Aeonian - Oikawa Toru x Reader

Ch. 00 - Prologue: Of Stardust, We Begin

The story of humanity begins not with cells, but with atoms. It begins not with life, but the absence thereof. Humanity did not come to be because of our kicking and screaming, of demanding to be granted life; rather, it was quiet and it was calm, and it was a gradual growth with gradual change.

Just as gravity pulled matter and elements and dust together to create stars and galaxies, humanity was drawn together of stardust. Slowly, we became ourselves and as our planet came to be as we know it today, so did we.

We became complex creatures of dreams and hopes, of desires and nuances. We are truthful and dishonest, loyal and unfaithful. We are given life only for it to be stolen - either by our own making or otherwise. We are foiled upon birth, and we are doomed with our first precious breaths. And yet we are also gifted, we are lovely, and we are fervent. We are intelligent beyond our years and yet know nothing at all; we comparatively know more in this time than we have ever known before and yet with the great expanse of the universe as we know it, we have returned to knowing nothing at all.

We are of stardust, and to the stardust we shall return someday.

Our forefathers, our ancestors and our grandparents - to the dirt they have gone, and there they shall remain. We will join them someday, too. But for all of this, as our bodies are laid in their final resting places in the dirt, someday the planet will die and with it, we will be released to the cosmos once more. For us, after we pass, it shall be instantaneous and yet as long as a thousand eternities stretched thin.

We are of stardust, and it is to the stardust we must go back to.

For all its mathematical proofs, for all its statistical anomalies and the theorems we have written to prove our existence among the stars and our place on the planet as we strive to name the nameless and provide rules for the ruleless, the universe is vast, unknowable, and ultimately forgiving. It allows us to struggle to learn, knowing that we shall never know all we want to know.

It allows us to, for it knows that we must.

We strive to learn about the infinite seas of matter above and below and everywhere else because it is our home.

We are of stardust. Someday, we will go home to it.

Humans long to know the composition, the history, and the future of the universe because we were birthed of it. All of us are all of it, altogether and separate. Our way to the future lies in the past, and so it is to the past that we look.

If you were to fall into a black hole, however fortunate and unfortunate you would be, you would be able to see the universe at both the beginning and ending of time - due to its dilation. We are perhaps in a black hole now, for we look to the future and the past with equal fervor, searching for answers in and among them, between them, and outside of them.

The universe is fated to exist because logic and science and yet, for all its logic and science, there is little room for fate.

And yet, conversely, it is the ultimate proof it exists.

Because how might two souls feel to be forever bound if no physical force on earth can justify it? How can people be so drawn to each other that it hurts to be away from them if not for some greater explanation? How can strangers feel fated to meet? How can little more than a single moment of shared eye contact in passing be enough for someone to linger in the mind for days, weeks, months after?

We cannot explain it with science.

We are of stardust - and it strives to return to itself, to return to the stardust with which it was formed, to the stardust it was partnered with in the very beginning of it all.