Revive Me

(Complete for now)

Chapter One: The Periodic Table of Terrible Timing

Chapter Two: 20 Questions (He has more than 20 questions)

Chapter Three: Can’t Fight the Moonlight

Chapter Four: An Uninvited Variable

Chapter Five: (how could I be) honest?

Chapter Six: A Lesson in Romantics (the beach episode)

Chapter Seven: Predictably Irrational

Chapter Eight: imgonnagetyouback

Chapter Nine: Daddy Warbucks

This was my reaction to stumbling across your profile. Pls never stop posting I'll die

Omg thank you so much!!! I really appreciate that you took the time to read my little idea!!! There’s going to be an epilogue eventually!

I’m also in the planning process for a Dr. Stone x Voyager fanfiction! So expect to see that in the coming weeks! 🥰

A Dr. Stone x H2O Just add water story

A/N: alright, this is it. It’s sweet, it’s warm, it’s how I imagine a relationship would start with Senku. I’ll probably do an epilogue a little later to really wrap it up but for now it’s closed here ❤️

Chapter Ten: Isn’t She Lovely?

Finals ended on a Thursday.

You knew this because you had it on your color coded calendar in “exam green” as you lovingly dubbed it. And also because the moment your last exam ended you sat in the hallway outside the lecture hall for approximately four minutes doing absolutely nothing— eyes closed in pure exhaustion and head leaned back on the wall, which was the closest thing to celebration your brain could manage after two weeks of sustained academic intensity.

Senku found you there.

He looked at you sitting on the floor against the wall with your bag half open beside you and said, with the diagnostic efficiency of someone assessing a situation —

“Done?”

“Done,” you confirmed.

He held out a hand.

You took it and let him pull you up and that was finals, concluded.

The summer had arranged itself the way things in this group tended to arrange themselves — without a formal plan, through a series of small events that accumulated into an outcome that felt, in retrospect, entirely inevitable.

Ryusui had mentioned, sometime in the week after the rescue, that his estate had more rooms than he knew what to do with and that he found he’d gotten used to having people around. He’d said it the way he said most things — casually, like it was a minor observation rather than an invitation — but Francois had already started making a list and that was that.

Which was how you ended up, on the Friday after

finals, in your dorm room with Senku methodically wrapping your books in packing paper while you directed traffic from the bed.

“That one goes in the box on the left,” you said.

“They’re all going to the same place,” he said.

“The ones on the left are ones I might want to read over the summer. The ones on the right are ones I’m done with for now.”

He looked at the two boxes. Looked at you. Put the book in the left box.

“Thank you,” you said.

He picked up the next book. Turned it over. Read the back with the attention of someone who couldn’t help but to read what was in front of him.

“You’ve annotated this entire thing,” he said, flipping through it.

“It’s my copy.”

“There are more notes in the margins than there is original text.”

“That’s called engagement with the material, Senku—”

“Some of these annotations are arguments with the author.”

“He was wrong about thermal stratification—”

“You wrote ‘respectfully incorrect’ with three underlines—”

“I said what I said.” You took the book from him and put it firmly in the left box. “That one’s coming with me.”

He looked at you with the expression that was almost a smile and went back to packing, and the afternoon light came through your dorm window and everything was quiet and easy and good. It was such an unusual experience for you but a welcomed one.

His phone rang.

He looked at the screen.

Something in his expression shifted — not dramatically, just the particular quality of attention he gave things that mattered.

“It’s my dad,” he said, and answered. “Hey.”

You went back to sorting through your desk drawer, giving him the half-privacy of not looking directly at him, listening to the one-sided conversation.

“Yeah. Tomorrow?” A pause. “Okay.” Another pause, longer. “Dinner, yeah. Hold on.”

He lowered the phone.

Looked at you.

“Do you want to have dinner with my dad tomorrow night?”

You blinked. “Yeah, sure.”

He raised the phone back up.

“Okay,” he said. “I’m bringing my girlfriend.”

He said it the way he said everything — flat, factual, completely unbothered — and then kept talking about dinner logistics while you sat at your desk with a highlighter in your hand and stared at the middle distance.

He hung up.

Went back to wrapping books.

You were stunned.

You watched him for a moment.

After a beat he looked at you.

“What’s the matter?” He asked turning back to the task before him.

“You just called me your girlfriend.” You replied

“Yes.”

“To your dad.”

“He asked who was coming to dinner. I told him.”

He turned a page of the book he was currently examining without looking up. “Are you okay with pasta? He makes this anchovy thing—”

“SENKU—”

“It’s very good, he learned it when he was at the Italian—”

“Can you put the book down—”

“I’m packing—”

“Senku.”

He put the book down. Looked at you. His expression was that of someone who was performing composure over something that was not entirely composed.

“You called me your girlfriend,” you said.

“Is that a problem,” he said. Not quite a question.

You looked at him — at the books half wrapped on your floor, at the afternoon light, at the particular quality of his expression that meant he was waiting for information he wasn’t sure he was going to like.

“No,” you said.

Something in him settled.

“Good,” he said, and picked the book back up. “The anchovy pasta is genuinely excellent, you should be looking forward to it—”

You threw your build-a-bear shark at him.

He caught it without looking.

Your phone lit up approximately forty-five seconds after Senku’s call with his dad ended.

group chat — the usual suspects

Taiju: SENKU CALLED HER HIS GIRLFRIEND TO HIS DAD OH MY GOD

Taiju: I REPEAT

Taiju: HE SAID I’M BRINGING MY GIRLFRIEND

Gen: finally.

Gen: I need the full story now

Taiju: HIS DAD CALLED AND HE JUST SAID IT LIKE IT WAS NOTHING

Ryusui: that’s our boy

Yuzuriha: 😭😭😭 I’m so happy

You: How the hell do you know this?! It just happened!

Taiju: BYAKUYA CALLED AND TOLD ME

Gen: Taiju why did you call Ryusui before me

Taiju: you take too long to answer

Gen: I was in the SHOWER

Gen: this is a profound personal offense

Taiju: sorry gen 😅

Gen: I want it noted that I said finally first

Gen: I have receipts

You: are you guys on the phone?!?

Taiju, Ryusui, and Gen: yes, with Byakuya.

Yuzuriha: I’m not but I am in the room with Taiju.

Francois has sent a voice message — 0:04

You played it.

Three seconds of complete silence.

Then, in the most serene voice imaginable: “Congratulations.”

You hearted Francois messaged

You: is anything sacred?

You put your phone face down on the desk and looked at Senku, who was very focused on wrapping a book and definitely not looking at you.

“Your friends,” you said.

“They’re your friends too,” he said.

You looked at the ceiling.

He was right.

Byakuya Ishigami opened the door before you’d finished knocking.

He was tall — you’d expected that from the photo In Senku’s room, with the same quality of focused attention in his eyes, but warmer somehow, the version of it that had learned over decades to direct itself at people rather than problems.

He looked at Senku first, briefly, the look of a father confirming his kid had arrived safe, and then he looked at you.

His whole face did something.

“You must be Y/N,” he said.

“Hi,” you said, and tried not to sound as nervous as you were, which was moderately successful.

“Come in, come in—” he was already stepping back, already gesturing, already talking— “I’ve been making the pasta since this morning, I hope you’re hungry, Senku never tells me if people have dietary restrictions until we’re already sitting down—”

“I don’t do that,” Senku said.

“You absolutely do that,” Byakuya said, with the cheerful certainty of someone citing well-documented historical evidence. He looked at you. “Does he do that?”

“Absolutely” you answered nodding your head

Byakuya pointed at you. “I like her,” he said, to Senku.

“I know,” Senku said, in a tone that meant he’d anticipated this and was managing his expectations accordingly.

You followed Byakuya into the house feeling approximately thirty percent less nervous than you had thirty seconds ago.

Dinner was extraordinary.

Not because of the pasta, which was genuinely excellent as Senku had said, and which you told Byakuya three times because it deserved to be said three times. But because of the quality of it — the specific warmth of being at someone’s table, the kind where the conversation went in five directions at once and nobody minded.

Byakuya asked you everything. Your major, your research interests, your goals, your family, what you thought about the current state of ocean conservation funding, whether you’d read the recent paper on kelp forest restoration that had come out of the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute.

He asked with the genuine curiosity of a man who actually wanted to know the answers, not the polite curiosity of someone making conversation, and you found yourself talking the way you talked with Yuzuriha — unguardedly, with your hands, about things you cared about.

Senku sat across from you and ate his pasta and occasionally said something that made you want to throw something at him and Byakuya laughed every time, with the delight of a man watching something he’d been looking forward to for a long time.

“He was like this at seven,” Byakuya said, at one point, nodding at Senku. “Just — commentary. Constant commentary. On everything.”

“I believe it,” you said.

“She encourages it,” Senku said.

“I do not—”

“You answer the questions.”

“Because you ask them directly at my face—”

“If you didn’t want to answer you could just—not answer, it’s a simple—”

“You don’t drop it!”

Byakuya was watching this exchange with the expression of a man whose evening was going exactly as he’d hoped.

You offered to help with the dishes.

Byakuya handed you rubber gloves without being asked, which meant either Senku had mentioned it or Byakuya was simply the kind of person who noticed things — and given what you knew about where Senku’s observational habits had come from, probably both.

Senku had been pulled into looking at something in Byakuya’s study — a new equipment catalog, or a paper someone had sent, or something else entirely that had captured his attention and was going to hold it for at least twenty minutes. You could hear them talking distantly, Senku’s voice and then his father’s, the specific rhythm of two people who communicated the same way and had long since stopped noticing.

You washed dishes.

The kitchen was warm and quiet. The window above the sink looked out at the garden, dark now, lit only by the house lights catching the edges of things. You could hear crickets.

Byakuya appeared in the doorway, coffee in hand, and leaned against the counter in the easy way of someone in their own kitchen.

“He never brings anyone home,” he said, conversationally. Not to start something — just as an observation, the way Senku made observations. Apparently it ran in the family.

“I gathered,” you said.

“He has Taiju. He has Gen. But he doesn’t—” Byakuya paused, choosing words carefully in a way that suggested he knew exactly what he wanted to say and was deciding how much of it to offer— “he doesn’t let people in. Not really. Not the way he’s let you in.”

You kept washing. The rubber gloves squeaked slightly against a pot.

“Do you know how I got my job at NASA?” Byakuya said.

“He mentioned before that you work there, but never told me anything else,” you answered.

He smiled

“Taiju,” Byakuya said. “Taiju and Senku together. Senku had the science — obviously, he’d had the science since he was approximately four years old — and Taiju was just excited to help and learn what he could.

You smiled at the dish in your hands.

“That sounds like Taiju,” you said.

“It does.” Byakuya took a sip of his coffee before continuing: “I was having a difficult time with the swimming test. You need to be able to swim with clothes on, so Senku and Taiju developed a special full body swimsuit that was supposed to help my movements.” He said while glancing to you raising his eyebrow.

“It didn’t work but it was still amazing” he smiled then added “so I decided that I’d work hard for him, like he had for me”.

You looked at Byakuya with awe. Senku was able to create something like that as a child? You could tell in that moment that Senku’s nature and passions have been nothing but encouraged by his father from such a young age. He was given full freedom to express himself in every way and never fear losing that support. You felt that envy again but it quickly washed away.

“When I went to the space station,” Byakuya said Senku used to email me. Updates — what he was working on, hypotheses he was thinking about, questions he had that he didn’t want to wait to ask.” He paused. “And sometimes, not too often but sometimes, he’d mention a girl.”

You went still.

“Not romantically,” Byakuya said, and you could hear the smile in it. “You know how he writes. Just — observations. She did this. She said that. She missed school again, interesting. He never connected the dots himself. But she kept coming up.” Another pause. “For years.”

The cricket sounds came through the window.

“I never said anything,” Byakuya said. “He would have denied it and changed the subject and I would have lost the emails.” His voice was warm. “But I noticed.”

You set the pot down carefully on the drying rack.

“I’m glad I finally got to meet her,” Byakuya said.

The kitchen was quiet.

You looked out at the dark garden through the window and thought about a boy who had been paying attention since the second week of sophomore year and had spent years emailing his father about it without ever saying so directly. You thought about notebooks and sticky notes and color coded calendars and rain boots left at your feet without explanation.

You thought about how long you’d been alone with something impossible.

And how thoroughly, completely, in every direction, you weren’t anymore.

“Me too,” you said. Quietly. Meaning it.

Byakuya smiled into his coffee.

From somewhere in the house, Senku’s voice carried through, asking his father a question about something. Byakuya set down his cup, gave you one more look — warm and knowing and entirely without pressure — and went to answer.

You turned back to the dishes.

The rubber gloves squeaked against the next pot.

A Dr. Stone x H2O just add water story

Chapter Nine: Daddy Warbucks

A car—limo to be more precise, met your group of renegade rescuers at the dock. Ryusui and Francois ushered everyone to the waiting vehicle.

You were still wrapped in the blanket as you were pushed gently to the backseat. You looked over at Gen who was helping himself to the snack bar like he owned the place. And then over senku who was sitting with his head leaned back and his eyes closed like he was entering a meditative state. Obviously you all were being taken to Ryusui’s home.

You knew he was rich. He’s part of the richest family in Japan, but this was beyond anything you could have imagined.

The gates were huge. The car pulled up to what you had assumed was a very large house and turned out to be something significantly more than that.

“Ryusui,” you said as you took in the sight before you through the car window.

“Hm?” He was already getting out, perfectly composed, as though arriving at a private estate after a high speed maritime rescue operation was simply how his Mondays went.

“This is a palace.” You said in awe, jaw dropping

“It’s a mansion,” he said.

“It has a gate.” You added as you followed him out.

“Many houses have gates.”

“It has TWO gates.” You emphasized

“Welcome,” he said, gesturing broadly, and that was apparently that.

Francois appeared at your elbow with the quiet efficiency of someone who had already assessed the situation and prepared for every contingency, and guided you inside with the practiced grace of someone who had done this — gotten people through those gates after difficult days — more than once.

The interior was exactly what the exterior promised. Enormous. Warm. Grandiose. The kind of space that had been designed to impress and had long since settled into simply being home to the person who lived there. You stood in the entryway in Ryusui’s t-shirt and a blanket and felt slightly unreal.

“Sit,” Senku said, from somewhere behind you, and steered you gently toward a couch that was approximately the size of your entire dorm room.

You sat.

The doctor arrived about ten minutes later.

She was calm and professional, just as you would imagine someone who had signed an NDA and had learned not to ask certain questions before they had context. She set their bag down, looked at you, looked at the assembled group of people in Ryusui’s living room, and said —

“Who’s the patient?”

“Her,” everyone said, simultaneously.

You raised your hand slightly.

The examination was thorough and efficient. Temperature — low but recovering. Blood pressure — slightly elevated, unsurprising given the circumstances. Respiratory function — normal. She moved through it with the focused attention of someone building a picture, and you answered her questions in the same flat, factual register you used when you were managing something difficult and needed to stay on the functional side of it.

Then she addressed your arms.

And paused.

Turned your wrist over carefully in her hands and looked at the bruising there — the specific pattern of it, the shape, the placement.

“These are handprints,” she said.

The room went quiet.

She moved up your forearm. Found more. The documentation of a struggle written directly onto your skin in purple and blue.

“You put up quite a fight,” she said.

“You should see the other guy,” you said.

Gen made a sound that was approximately seventy percent pride.

The doctor looked at you for a moment with the expression of someone recalibrating their assessment upward. Then she gently released your arm and said —

“Can you tell me what happened? I need to understand the full context of your injuries.”

You looked at your hands in your lap.

The room waited.

“I was swimming,” you said. “Away from Treasure Island. Heading back to shore.” You paused. “I was going fast. Or — I was about to. I hadn’t hit full speed yet.”

Many hours earlier:

The water had been dark and warm and familiar.

You’d been moving at a good pace — not your full speed, not yet, you were still in the shallower water near the island, building up — and you’d been thinking about making it back to campus in time and the notebook and the way the door had sounded when it clicked shut behind him and you hadn’t been paying nearly enough attention and—

The net closed.

Not gradually. All at once, contracting from every side simultaneously, the mechanical certainty of something designed to hold things that didn’t want to be held. You hit it at enough speed that the impact registered — not painful exactly, more like a full body jolt, the sudden understanding that you were not going anywhere.

You stopped.

Assessed.

The net was commercial grade. Heavy. The kind used for large catches. Someone had put this here deliberately and recently — you could tell from the weight of it, the way it sat in the water, it hadn’t been here long.

You reached for your phone.

The case was waterproof but the neck strap wasn’t rated for the force of the water pulling down on it and you watched it pull away from you and fall and kept watching until it disappeared into the dark below.

Gone.

You assessed again. Conserved. Waited.

The net was moving.

Upward.

You heard the boat before you saw it — the engine, low and steady, the particular sound of something large and purposeful directly above you. Voices. More than one. Words you couldn’t make out through the water.

And then you broke the surface and were tossed on the deck.

The light hit you first — the research vessel’s deck lights, bright, white and clinical — and then the hands, reaching into the net, and you reacted before you fully processed what was happening.

You got one of them square across the face with your fist.

They stumbled back. Someone swore. More hands came — and these ones knew what they were doing, grabbing for your arms, your wrists, pinning with the practiced efficiency of people who had a protocol for this, which meant they had been prepared for resistance, which meant this was not an accident.

You kept fighting.

Your tail gave you leverage they hadn’t fully accounted for —the weight of it caught one of them in the ribs when you twisted and you heard the sound it made and filed it under satisfying —but there were too many of them and you weren’t able to fend off a group.

The crate was metal and cold and they forced you into it and the lid closed and the lock engaged and the sound of it—

That sound.

You’d heard a lot of sounds in the last six years that had scared you. But this one was the worst.

And then it was dark. You felt the crate being moved somewhere, presumably a storage room of some kind. And then as the hours passed it got significantly colder.

The living room was very quiet when you finished.

You looked at your hands.

Ryusui was standing by the window with his arms crossed and his jaw set and the expression of a man who was performing composure over something that was not composed at all.

Gen was looking at the floor.

Francois had set down the thing they’d been holding at some point during the telling and hadn’t picked it back up.

Senku was looking at your wrists.

Not with the data-collection look. Not with the scientist expression. Just — looking. With the quality of someone sitting with information they wished they didn’t have.

“The bruises on her forearms are consistent with what she’s describing,” the doctor said, carefully, into the quiet. “Defensive wounds and restraint marks. She was held down by multiple people.” She paused. “She’s going to be okay. Rest, warmth, fluids. The hypothermia is mild and she is recuperating well. The bruising will take a couple of weeks.”

“Good,” Ryusui said. Quiet. Definitive.

Another silence.

The doctor looked around the room with the expression of someone who had several questions she weren’t sure were within the scope of her NDA, and then looked at you, and finally said —

“I have to ask.” A pause. “The — the tail. The transformation…” She looked almost sheepish, which was not an expression you expected from someone who had just conducted a clinical examination with complete professional composure. “Is there — I mean, biologically, how does—”

Senku was off the couch and onto the ottoman beside the doctor before anyone had finished processing that he’d moved.

The notebook was already open.

“The transformation is triggered by water contact with the skin,” he said, with the focused enthusiasm of a person who had been waiting for an audience qualified to appreciate this data. “The cellular mechanism is still unclear but the speed suggests something closer to a rapid protein restructuring than a traditional—” he turned a page— “the tail itself has an internal skeletal structure consistent with a modified caudal fin, here—” he pointed— “the speed data is here, 186 miles per hour, which makes the hydrodynamic efficiency—”

The doctor leaned in.

Her eyes went wide.

“That’s — that’s not possible,” they said. “The drag alone—”

“That’s what I said!” Senku said, with the satisfaction and enthusiasm of someone who had been vindicated. “I have three hypotheses about the mechanism. The moon pool water specifically seems to be a factor—”

“The mineral composition?”

“Or something else entirely. I need more samples.” He turned another page. “The full moon effect on behavior is documented here — it appears to affect cognitive function rather than the transformation itself, which suggests a neurological rather than physiological—”

“Fascinating,” the doctor said, and they were fully in it now, two scientists leaning over a notebook in Ryusui’s living room while you sat on the world’s largest couch wrapped in a blanket, and Gen looked at you with an expression of profound resignation, and Ryusui quietly refilled everyone’s drinks. Needing something to do to distract him.

The consultation lasted twenty minutes.

When it was done the doctor sat back, slightly dazed, with the expression of someone who had just had their entire understanding of biology expanded in ways they needed time to process.

Senku closed the notebook.

Stood up.

Crossed to the couch.

And set it in your lap.

“You can go through it,” he said. Simply. Like he was handing you a book he thought you’d find interesting. “All of it. Whatever you want.”

You looked down at the worn green cover.

“Okay,” you said.

He went back to his chair.

Taiju arrived like weather.

The front door opened and he was simply there — enormous and present and already talking, eyes wide, taking in the room and you on the couch and the doctor packing up her bag—

“IS Y/N OKAY? AND SHE’S A FISH—”

Yuzuriha’s hand connected with his arm before he’d finished the sentence.

“She’s RIGHT THERE,” she said.

“I KNOW she’s right there, that’s why I—”

But Yuzuriha wasn’t listening anymore.

She crossed the room and she sat down next to you on the couch and she put her arms around you and held on, and she didn’t say anything, and she didn’t ask anything, and she didn’t make it about the tail or the rescue or any of it —

She just held on.

And that was the thing, the specific thing, that undid you completely.

Not the crate. Not the net. Not the hands or the bruises or the hours of cold water. Not even the fight with Senku or the notebook or the word subject in the moonlight.

Just — Yuzuriha. Holding on. Like you were worth holding onto.

You put your face in her shoulder and the steadiness that you’d been running on for days and weeks and possibly years just — stopped. Just ran out. And you cried in Ryusui’s living room in front of everyone and didn’t try to stop it because you were so, so tired of stopping things.

Nobody said anything.

Taiju sat down on your other side, enormous and warm, and put a hand on your back very gently for someone his size.

“Sorry,” he said, quietly. “About the fish thing.”

You laughed, wet and undignified, into Yuzuriha’s shoulder.

“It’s okay,” you said.

“You’re not a fish,” he said, very seriously. “You’re a person. Who also has a fish part. Which is amazing. You’re amazing.” He paused. “I’m going to need you to explain it to me later when you’re feeling better.”

“Taiju,” Yuzuriha said.

“I’ll wait,” he said immediately. “I’m just saying. When you’re ready.”

You laughed again, and it was less wet this time, and Yuzuriha loosened her hold slightly to look at you with the expression of someone making sure you were actually okay rather than performing okay.

You gave her the smallest nod.

She held on for a little longer anyway.

Francois made soup.

Of course Francois made soup. Francois had probably started making soup the moment everything settled down, had probably known soup would be required before anyone else had thought the word, and the result was — extraordinary. Obviously. Because Francois didn’t know how to make anything that wasn’t extraordinary.

You sat in the warmth of Ryusui’s living room with a bowl of it and let the evening settle around you. Taiju was asking Ryusui questions about the yacht with the genuine enthusiasm of someone encountering a new obsession. Yuzuriha had found a spot near the window and was sketching something, occasionally glancing over at you with the quiet checking-in quality of someone who was going to be doing that for a while and didn’t mind.

Gen was on the chaise with another margarita — Francois had produced one, silently, without being asked, because Francois understood Gen on a fundamental level — looking at his phone with the practiced casualness of someone listening to everything happening in the room.

Senku was in the chair across from you.

Not hovering. Not watching you with the data-collection look. Just — there. In the same space. Close enough that you were aware of him the way you were always aware of him now, the warmth of his presence that you’d stopped pretending wasn’t a thing you noticed.

At some point he looked up and found you already looking at him.

You smiled.

Just that. Just a smile, small and tired and real, across the warmth of the room.

He held it for a moment.

Then he looked away, and his jaw did the thing, and you looked back at your soup.

By 1AM the palace had gone quiet.

Taiju had been allocated a room that he’d declared the nicest place he’d ever slept in, and had gone with the immediate decisive energy of someone who had done a lot today and was ready to stop. Yuzuriha had checked on you one more time — hand on your arm, eyes asking the question — and you’d given her the nod that meant actually okay and she’d gone.

Ryusui had disappeared somewhere in the depths of the mansion. Francois had tidied everything in their efficient, invisible way and said goodnight with the particular warmth of someone who didn’t usually say goodnight but meant it tonight.

Gen was the last to go.

He stopped in the doorway and looked at you on the couch with the notebook in your lap and the blanket around your shoulders, pajamas that Francois had gotten for you, and the lamp making everything warm and amber.

“You good?” he said.

“Yeah,” you said.

He looked at you for a moment with the expression that wasn’t performing anything.

“Okay,” he said. And then: “Y/N.”

You looked at him.

“He’s been keeping that notebook,” Gen said, “since the second week of your sophomore year.” He tilted his head. “Just so you know what you’re looking at.”

He went to bed.

The living room was quiet.

You looked down at the notebook in your lap.

The cover was soft under your hands — worn and faded and carefully kept. You’d read parts of it, sure. But you hadn’t read it from the beginning.

You opened it to the first page.

The first entry. The handwriting was slightly different — younger, somehow, the same efficiency but less practiced — and it said:

Y/N — 2 hours late to school. Didn’t speak to anyone. Reason unclear. Filed for reference.

You turned the page.

Y/N avoided the east courtyard sprinklers. Deliberate path alteration.

Another page.

Weather app — checked 17 times. Logged by time: 7:43am, 7:51am, 8:02am—

The times went down the margin in a neat column. Every single one.

You sat with that for a moment.

Seventeen times. He had watched her check the weather app seventeen times in one day and written down every hour and minute.

You turned more pages.

Y/N missed school.

Y/N missed school.

Y/N missed school.

She’s back. Not raining today. Correlated?

When asked in regard to avoiding sprinklers— “I hate getting wet.” Filed. Pattern forming. Why?

Takano — water. She was gone the rest of the day. Absence and water exposure: directly correlated. Conclusion forming.

You thought about a sixteen year old boy in a high school hallway, watching, filing, trying to understand something he didn’t have a framework for yet. Not cruelly. Not invasively. Just — unable to stop noticing. Unable to stop caring about what he noticed.

You turned more pages.

There were calculations. Hypotheses that turned out to be wrong, crossed out and rewritten. Questions he didn’t have answers to yet. And then, tucked into the margin of a page that was otherwise full of careful scientific notation, in slightly different handwriting, like it had been added later, like he’d come back to this page and written it small and in the corner where it was easy to miss —

Unrelated: she laughed at something today in the hallway. Filed separately. Not sure why.

You stared at that for a long time.

Not sure why.

You kept reading.

The entries got more frequent. More detailed. The hypotheses got more sophisticated as he got older and the science got sharper, but underneath all of it — underneath the data and the correlations and the careful notation — there was a thread that ran through every page. A consistent, quiet, completely unscientific thread that he had apparently never noticed he was pulling.

He had been paying attention to you.

Not to the mystery. Not to the anomaly. To you. To the laugh in the hallway and the seventeen weather checks and the way you’d looked when Takano dumped the water on you and you’d gone still for just a second before your face smoothed over. He’d written that down too. She covered it fast. Practiced. This is not the first time.

You got to the pages from this semester — the lab, the questions, the moon pool data, the full moon protocol — and they were different in texture, denser, more urgent, the handwriting slightly less neat in places like he’d been writing fast. But the thread was still there. Underneath all the science.

The last entry was dated the night at the campfire.

It said:

She mentioned the kelp forest restoration at dinner. Got that look again.

You closed the notebook.

You sat in the quiet of Ryusui’s living room with the lamp and the blanket and held the worn green cover between your hands, and thought about a boy who had been paying attention since the second week of sophomore year and had never once told you, and had apparently never quite figured out why he couldn’t stop.

You thought about “not sure why” written in the margin in small handwriting.

You thought about “I thought you were pretty.”

You thought about standing up and walking out of a lab in the middle of a session because you hadn’t come.

You put the notebook carefully on the cushion beside you.

Pulled the blanket tighter.

And for the first time in a very long time, let yourself think about what it might feel like to stop being careful.

Hey guys, I absolutely hated the first version I wrote of chapter nine and I won’t put anything out that I don’t think is up to my standards out of respect for everyone that takes the time to read my work. I’m completely redoing it now—like just now starting from scratch, but I won’t be able to finish it tonight mostly due to my injured hand. I will however post it as soon as it’s ready and up to par.

A Dr. Stone x H2O just add water story

A/N: sorry it’s a little late, it’s hard to type and edit with one hand lol hope you all enjoy!

Chapter Eight: imgonnagetyouback

The plan came together in approximately four minutes.

This was no where near enough time to develop a good plan. Senku was aware of this. He was also aware that they had no better options, a research vessel full of people who had found something they were not going to give back voluntarily, and a window of time that was closing.

So. Four minutes. This was what they had.

“We need to get on that ship,” Senku said.

“Observant,” Gen said.

“Without them knowing why we’re there.”

“Also observant.”

“Ryusui.” Senku looked at him. “How good are you at playing helpless?”

Ryusui smiled. It was the smile of a man who found the concept genuinely entertaining.

“Remarkably,” he replied.

The navigation system on Ryusui’s yacht went mysteriously offline approximately 2 minutes later.

Ryusui stood at the helm with the expression of a man who was very wealthy and very far from shore and very, very confused about how either of those things had happened, and radioed the research vessel with the sheepish energy of someone who had gotten slightly in over his head.

“Navigation’s been out for hours,” he said, into the radio, with the rueful embarrassment of a man confessing something mildly humiliating. “I’ve been trying to sort it myself but I think we’ve just been going in circles. You know how it is — they’ll let just about anyone rent these things if you’ve got a black card to flash.” A self deprecating laugh. “Any someone could help us out?”

A pause from the other end.

Then: “Copy that. Come alongside, port side.”

“Which side is that?” Ryusui questioned to make the act more believable.

“Left side” the voice answered in the raido

Ryusui set down the radio and looked at all of them with the calm of a man whose plan was already three steps ahead.

“Showtime,” he said.

The moment they pulled alongside the research vessel Senku slipped away.

Nobody on the research vessel noticed because Gen had already begun.

By the time the crew appeared at the rail Gen was in full motion — one hand gripping the railing, the other pressed to his chest, his voice carrying the specific tremor of a man holding himself together through sheer force of will and not quite succeeding.

“Oh thank god,” he said, to the crew member who leaned over. “Oh, thank god — we’ve been out here for I don’t even know how long, the navigation went out and Ryusui kept saying he knew where we were going but I could tell — I could tell —”

“Sir, if you could just—”

“My grandmother,” Gen said, voice dropping to something raw and haunted, “was on a boat. When it went down.” He paused for effect. “I’ve never told anyone that. It just feels — it feels very relevant right now—”

The crew member looked at Ryusui, who spread his hands in the universal gesture of I’m so sorry about him.

“He’s sensitive about open water,” Ryusui said, with great sympathy.

Below deck, the science ship was utilitarian and well-equipped — long corridors, numbered doors, the hum of climate control systems. Senku moved fast and quiet, following the cold toward the specimen storage area, pocket toolkit already in hand.

The crate was large. Metal. Padlocked. Leaking water from the base seam.

He used the screw driver and used it to break the lock open.

He lifted the lid open and you were inside — tail tucked against yourself for warmth, arms wrapped around your own shoulders, hair matted, eyes wide for the half second before you recognized him.

“Senku?” you questioned. Your voice was rough.

“Yeah,” he breathed out. He crouched down, shrugged off his jacket. “I’m getting you out. Can you move?”

You tried. Your tail moved sluggishly, the cold having done its work.

“Not really,” you said through chattering teeth.

“Okay.” He spread the jacket flat on the floor. “Help me knock this over.”

“Are you going to drag me again?”

“Do you have a better idea.”

You looked at him with tired eyes “No.”

“Count of three,” he said with a raised eyebrow.

“Count of three,” you agreed.

“Push when I pull.”

“One,” you said together. “Two. Three—”

You put all of your strength you had left into throwing yourself against the metal wall.

The crate crashed. Water everywhere. You hit the floor and he lifted you on to the jacket and began pulling you toward the corridor.

“This is undignified,” you said

“Yeah, yeah,” he agreed, pulling harder.

Footsteps above them. Voices moving. Senku stopped pulling and quickly got his phone to send a text.

Meanwhile, below deck on the yacht, Francois felt their phone buzz discreetly. They glanced at the screen.

buy time. also need a shirt.

Francois looked at the message for exactly one second. Then they made their way upstairs, showed it silently to Ryusui, who read it, nodded once, and seamlessly resumed his role as the helpless wealthy sailor while Francois turned to find Gen.

Gen discreetly read the message. Glanced up at Francois. Looked back at the crew member who was now deeply invested in his grandmother story.

He pressed a hand to his forehead.

His eyes rolled back.

He went down like a beautiful, dramatic tree.

The crew member lunged forward and the one helping Ryusui ran towards Gen. Francois crouched beside Gen with practiced concern, managing the small crowd with serene authority, and Ryusui took the opportunity to slip quietly away and onto the science ship that was holding his student captive.

A door opened behind Senku and Y/N.

A crew member came out—

Looked at Senku.

Looked at you.

Looked at your tail.

Drew breath to shout —

Ryusui came down the stairs that leads to the upper deck.

He took in the scene — the crew member, the tail, Senku trying to drag you, the spreading water — in approximately one second. Then he stepped forward, scooped you up and over his shoulder with the practiced ease of a man built for exactly this kind of situation, and swung your tail directly in the crew members face before they’d finished their first word.

They went down.

Ryusui was already moving up the stairs.

“Hi,” he said, to you, upside down over his shoulder.

“Hi,” you managed.

“You alright?”

“Mostly.”

“Good.”

He was navigating the corridor at speed, Senku keeping pace, your tail functioning as an inadvertent weapon against anyone they passed. “Deep breath.”

“Wait—”

He didn’t wait.

He hit the exterior door, crossed the deck in four strides, and you went over the railing.

You hit the water— it was warm and you were finally free— and you surfaced into the afternoon light gasping, the ocean around you, the research vessel’s hull beside you and Ryusui’s yacht on the other side. You could see the swim platform at the stern, low to the water, Francois already there.

You went under and came up at the platform in seconds.

Francois and Gen — who had apparently made a miraculous recovery from his fainting episode after the two science ship crew members went back to their ship for a first aid kit — were both at the platform, Gen holding the rail above it, both of them reaching for you.

“On three,” Gen said.

You grabbed their hands.

They pulled.

You were halfway onto the platform when Ryusui opened the throttle.

The yacht lurched forward and everyone grabbed whatever was nearest — Gen’s hand locked around the rail above the platform, Francois gripped the cleat beside them, and you grabbed the only thing available which was Gen’s leg, and held on.

“GEN—” you started.

“I HAVE YOU—” he shouted, over the wind and the engine and the rapidly increasing distance between the yacht and the research vessel —

“THIS IS NOT IDEAL—” you shouted

“I’M WELL AWARE—”

Francois said nothing, holding on with the serene practicality of someone who had simply decided to survive this and was executing accordingly.

The research vessel fell behind. The yacht pushed harder. The wind was tremendous and the spray was everywhere and you were still half on the platform holding onto Gen’s leg and this moment was making its way on your list of most undignified moments.

But you were out.

You were out and moving and the research vessel was getting smaller and Ryusui was at the helm looking like a man who was having the time of his life, and you relaxed just a little.

“I like your new look,” Gen said, from above you, slightly breathless, still holding the rail. He looked pointedly at your tail. “Still prefer you with legs though.”

You laughed.

It surprised you — the laugh — coming out real and unguarded in the middle of the wind and the spray and the undignified platform situation, and Gen looked down at you with an expression that wasn’t performing anything at all.

“There she is,” he said, quietly.

Once they had enough distance Ryusui eased back on the throttle and Gen and Francois hauled you properly onto the yacht — not just the platform, all the way up, onto the deck, where Francois had already produced towels from somewhere and a warm drink that appeared in your hands before you’d fully processed sitting down.

“Where did those come from,” you said, looking at the towels.

Francois looked at you with mild serenity. “I’ll be right back,” they said, and disappeared.

Gen sat down next to you. “Drink,” he said, nodding at the cup. “You’re cold.”

You drank. It was warm and slightly sweet and exactly right in the way that Francois’s things always were.

Francois reappeared with Ryusui’s black t-shirt — the one from the sail bag, dark and long enough to cover everything that needed covering — and handed it to you without ceremony.

“Ryusui’s,” they said.

“Of course it is,” you said, and Gen took the towel from your lap before you could reach for it and began carefully, methodically patting down your tail, and Francois took the other towel and did the same from the other side, and you sat there between them drinking your warm drink and letting them take care of you and felt — unexpectedly, overwhelmingly — like you might cry.

“Gen,” you said tears beginning well up. The panic, stress, a d exhaustion from the situation—both physically and mentally, were finally beginning to to catch up.

“Don’t,” he said, still patting. “You can fall apart later. Drink your drink.”

You drank your drink.

When you felt the familiar shift beginning — the tail fading, legs returning — you pulled Ryusui’s t-shirt over your head quickly and efficiently and Gen looked tactfully at the horizon and Francois helped you up and led you to a lounger. They produced a blanket from somewhere and draped it across your lap and the whole thing was handled with the practiced grace of people who had gotten good at this in record time.

A hand appeared in your peripheral vision holding another warm drink.

You looked up.

Senku was standing there, his clothes still wet from the water in the crate splashing on him— with his hair wrecked by the wind and salt spray and his eyes doing that direct thing they did when he had something important to say.

He held out the drink.

You took it.

He sat down next you.

Francois appeared at Gen’s elbow and took his shirtsleeve between two fingers and began walking away with a protesting Gen — “wait, I want to hear—” — and kept going, because Francois had a grip like a very polite vice and was not negotiating.

“Goodbye,” Gen said, to you, over his shoulder, being steadily relocated..

And then it was just you and Senku and the water and the sound of the engine and the afternoon light on the ocean, and you looked at each other for a moment the way you’d been looking at each other since he saw all of you in a classroom with the blinds pulled down and a green notebook and forty seven questions.

“How did you know where I was?” you asked.

“Treasure Island is where you go,” he answered. “When you need to get away.”

“You don’t know that.”

“It’s kind of my safe place, I come here all the time” he quoted you.

You were quiet for a moment the said “Oh yeah.”

There was a pause before he spoke.

“You didn’t come to lab”

He looked at his hands. “I stood up and walked out.”

You looked at him.

“I didn’t think,” he said. “I just went.”

He continued speaking,

“I called Gen, and we both tried calling you.”

“The phone rang without going to voicemail,” he added. “That told me it was somewhere without signal. Somewhere it shouldn’t be.”

The boat moved. The water moved. Somewhere behind you Ryusui said something and Gen’s voice responded, muffled, and Francois’s footsteps crossed the deck.

“I intentionally spilled the water on you,” Senku said. “In the lab. I had a hypothesis about you and I needed a controlled observation and the opportunity presented itself.” He looked at his hands. “It was logical but it was also wrong. I should have told you.”

“Yeah,” you said. “You should have.”

“I know.”

You looked at him for a long moment.

“And the subject thing?” you asked

“Shorthand,” he said. “It’s how I write notes. It doesn’t — you’re not—” he stopped. Started again, which was rare enough that you paid close attention when it happened. “You have never been just a subject. To me. Not from the beginning. Not ever”

“The beginning,” you said. “When was the beginning?”

He looked at the water.

“The notebook,” he said, “goes back further than this semester.”

You waited.

“I’ve been keeping it since high school,” he said. “The observations. The weather app, the sealed bottle, the sprinklers.” He paused. “The first entry is from sophomore year.”

You stared at him.

“You’ve been—”

“Observing,” he said. “Yes.”

“Since sophomore year of high school.”

“That’s—” you stopped. Did the math. “That’s years, Senku.”

“I’m aware.”

“Why.”

He looked at you then. The direct look, completely unguarded, the one that meant there was no performance happening anywhere in his expression.

“I thought you were pretty,” he said. “And wanted to know more about you.”

The boat moved.

The water moved.

You looked at him — his wrecked hair, his face that was slightly turning red— and felt something that had been tight and scared and buried for a long time and completely let it go.

“You’re irrational,” you said. “You could have just talked to me.”

Something moved through his expression. The ghost of something — surprised and warm and almost a smile.

“I know,” he said.

You put your head on his shoulder.

He went very still for a moment.

Then his shoulder relaxed under your cheek, and his arm came up slowly, and neither of you said anything else for a long time. You closed your eyes and settled into him.

Behind you, at a very respectful distance, Gen appeared for approximately one second.

Saw the scene before him and retreated.

Pressed his back against the cabin wall.

Mouthed something that was probably finally to nobody in particular.

Looked up at the sky.

Francois appeared beside him, looked at the expression on his face, and handed him his margarita.

He accepted it with both hands.

A Dr. Stone x H20 just add water story

Chapter Seven: Predictably Irrational

The tent was quiet when you slipped back in.

Yuzuriha stirred slightly — just enough to make your heart stop — and then settled, her breathing evening back out into the slow rhythm of someone still mostly asleep. You lay down on top of your sleeping bag and stared at the roof of the tent and listened to the birds starting up outside and tried to feel like yourself.

It didn’t work.

The moon pool had done what it always had— held you, steadied you, given you somewhere to put the feeling that had no other container. But the word was still there when you surfaced. It was still there when you swam back. It was going to be there at breakfast and on the boat home and in every lab session and every study evening and every morning he showed up at your door with the notebook and the questions and it was not going to haunt every moment with him until now—

Subject.

You closed your eyes.

You were going to be fine. You were a person who managed impossible things. You had been managing the most impossible thing since you were fifteen and you were very good at it.

You were going to be completely fine.

“Where’d you go?”

Yuzuriha was sitting up when you came back from brushing your teeth, hair slightly rumpled, genuinely curious rather than suspicious.

“Just brushing my teeth” you replied

She gave you a look “before that”

“Oh, just a morning hike,” you smiled, and hated how easy it came out.

She accepted it with the warmth of someone who wasn’t going to push, and you were grateful and guilty about being grateful.

Breakfast was Francois’s doing — as all the meals had been— and it was extraordinary in the way of someone who had decided that camping was not an excuse for mediocrity. Gen appeared from the tent he’d shared with Senku and Taiju and Ryusui with his sunglasses on, slightly crooked, looking like a man who had made some decisions last night that he was currently reassessing. He accepted the coffee Francois produced with both hands and a reverence that bordered on spiritual, and lowered himself into a chair with great care.

Senku was already up, already at the sample table, already writing.

He looked up when you sat down. Met your eyes briefly.

You gave a small smile. Looked away. Reached for the coffee.

Across the table, Gen looked at you over the rim of his cup expression hidden by his off centered sunglasses.

The packing up took an hour. Everyone had opinions about the most efficient way to break camp and Gen’s opinion was that someone else should do it, which Taiju cheerfully ignored by doing approximately everything while Gen supervised from his chair.

Ryusui had the tender running by ten. The yacht waited in the morning light, impossibly pristine for something that had spent a night anchored near a camping situation involving Gen and two cases of margarita mix.

You were the last one to the tender.

You stood on the shore for a moment before you got in, looking back at the island — at the tree line, at the path that led to the hole that led to the passage that led to the moon pool. Your moon pool. Your safe place.

The word still weighing heavy in your mind.

You got in the tender.

The boat ride home arranged itself naturally, the way things did when a group of people had spent enough time together to stop being deliberate about where they ended up. Ryusui at the helm, obviously. Francois wherever Francois needed to be. Taiju on the deck doing something enthusiastic involving the rigging that Ryusui kept directing.

Gen found a sun lounger and ended up horizontal immediately with the focused intention of a man healing.

And Yuzuriha found you.

Or you found her. It was hard to say which — you’d both ended up at the stern with your backs to the wind, her sketchbook open on her knees, you with your oceanography notes because you had a test in two weeks and the Treasure Island detour had not made that go away.

“Can I ask you something?” Yuzuriha said, pencil moving.

“Sure.”

“The kelp forest stuff you were talking about last night.” She glanced up. “The bleaching. Is it as bad as the reports say?”

And you were off.

Twenty minutes later you were talking with your hands about thermal stratification and sea urchin population explosions and the specific grief of watching an ecosystem you loved dismantle itself from the outside in, and Yuzuriha was listening with the focused, genuine attention of someone who was actually hearing you — not just waiting for a pause to say something, but hearing — and asking questions that were smart and engaged and led you somewhere further than you’d expected to go.

She cared. She genuinely cared. Not because it was your thing or because she was being polite, but because you’d made her care by talking about it, and she was the kind of person who, once something got in, let it all the way in.

You thought — again, more certainly this time — oh. I really like her.

At some point you looked up and found Senku across the deck, sitting against the hull with his notebook open, watching you.

Not with the data-collection look. Something else. Something quieter, that he redirected immediately when your eyes met, back to the notebook, pencil moving.

You looked back at Yuzuriha.

“So the restoration projects,” she said, “are any of them actually working?”

You told her about the ones that were.

By the time you docked, you had each other’s numbers. Yuzuriha had three pages of notes in her sketchbook that weren’t sketches. And you had the specific warm feeling of a friendship that had arrived without announcement and intended to stay.

Senku walked beside you off the dock and said “it’s good that you and Yuzuriha get along” in the tone of someone making an observation they were genuinely pleased about, and you said “yeah” and meant it, and he went back to his notebook, and Gen watched the two of you from behind his sunglasses and said absolutely nothing.

The walk back to campus was uneventful. What was once comfortable silence was now clawing at you.

“I think I’m going to head to my room and take a bath” you said.

Senku looked up from his phone. “The samples need cataloguing. I was going to—”

“Tomorrow,” you said. “I’m exhausted. I want a bath and my own bed.”

He looked at you for a moment with the assessing quality that usually meant he was running some kind of internal calculation. Then he nodded, looked back at his phone.

“Tomorrow,” he agreed.

You walked away.

Behind you, Gen stood very still for exactly one second.

Then he fell into step beside Senku, hands in his pockets, and said nothing, which was the loudest thing he could have done.

Spring break ended. The semester resumed. And Senku, buried to his eyebrows in Treasure Island sample data, did not immediately notice that something had changed.

He noticed on Monday.

He’d come to your room at six thirty the way he always did — key in hand, full intention of waking you up with whatever hypothesis had occurred to him between the gym and your door — and found the room empty. Bed made. Everything tidy—very unusual for you. No sign of recent occupation.

He stood in the doorway for a moment.

Then he pulled out his phone, texted where are you, and went to class.

Your response came forty minutes later: library. early start.

Reasonable. He filed it under reasonable and went back to his notes.

By Tuesday he’d missed you at your morning lecture, at the dining hall at lunch — you’d been there, apparently, Taiju had seen you, you’d left before Senku arrived — and at the spot outside your oceanography seminar where he’d taken to waiting when his schedule allowed.

By Wednesday he was starting to not file things under reasonable.

Study group, you texted, when he asked where you were at dinner. Sorry, forgot to mention.

He read it three times.

You never forgot to mention things. You had a color coded calendar now, courtesy of Senku. You were, if anything, over-communicative about your schedule because the schedule was load-bearing in a way it wasn’t for most people.

He put his phone down. Picked up the sample data. Put it back down.

By Thursday he was at your psych classroom twenty minutes before the end of lecture, leaning against the wall, watching the door. He’d been at your morning lab — you’d been there, professional and present and completely correct in every interaction, and had left the moment the session ended before he’d finished packing up his equipment — and he’d spent the intervening hours trying to identify the variable that had changed and coming up with nothing.

The classroom door opened. Students filed out.

You were not among them.

He straightened. Looked at the door. Looked at the students still coming out.

Gen appeared in the doorway last, took one look at him, and stopped.

Looked at the door behind him, where the classroom was now empty.

Looked back at Senku.

“Senku,” he said.

“She’s not—”

“No,” Gen agreed “She left after she finished the test.”

A pause.

“What did you do,” Gen said. Not unkindly. Just — directly. The way you asked a question when you already had an idea what the answer was.

Senku opened his mouth.

Closed it.

And said, for possibly the first time in his life, with complete and genuine uncertainty:

“I don’t know.”

Gen looked at him for a long moment. Then he tilted his head toward the stairwell.

“Walk with me,” he said.

They found an empty study room on the second floor. Gen sat on the table. Senku stood, which was how he thought better, and waited.

“I found the notebook,” Gen said. “On the camping table. In the morning.”

Senku went very still.

“I read some of it,” Gen said, which they both understood to mean he’d read quite a lot of it. “The early entries. From high school.”

He watched Senku’s expression do something complicated.

“There was one,” Gen said, carefully, “about a water bottle. In the lab. Your shared lab...”

The stillness in Senku shifted into something different.

“It was a controlled observation,” Senku said. “I needed to know how she’d react if the exposure was accidentall. Whether the system she’d built was reflex or deliberate. It was data I—”

“You spilled it on purpose,” Gen said.

“It was a controlled—”

“Senku.”

A pause.

“Yes,” Senku said.

Gen nodded slowly. “She found the notebook on the camping table too.”

The silence that followed was the kind that had weight and edges.

“She read it,” Senku said. It wasn’t a question.

“That would be my guess,” Gen said. “Given.” He gestured at the general situation. The empty psych classroom. At the four days of missed dinners and early library starts and study groups that may or may not have existed.

Senku was already moving toward the door.

He didn’t knock.

He used his key, which in retrospect he would identify as the first mistake, and pushed into your room to find you at your desk with your oceanography textbook open and your highlighter in your hand and the expression of someone who had known this was coming and had been waiting for it anyway.

You looked at him.

He looked at you.

He was breathing heavy about to speak when you said:

“I read the notebook”.

“I know. That’s why I’m—”

“The whole thing,” you said. “Or enough of it.”

Something in his expression shifted. Recalibrating.

“Okay,” he said, carefully. “What—”

“Subject,” you said.

He blinked.

“I’m sorry?”

“That’s what I am in there.” Your voice was very steady. You’d had four days to make it steady. “Subject response to cold water. Subject lateral fin movement. Subject expresses distress.” You set the highlighter down. “Subject.”

He stared at you.

“That’s—” he started, and then stopped, and you could see him trying to locate the problem, trying to find the logical error in your reasoning, and the fact that he had to look for it said everything.

“I was so stupid,” you said, and your voice stayed steady, which was the thing you were most proud of in the moment given you were holding back tears.

“I actually thought—” you stopped. Shook your head. “It doesn’t matter what I thought. The point is I read your notes and I understand now. And it’s fine. You’ve been incredibly helpful and I appreciate everything you’ve done but I think we’re done—”

“You think I only care about you because you’re a mermaid,” he said.

Not a question. Flat. Like he’d just identified the variable.

“I think that’s when you started caring,” you said. “Yes.”

“That’s—” he stopped. And then — and this was the thing you would replay later in the exact awful slow motion of moments that go wrong — he almost laughed. Not cruelly. Not deliberately. Just the brief involuntary exhale of someone who has braced for one problem and found a completely different one. “You’re being irrational.”

The room went very quiet.

“I’m being—”

“The conclusion doesn’t follow from the evidence. The notebook terminology is scientific shorthand, it doesn’t indicate—”

“Stop” you told him.

“Y/N—”

“I think you should go.” Still steady. Still even. “Please.”

He looked at you. Something moved through his expression — the beginning of something, reaching for words that weren’t coming fast enough, the rare and disorienting experience of being in a situation his brain couldn’t solve in real time.

“It wasn’t a suggestion,” you said.

He turned and left.

The door clicked shut behind him.

You sat at your desk for a long moment, highlighter in hand, oceanography textbook open to a page you hadn’t been reading.

Then you put your head down on your arms.

And the steadiness, which had held for days and through the whole conversation, finally ran out.

He went back to his room.

He sat at his desk with the Treasure Island samples and told himself you needed time to cool down. That was how this worked — you’d said something, he’d said something, the emotional response was running hot and once it leveled out you’d be able to look at it logically and see that the conclusion you’d drawn was incorrect and he could explain properly.

He’d give it a day. Maybe two.

He opened his notebook and stared at the page and did not write anything for quite a long time.

Saturday night Gen knocked on his door.

“What did you do to make her leave?” he said, when Senku opened it.

“She needed time to—”

“She’s at her parents’ house, Senku.”

Senku looked at him.

“She told me when I tried to take her out tonight,” Gen said. “Going to see her parents. Needed some air. Those were the words she used.” He tilted his head. “What happened.”

Senku told him. Flat, sequential, the facts as they had presented themselves. The notebook. The subject terminology. What you’d said. What he’d said.

Gen listened to all of it without interrupting.

When Senku finished, Gen was quiet for a moment.

Then he said, with the specific measured patience of someone trying very hard not to say the first thing that came to mind:

“For someone with such a high IQ—”

Senku cut him off “Don’t.”

“You called her irrational.”

“The conclusion she drew was—”

“She told you she felt like a specimen,” Gen said. “And you told her she was being irrational.” A pause. “And then you laughed.”

“I didn’t—it wasn’t a laugh, it was an involuntary—”

“Senku.”

Silence.

“You’re an idiot,” Gen said.

“Shut up,” Senku said.

Gen shut up. But he stayed, and sat on the edge of Senku’s desk, and didn’t leave for a long time.

You came back Sunday.

You didn’t tell anyone. You went straight to your room, dropped your bag, and then kept moving, because your room felt claustrophobic and you needed somewhere that didn’t.

The moon pool was four hours away by boat.

You were faster than boats.

You told yourself it would just be a few hours. You’d swim out, spend some time in the pool, clear your head, be back before the morning. You had an eight AM class on Monday and the lab at 11 and you were absolutely not going to let this situation with Senku affect your grades.

You were there by late evening.

The moon pool was exactly as it always was. The disc of sky above it dark and salted with stars, the water warm and still, the rock smooth under your hands. You pulled yourself up onto your favorite flat rock and lay back and looked at the stars through the opening and breathed.

This was the place where everything had changed.

You’d spent six years being afraid of that fact. Running from it, managing it, building systems around it.

And then someone had shown up with a notebook and a laundry cart and you’d let yourself stop being afraid for a little while.

Subject.

You closed your eyes.

You weren’t sure how long you lay there before you fell asleep. Long enough for the stars to move. Long enough for the fear and the hurt and the wanting to all run down into something quieter, something that was almost just — tired.

Long enough for Monday to arrive.

You woke to pale early light coming through the opening and the immediate, lurching awareness that it was later than it should be.

You grabbed your phone. Waterproof case, thank god.

5:58 AM.

“Okay,” you said, to nobody. “Okay. Eight AM class. a little over an hour back.” You were already pulling yourself to the edge of the pool. “If I go now and go fast—”

You slipped into the moon pool and out into the open water.

Just before you sped off something caught you.

Something from outside —something that closed around your tail with the specific mechanical grip of—

Net.

The word arrived in your brain with horrible clarity at the same moment the net contracted and you understood, with the particular cold calm of a person whose system has just encountered a scenario it did not account for, that you were not going anywhere.

You grabbed your phone from around your neck.

You tried to unlock it but it wouldn’t respond to touch under water. Then as the net moved up the phone ripped from its neck strap and fell through one of the small openings.

You watched it sink.

The small white rectangle tumbling slowly down into the dark water below you, getting smaller, and smaller, and then gone.

You were alone. You were caught.

You stopped panicking because panicking used energy and energy was the one thing you needed to conserve. You assessed instead, the way you’d always assessed — methodically, without feeling, just the facts as they presented themselves.

The net was strong. Commercial grade. The kind used for large catches, not incidental ones. Whoever had put it here had put it here deliberately and knew what they were doing.

The moon pool entrance was behind you, blocked now by the net’s positioning.

You could not transform back — you were in open water and the worst part was:

Nobody knew where you were.

He noticed at 11:04 AM.

Lab started at eleven. By 11:03 he’d catalogued her absence as avoidance — understandable, expected, he’d give her the run down and notes and they’d talk after — and had turned back to start on the days classwork.

By 11:04 something shifted.

He put his pencil down.

She had a test in a week. They had lab reports due. She would not skip lab over a fight. She would not risk her grade over—

He stood up.

His stool scraped back loud enough that the students at the stations around him looked up. He was already across the room. The door swung shut behind him and he was in the hallway with his phone in his hand, calling before he’d fully decided to.

Gen picked up on the first ring.

“She’s not in lab,” Senku said.

A beat of silence. One single beat.

“I’ll meet you outside,” Gen said, and hung up.

They stood outside the science building in the late morning sun and tried her number.

It rang.

And rang.

And rang.

No voicemail. No click of it connecting to an automated message. Just — ringing, endlessly, into nothing.

“It should have gone to voicemail,” Gen said.

He said it quietly, almost to himself, but Senku heard it and the same cold calculation ran through his head simultaneously — a phone that rang out without hitting voicemail was a phone that existed somewhere without a network connection. Somewhere underground—Somewhere underwater.

Somewhere it had no business being on a Monday morning when she had classes.

They looked at each other.

“Treasure Island,” Senku said.

“You don’t know that—”

“Where else would she go?” He was already moving. “When everything falls apart. Where else would she go.”

Gen didn’t answer because they both knew the answer. He’d read enough of the notebook to know.

They were already walking fast when Ryusui came around the corner of the building with his duffel bag and the unhurried expression of a man between commitments.

He took one look at them and stopped.

“What’s happening,” he said.

Senku and Gen looked at each other.

One second.

“We need your office,” Senku said. “And then we need your boat.”

Ryusui’s university office looked out over the water.

Senku told him everything — all of it, your tail, the moon pool, the real reason for going to treasure island, the fight the two of them had, and the never ending dial tone. Ryusui listened to every word with the still, focused attention of a man filing information as fast as it arrived.

When Senku finished, Ryusui looked at the water outside his window for a moment.

“You think she’s at Treasure Island,” he said.

“She goes there when she needs to be alone,” Senku said. “And I think something happened.”

He met Ryusui’s eyes. “She wouldn’t miss her classes.”

Ryusui held his gaze for a long moment. He knew his student. And Senku was right, she never missed class—ever.

Then he stood up, reached for his duffle, and said —

“Francois will meet us at the dock.”

The yacht’s max speed was 76 knots.

Ryusui had never pushed the engine this hard and did not appear to be thinking about the engine at all. He stood at the helm with his jaw set and his eyes on the horizon and his hands on the wheel with the particular quality of someone who had located their most serious self and was operating entirely from there.

Nobody spoke much.

Gen was holding tight to the railing, trying her number every fifteen minutes. Straight to endless ringing, every time. He’d look at the phone, look at the horizon, put it back in his pocket.

Francois had appeared at the dock with a bag that clinked and another that didn’t and had not explained the contents of either. They stood near the stern, steady despite the speed, watching the water.

Senku was at the bow.

He’d been at the bow since they left the dock. The wind at this speed was significant, spray coming over the rail, and he didn’t move. Just stood there with his hands on the railing and his eyes on the water ahead and thought about a lot of things he should have said differently and a lot of things he should have understood faster and the girl who had let him into the most private place she had and trusted him with the most terrifying thing about herself and deserved —

Ryusui interrupted his train of thought by shouting from the helm.

“There.”

They all looked.

The ship was large and white and clearly, professionally labeled — PACIFIC RESEARCH INSTITUTE — MARINE BIOLOGY DIVISION — anchored in the water not far from the coast of Treasure Island. Official. Funded. Equipped. The kind of operation that had resources and people who knew exactly what to do with an unprecedented discovery.

The kind of operation that would call her a subject and mean it.

Nobody said anything.

Senku’s hands tightened on the railing.

Gen looked at the ship. Looked at Senku. Looked at Ryusui.

Ryusui looked at the ship for a long moment. Then he looked at all of them, one by one, with the expression of a man who has made a decision he intends to keep.

“Alright,” he said quietly.

“We’re getting her back,” Senku said.

“Yes,” Ryusui agreed. “We are.”