voidtreckerexpress | [open] and if it gets too rough, just yell

"Not particularly." Senku responded. "I'm just working on a project." He didn't play that much.

"If you want me to go..." He waved his hand. "I can leave."

"It's... up to you," he says, head down and sheepish. "Don't wanna keep you if you're busy. We're not gonna do anything to the place."

He waves a hand saying that, a pause before he explains-

"Well, nothing other than this." Since. Yeah. He's already done things, but you know. He plops himself down, catching on a wet patching of the carpeting. Makes a small face, but can't find it in himself to care that much.

"You ever can't stop thinking about something though, you don't know what to do?"

"I'm always busy." Senku snorted and waved his hand a bit with a bit of a smirk.

He approached then, considering the question.

"I often have things I have to think about and I think about them on a loop, trying to pick them apart and find solutions."

"Yeah?" He thinks about that, looking from Senku to the wall. Arms resting on his legs, giving him a slouch.

"What about...you know what the solution is, but it pisses you off anyway?" There's a light note to it, like a joke.

"Yeah." Senku answered. "Sometimes I make decisions I don't like. Sometimes I'm backed into a corner. Sometimes we're making the best of a bad scenario."

"So, you just pick those apart 'til you have to do them?" So it sounds, by that response. Or so Tidus is assuming.

"I try and look at every problem from every angle I can. Especially if I don't like the answer. Then I try and examine it some more, in maybe a very human attempt to find an alternative."

Senku sighed and approached, taking a seat.

"Sometimes, there just isn't one." He considered for a moment. His life wasn't much of a secret, especially not at home where he had no privacy and every decision was heavy on his shoulders.

"I know I didn't tell you, but I had to kill someone. There wasn't an alternative choice."

"...I'm sorry."

He says it first, but not right away. Face neither showing surprise or disgust, or anything particularly different. Takes a moment to ask:

"What happened?"

"He was my enemy, but that's not why. We're not enemies anymore." Senku explained with a headshake.

"But, during our fight, once we'd reached stalemate and had a ceasefire in place, someone betrayed him and he was stabbed through with a spear. We subdued Hyouga together, but he was severely injured. I performed surgery in an effort to spare him, but unfortunately while I could repair the damage, there was nothing I could do about sepsis."

Senku exhaled. "Sepsis is a post-surgical infection and what I needed to fight it, I just didn't have. So...I came up with a plan. I want to use the petrification to bring him back. It heals mortal wounds." No one should ask how he knows that.

"But the deal is that I needed him to die first. So I made him comfortable. He would've died anyway but I did what I could and then I froze him. It was over a year ago. It was...the only dark spot on what was otherwise a bloodless encounter. But it doesn't matter. Before we were enemies we were friends and I-" He considered him a friend. He respected Tsukasa.

"He has a chance now, right?" Tidus cuts into words Senku's already cut off for himself. "You took a chance, you did what you could - he didn't have anything else."

And isn't that better than nothing else? A hope - even if it doesn't work, no one can say that Senku didn't try. Even if maybe Senku won't be able to be satisfied, even with all the options he knew he looked at.

But Tidus wonders, eyes on the split between wall and carpet, the water oozing and turning the material dark. "You ever had to fight someone to kill them? No alternatives?"

"From what he said, I think he thinks if he doesn't come back it's okay. Partly because of what he did, which was attempt to murder hundreds of people, and because he did kill me so he said it's only fair if I am the one who ended his life." Senku shook his head a little.

"Yeah. We got what we needed. Gen tells me it worked. He's from further in time so it was a good gamble. Tsukasa's going to be okay. I just won't ever forget what that was like, to walk someone to death." It made him softhearted, maybe, but he didn't care. That was going to be their ethos.

Senku considered his question. "In combat, they are at least trying to kill me. There's a risk it could end that way. I have a team of pacifists." He quirked a small smile. "Meaning none of them want our enemies to die so we're not looking for that. We fight to subdue. It's significantly harder than just going in and killing someone. Having a prisoner means you're deligating manpower for potentially years to look after them."

"So no. But I hate questions like that. I'm a totally stubborn guy, if someone told them I had no alternative, I'd still try to find one."

There's a scoff, low as it is. "What, after the fact? 'Cause a lot of us don't get time to find them in a fight. Sometimes, it's just you and a few people outnumbered. Sometimes you're not smart enough to do anything but put someone out of their misery."

There's a bitterness towards the end.

He knew enough to know about people that Tidus wasn't really talking about him, but something that was bothering him, he just wasn't well equipped to ask the right questions, but he could keep him talking, even if he was frustrated at him instead, maybe.

"I try to plan on contingencies, personally. If something goes wrong, I need endless back up plans. I usually need those ones anyway." He commented wryly.

"Fights aren't scripted. Battle isn't scripted. I've had to improvise. I'm lucky that my mind works a mile a minute, but I paid for that with no strength instead. I could be in serious trouble if I were cornered like that, alone."

He sighed. "The reason for taking a life won't ever change the fact that it will weigh, very heavily. I know Tsukasa's death will have been temporary. He's been on ice for a year and a half roughly. It doesn't really change how I feel about it. I'm relieved to know he's going to be okay, but it probably won't take away the nightmares." Yes, he had nightmares.

There isn't a lot that Tidus can say with that. Senku speaks, and he does it enough that Tidus's thoughts drift, a frustration there but then lost. He could agree with his last words - he gets it - but he finds himself keeping silent. Something else on his mind by then, another thought. Eyes still keeping forward, on that darkened patch of floor.

"You were wrong, what you said about Lightning. At the meeting," he clarifies; not sure if Senku would know who he means by a name alone. "Whatever you were trying to say, saying she didn't care about someone dying - you were an ass."

He leaned back on his hands then, not complaining about the subject change. "So I've heard." Tidus wasn't the first person to tell him that. Acknowledgement that he'll accept that.

"She's not right though. I'm not okay with what she said, regardless how much that makes me an ass or not."

"Well, I didn't think you were right either," he says with a tip of his head. A slight lift of his tone, but he's otherwise still sombre, dispirited than usual.

"You see a lot of things your way, and maybe that's the leader in you who tries to look at every alternative, ways to make things better. I get that. But you know? You like to accuse and throw around assumptions without even asking. You did the same with Roland and the other teams back when we talked with Gen and him. Just because Orange is one way doesn't make the other teams the same."

A beat. "You've got good ideas, but I don't agree with the way you see everything."

Senku was quiet for a moment, more out of reflection than anything. He wasn't offended that Tidus didn't think he was right. There was room for debate in there if his ideas were wrong.

"If people don't say what they mean I can't read the subtext." Senku answered, a bit of an absent murmur in his tone, but that wasn't much of an excuse. It didn't matter much.

"I've been essentially told not to bother. Perhaps that's wise advice. Have people just talk to Gen." Gen had the patience to put up with him, others probably didn't, which he thought was fair enough.

"What happened to the guy who told me he was too stubborn?"

He doesn't speak it right away, but it's said as he rises to his feet, too agitated - his body, anyway - to keep on sitting. A tension that won't leave the back of his shoulders, walking idly to try and ease it.

"You have good ideas. You want to help. I don't think you should stop. I just think..." he sighs, stopping in place. "You know what? I don't know what I think. Maybe I'm the asshole who doesn't get it. I'm not a leader; I don't know anything about them. I'm just thinking about a hundred things at once and none of it's got anything to do with me."

It's not useful to Senku, but being useless - that's all Tidus knows to be, right now. His thoughts not sticking to just one thing anymore, though they all lead back to the same issue. What's really bothering him. The tight anger in his chest, the way he wants to dig into the broken terminal he knows that's there, just tear it up and cause some more damage.

"Ah, yeah, I am stubborn. Gets me in trouble." He said with a wry little smile. The truth was just when Buttercup told him not to bother, essentially, that had hurt his feelings. It was pretty hard to hurt his feelings and get to him, but she had.

"You think, maybe, I should be less of a dick about it. Less blunt." Senku filled in. "That's got nothing to do with being a leader. I can't read people at all. Social stuff, I just get impatient. I have little impulse control. Take your pick. It's not that you're an asshole, or wrong, or not a leader. I've been hearing stuff like that my whole life."

"I might not be a typical leader, maybe, in that I never really get better at any of that, but I don't actually think I'm a bad one." Senku told him. "I know I don't come across well and I don't understand motivations. Gen, I understand, for some reason. Eva I understand because of our bond, I can feel how she feels. Everyone else is a huge question mark to me." He sighed. He didn't know how to fix that, or he would've long before now.

"Like right now, I know you're upset about something." He gestured at the destruction. "I couldn't begin to guess what. I don't think you broke things because of me." He commented wryly.

"Nah," he answers softly. "This had nothing to do with the meeting. Um, well... I didn't really start it, but."

He turns his head, feet paused from their idle pacing. It doesn't really matter who did or didn't start it - it's not like he didn't want it in the first place.

"I just don't take well to people disappearing completely. It's kinda a sore spot." To be wry in return. "I know what we've gotta do - don't let it happen, and find a way to change it."

And yet, here he is. A knocked over snake plush with a thick red forked tongue poking out cartoonishly near his feet.

"...I still hate it."

"That's the optimistic answer." Senku agreed with a bit of a nod. "And the stubborn one, if you're like me."

He doesn't move to stop him if he wants to keep knocking things over. There's not much harm in that anyway and if it makes him feel better, then...

"People want to be remembered." Senku answered. "That's only natural, I think. They like to have an impact on the world whether it's within a small group of people or a huge global scale. And they say that no matter what happens, if you had that impact, there's no way to disappear."

"I don't have vanishing in my world, but we do have death, which is the only thing I can compare it too. Loss..." He trailed off a moment. "It hurts. There is...pain associated with it. Nobody likes it, and yet, it's inevitable. Is that sort of how you feel about it?" He asked, specifically because he just got scolded for making assumptions.

Tidus is just standing, for now. Never one to be still for long, but for the time, the anger that'd turned the car into what it is now has withdrawn. Tight and persisting in his limbs, but that desire to thrash isn't in Tidus as he meanders slowly about. Pausing, not really having a destination, a point.

"...I watched it once before. I knew it was going to happen - everyone disappearing. It is death," he speaks plainly, but softly. A word he rarely likes to use for himself, but it's no longer just about him. "It doesn't feel like it, but - there's nowhere else. There's no waking up. You're just gone."

All of Zanarkand, in an instance.

"...You lost your whole life too." He doesn't know if it really compares, but he brings it up- looking somewhere over to where the untouched VR system sits, but then turning to Senku, though his gaze continues to wander than stick. "Imagine being the guy who helped end it. Then you show up somewhere, and you find out - everyone around you's been put under the same fate as everyone you knew was. I know it's not the same, but-"

But: still the heat grows, the passion, the hurt of it. Maybe he could trash things, but instead he starts moving again, a stilted pace of pausing, of clenched fists. A head bowed and jaw tight.

"I'm not you," he goes on, more emotion than reason. "I never find another way."

"You're trying to help me understand." Senku agreed with a bit of a nod. "That's also how I think about death that it's just a consequence, in the sense that it's inevitable and there's no life waiting on the other side of it. I'm not a religious guy."

He exhaled. "I didn't cause what happened to my world, but I do understand that feeling. I woke up six months before anyone else. I was alone on a planet surrounded by statues that were once people and no one was around and it-" He swallowed. He didn't like to think about that. Or talk about it. It, more than the petrification, really messed him up psychologically, and he hated that.

"One of my traits is a level of obsession and focus, so when I got it into my head that I had to save them, that's what I did. I just...did. It took a year. I know I make things seem easy, but they aren't. They weren't. I don't...want to complain about the struggles or the unpleasant things and there are a lot of them." He didn't want to focus on them.

"Still." Senku murmured. "I can't save everyone, and I guess you feel like you can't save...anyone?" He was hedging a bit, because he took Tidus' scolding to heart.

"I can't tell you what to do, I don't even want to. I have an urge to help, even though we talked about this." He smiled wryly. "The pain fades. It hasn't gone away yet, but it fades. In all of that, I lost the family I had." He exhaled. "I don't even know where I am going with this, I'm just processing or I don't know. Talking."

Tidus makes a sound. A noise of recognition, to let Senku know he's been heard before he might feel the urge to continue. But Tidus needs time himself to process Senku's points, quietly, not rushing to get anything out. The energy of his wandering becoming listless in the meantime; perhaps to do with the weight of their conversation. Both of their truths shared.

"I wondered if I could've saved them. If I told everyone what was going to happen. I didn't. I was scared. I didn't want to see them...change." Words hushing, his throat tries to close up, but Tidus takes a breath in, holds it before letting go. Starts again as pushes down on the upset that wants to take form. "I don't know we had the time anyway. My old man was losing it. He couldn't hold on. ...but it's easy to think about, when everything's too late."

He lowers into a sitting position, cross-legged. Not quite where he was, but his body somewhat turned to Senku, with distance. Silence clinging to him, his head dipped.

"We saved the rest of Spira. I know that. We saved the fayth, even with everyone we had to...kill. Strike down." He can't keep the shame out, remembering those last fights. Everything they had to do to stop and weaken Yu Yevon. He sighs, elbows resting on his knees; dragging up his hands into his hair.

"It's just... a lot. If we can find a way to-- remove the tether, stop the train, get somewhere else and stop all this -- I know that's what we have to do. I know we want to stop this. All we can do is try."

Despite trying feeling so difficult, despite trying hasn't seemed to take them anywhere.

"But-" Tidus lifts his head, looking at Senku. "-I don't want anything to happen to you. To anyone. I don't want any of you to fade. I want you and Gen to go home, Senku, I want everyone to-"

He sinks his head back down, the ends of his palms digging into his eyes, fingers gripped into his hair, his scalp. All fading is, is a countdown. An end. Everyone goes, there's no buts. And it's not the same, but- what if, what if-

His shoulders tremble.

There were a lot of reasons why Senku was not the ideal choice for a deep, emotional conversations, but at the very least he was trying. He kept quiet while Tidus got through what he wanted to say. He could, at least, somewhat relate. He knew what he'd felt when Tsukasa died, so he could at least consider that Tidus might feel similarly taking someone's life.

"It's always...easier to look back after the fact and...poke holes into things. To question things." He said softly. He didn't know what to say to offer comfort so he didn't. He was just willing to listen, if that was enough.

"I agree with you." He answered. "I don't want any harm to come to anyone here, but at the same time, there are people I need to protect at home. That comes with the territory of everything I do...so I don't want to stay here forever."

Senku exhaled slowly. "We will have to decide on a plan, then, where that doesn't happen. I don't do plans that involve sacrificing people. I won't agree to one. I know your circumstance, and I accept your choice." He added quickly, in case Tidus thought he forgot. "And I respect it. If our plan saves everyone else, and gives you what you want, I'll be happy with it."

"We'll just have to accept nothing less than that." Senku said, a bit of determination in his voice. "This is no different than any other battle to me, and I don't sacrifice anyone. Foolish though that may be, if I turned into that person, my generals would flay me, with good reason. We will find a solution we like, Tidus. That everyone is just going to fade away is not an acceptable outcome."

[open] and if it gets too rough, just yell

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