of a man who had a good night’s sleep. During the day, when he was among the villagers, his mind often floated past his predicament, allowing him to ignore the growing lethargy in his limbs while he worked. Then whenever evening struck, he'd hang around the village, checking up on a few things before retiring.
No one noticed. Gen didn’t tell anyone. Life went on.
Sometimes, Gen would let his eyes linger a bit too long on Senku’s silhouette, basking in the momentary calm his body would retain whenever the green-haired man was in sight.
And then the next one hit.
The cell phone equipment had been a heavy mass on his back when he first felt the sudden pull on his chest, making him stomp on the snow much harder than he’d wanted to. He planted a palm against a nearby tree, trying to flatten the tension from his fingers and expertly slipping a petal from his other hand to the floor as part of the routine. Just as Magma and Chrome had gone ahead to not disturb the tracks Gen was leaving behind, his fingers began to claw at the tree bark, scratching away the surface when the pain assaulted his chest.
It was agonizing.
The snow blurred into a blob of white in his vision. It’s even hurting his eyes, and his head began to feel as if a burning hot crown was encased in a dense iron around it. Mismatching the previous ones, this spasm packed a lot more impact. With looming dread, Gen turned to see the path they’ve trekked, their footprints now invisible in the snow. But Gen would still be able to retrace it back to the village—back to where he was. At the mere thought, a searing sting speared through his chest, making him hunch over with a curse. And then… gone.
With his lungs abruptly unrestricted, Gen straightened up, trying to re-coordinate his breathing. Fortunately, Magma and Chrome were none the wiser, both still on-guard for any possible threat, especially since they were already nearing the borders of Tsukasa’s Empire. Gen had never really thought about going back to this place; but when Senku made the request to him, he quickly discovered that he now found it hard to refuse the scientist of anything.
Ha. Look at him. Such shameful behavior for a mentalist of his caliber.
A weight sat in his chest for the entirety of the expedition. It wasn’t as painful—or at least painful enough to have him heaving for air—but it was nevertheless too sizable to be completely ignored. It grew even heavier when the added load of guilt started to claw at his gut. Half of him was wracked with worry over Chrome and Magma, who’d opted to stay and distract Tsukasa’s archer so Gen could slip away. The other half was wrestling with the feeling of desperation and relief. He felt like a walking anomaly. The thought of leaving his friends behind was like treading through mud. Yet, at the same pace, he could also feel his footsteps getting lighter, each in every step he took to cut the distance back to the village and back to him.
It was only when Senku’s eyes found his exhausted form, open relief so breathtaking on the scientist’s face, that Gen was finally faced with the realization.
Death, ever devoted, would soon come for Gen in the form of Ishigami Senku.
His soulmate.
♤