Work Text:
Pen thinks she’s finally lost him when a man built with half a ton of well-used muscle and gravity-defying spikes of black hair drops into her booth with a pleasant smile on his face. It’s a really nice smile, surprisingly straight white teeth against freckled brown skin, the sort of smile of a person who smiles often not for practice but because he means it. Nice enough that in other circumstances, Pen would believe him to genuinely be a pleasant person by his smile alone.
But she’s caught few enough glimpses of him over the last month that Pen knows, whoever this man is, he is the opposite of pleasant. Anyone with the sort of calm, cold, deliberate stalking, circling her in until she’s caged herself like a rabbit hunted by a wolfhound until it is stuck frozen and shivering and only able to wait—someone capable of that can’t be pleasant. That he did so while wearing a bright orange shirt under a forest green vest is more embarrassing to Pen than anything else. She should have seen that.
“I promise I won’t stop you if you try to leave, but at least let me pay for your lunch,” he says. “You haven’t had a good meal since you noticed me following you.”
She folds the rabbit shivers into the pit of her stomach and hopes they stay there. She’s a Hunter, dammit, not some meek prey. “And whose fault is that?”
“Yours, I think.” He flips open the menu, front teeth gnawing on his bottom lip as he looks over the diner’s fairly mediocre selection of salads and sandwiches. “And mine, and the person who hired me. But mostly yours. I’ve been eating less, too. You’re really hard to keep track of!”
He says it like it’s a massive compliment, beaming at her with an absolutely ridiculous amount of pride. Pen wants to punch it off his face, but the scars on his arms and the healed break in his nose make it obvious that a punch won’t do more than annoy at best and infuriate at worst. She doesn’t catch any feeling of aura, not more than any other well-trained tracker, but that scares her even more than his smile.
Pen doesn’t actually hate being scared. It’s served her well in the past, made her sharp, kept her alive at the worst points of her life. But a month of being constantly on that edge has dulled it until what little advantage she has is useless and painful. She’s tired. And a hot meal sounds really, distractingly tempting, especially when—”Waffles?”
The man’s smile changes briefly into something warm and brilliant. “With whipped cream and chocolate chips. They’re really good. My best friend would love it.” He closes his menu and signals the waiter, who waves cheerfully. The few other customers are out of earshot, studiously munching on oversized sandwiches and slurping soups rather than trying to listen in on any conversations. Pen realizes with growing dismay that she didn’t just get caught in a diner in the middle of nowhere, she got caught in a diner that her hunter has been to before and befriended the staff. He may as well have planned this. Hells, he probably did.
Danger danger danger! cries the little rabbit in her stomach.
“So?” he asks. “Would you like lunch? Or do you want to leave?”
This is a bad idea. One with damning consequences if Pen doesn’t play her hand right. But it has been so long since she had warm food and the waiter is coming over anyways.
She orders the waffles with extra blueberries. They’re out of season. She’s not paying. The Hunter gets a funny look on his face, like he’s trying not to laugh, and orders a salad in a way that is probably meant to be argumentative. Whatever it is, it’s an argument Pen doesn’t hear and doesn’t care about. If he wants to talk, he can talk.
Instead, he reaches into his backpack and pulls out a small file and an old phone, a thick one with unbreakable glass that weigh almost enough to be used as a weapon without even bothering with nen. It’s not the phone Pen would pick, but it probably could pick up a cell signal in the middle of a desert or buried under a missile silo. He sticks his tongue out at whatever message he’s received before tucking it back into a pocket and rifling through the file. “Did you get the tattoos after the Hunter Exam?” he asks.
She bristles instinctively and does not slap her hands over her tattoos, partly because at least a few of the marks would take offense and try to stab her. Instead, the bear and dragon whisper across her skin, fangs and claws bared. They’re hers. They are her. “What’s it to you?” she demands.
He grins, eyes tracing the dragon as it loops around her left arm from her shoulder all the way to her wrist. It originally came from her back, so there’s more of it than can possibly fit on her arm. Unleashed, it’s almost unstoppable. For now, it’s content to be color dyed into her skin. “I thought it was pretty. It’s not like a lot of hatsu, you know?”
She doesn’t bother to answer that. It’s not his right. She doesn’t even know this man’s name, doesn’t know anything about him other than he’s more powerful than he seems and has been chasing her. “You were hired to find me,” she says.
“Mm-hm.” He sips at one of the cups of ice water.
“Then you know what I did before I ran.”
He nods. “You’ve killed ten people in Padokea, including one administrator and most of his staff.”
“And I’d do it again if I could,” Pen says. She sets her jaw defiantly, the tattoos on her skin crawling with the desire to get out and restrain this man, this Hunter. But he still has that pleasant, almost vacant look on his face, shifting only slightly to thank the waiter as they set down a stack of waffles nearly up to Pen’s nose and a massive salad. The overwhelming smell of butter and syrup alone is almost enough to make Pen forget where she is or who she’s talking to—it's a veritable pillow of waffles, golden brown and fluffy and this is not at all what she should be focused on.
The man shrugs and slips the papers back into his bag, plopping it into the corner of his side of the booth before stabbing at his lunch of rabbit food dressed up with chicken. “I know. And I’d let you do it, I think.”
Those are words she doesn’t expect to hear, least of all from a Hunter whose only goal for the last four weeks has been to hunt her. She shoves half of the waffles into her mouth to give herself time to think, and the man laughs a little, twiddling his fork between bites of lettuce and nuts. “Why would you do that?” she manages once most of the food is down her throat.
“Well, this has been a fun hunt!”
Pen chokes. She blames the whipped cream. “Fun.”
“Sure! You are pretty good at staying off anyone’s radar, although you’re a little better at it in cities than forests, so you shouldn’t have left Yorknew. But this has been way better than most things the Association hires me for. I normally get hired to deal with tax evasion—some Hunters hate that the Association can tie us to them with finicky rules, so they hide where they think no one can find them.” He makes a face, nose scrunched up in displeasure. “The worst ones are the ones who don’t want to be paid.”
“Who wouldn’t want to be paid?” Pen asks incredulously.
“My friend Leorio says idiots, mostly.”
Pen bursts out laughing, then immediately remembers she’s not supposed to be even talking with her hunter, let alone laughing with him. “So if you wouldn’t stop me from murdering those people in their offices, why can’t you let me go?”
“Oh, I’m not here because of the murders!” The genuine warm smile is back on his face, a little sheepish. “I’m sorry. That would have made things easier if I could have explained it.”
“So it’s my fault for running?”
The man takes a long slurp of water, ice cracking. He doesn’t say anything, but he doesn’t need to either. It's infuriating.
Pen jabs her fork into the table hard enough that the cheap metal goes right through the thick plastic with a resounding crack, and the few other people in the diner all jump in their seats. “I didn’t have any other choice! If I hadn’t run, then someone else might’ve been blamed. I did it, it’s my fault.”
The man doesn’t even blink. “Okay,” he says.
“They deserved to die.”
“It’s not my call.”
“But it was mine?”
The man sets down his glass and looks Pen in the eye. His eyes are level, and calm, and horrifyingly cold, like they’ve sucked all the warmth out of his face. “If you made it, it was yours. If someone else told you to do it, you had a choice too. If you think it was worth it, and you still think so, then that’s what you think.” Pen can’t fight the shivers crawling out of her stomach. “If I was hunting you for your murders, I would have found you much sooner and asked you about them. And if what you said isn’t true, then there’d be a problem.”
Problem. Hunters have good instincts, most of the time. Pen’s have kept her alive for her whole life, helped her dye her skin with nen-laced ink and let her fight her way out of worse places than a diner booth. And her instincts are telling her this man has killed over problems—not liked it much, maybe, but he has, and he won’t hesitate to do it again, and then he’ll move on as simply as though squashing an ant.
“Am I a problem?” she asks, hating how small her voice sounds. Her tattoo made of bladed teeth circles from its place around her bicep and loops around her wrist, tightening worryingly over her pulse. Problem or not, scared rabbit or not, she won’t let anyone take her without a fight.
He laughs again, and light returns to his eyes as though it had never left, easy smile on his face open and genuine once again. “Just for the person who hired me. But I don’t think she minds. She did hire me, after all.” He passes over a small card. Pen’s picture is on one side, a rare smile on her own face and hair a different color than it is now. She doesn’t remember having this picture taken, but she recognizes the festival, colorful lanterns illuminating the dragon dancing across her neck and shoulders. It had been right after the Hunter Exam, when things seemed good, before…
On the other side is her name scrawled in a familiar hand, and the words Please bring her back.
“We can keep going, if you want. I meant it when I said this has been fun.”
“I…” Pen clenches her fist over the photograph. Her heart aches—not for the first time, but more sharply than it has in weeks. Maybe she hasn’t completely drowned her sorrows yet. “How did she find you? Syl’s not a Hunter, she can’t afford someone like you.”
The man shrugs. “Friend of a friend. I think? And a hunt this good pays for itself.” He grimaces. “This is much better than the Association’s jobs. I charge them as much as I can because most of those are about yelling loudly at other Hunters, not about hunting. I like hunting, or I wouldn’t be a Hunter.”
“Makes sense.”
“Do you like being a Hunter, Pen?”
Pen drops the photo of herself. It settles, crumpled and smiling, against the cheap diner table. The man simply watches with the sides of his lips turned up, attentive and patient like he actually cares about this. And the scary thing is, even scarier than the unsettling conviction lurking inside his smile, is that Pen believes he does. She wants to tell him how she always looked up to Hunters as people who could do anything they wanted. That the Exam had been everything she’d ever dreamed. That when she had seen that asinine twit take advantage—
Hunters can do anything they want. Pen’s a Hunter. She did. For a while, that’s all she did, not caring about anyone else except what she wanted. And that’s still what she did, taking matters into her own hands when no one else would stop her. So she doesn’t regret the feeling of teeth and claws and chains tearing through his flesh, filtered through her tattoos made real with nen and fury. That man, his accomplices, all of them, they deserved what they got.
She regrets the look on her sister’s face as she stood there, blood covering even the darkest ink of her tattoos, sirens blaring and people shouting.
Pen wants to tell this strange, terrifying, kind-seeming man that she’s a Hunter because of that. But she doesn’t.
Instead she says, “It’s not your business, Hunter.”
He holds her gaze for another moment, staring straight through the back of her head to the blood that’s long since washed off, before breaking away with a small sigh. “I guess not,” he says, and just like that, lets it go. Pen’s almost jealous at how easily it slips away from him, water off a duck or under a bridge.
She's still quiet when the check comes, and the Hunter counts out a scattering of cash. Coins rattle in distracted circles across the table. “So? Do you want to keep going?” he says.
“Going?”
“You never answered my question earlier, if you want to keep going on this hunt.” He props his chin up on a fist, wistful smile on his lips. “But I think Syl misses you.”
“I—” Pen carefully picks the photo back up, turns it over to look at the scrawl her sister calls handwriting. “Do you have people you miss, Hunter?”
He smiles brightly, almost brilliant in the afternoon sun shining through the windows. “I do. But sometimes, you need to go hunting, you know? Find something new. Make new friends. Chase something exciting.” He holds out his hand. “I miss them, and they miss me too, but we all have our own stuff to chase. I can go home whenever you’re ready.”
She takes it, and his hand is warm and solid and scattered with callouses and scars. “I’ll think about it.”
“Promise?”
She smiles before she can stop it. “I promise.”
“Then I’ll wait at the airship for a day. There’s a seat for you if you want it.” Her hand shakes up and down three times before he drops it.
They’re most of the way out of the diner (the server and the waitstaff stop him to shove a massive takeaway box into his hands, despite his protests) when Pen finally asks, “If I’m accepting the ticket—maybe,” she adds hastily, because she has to think about this, and the man’s wide grin is not enough to convince her. “If I do, what name is it under?”
“Oh, sorry!” He rubs the back of his head bashfully. “I’m really bad with introductions, and I already knew your name too. My name’s Gon. It’s nice to meet you, Pen! Formally, at least.”
“You are a very strange Hunter, Gon—” Pen halts, half a foot still in the diner. The man—Hunter—Gon stops and stares, about to ask what’s wrong when she blurts out, “You’re Gon Freecss???”
He blinks innocently. “Yeah?”
She’d had Gon Freecss after her. This whole time. There are stories told in the Association, rumors and tall tales and things that can’t possibly be true. But Pen’s tattoos come to life, and there is a Hunter with no nen who is somehow all the more terrifying for it. Pen almost feels relieved, that it took someone like him to track her. But that means her sister knows someone who knows Freecss, and Pen…can’t really consider that right now.
“I’m going home,” she says, and storms past him, perfectly aware that the dragon on her back loops up her neck to hiss at the very confused Hunter left standing in the dust.