Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Gon needs him. It’s a fundamental fact, a gemstone glowing at the center of Killua’s mind. His body has been built around it.

That’s why he walks.

The dark is clinging at him like damp fabric, it stings like Killua’s own electrified Hatsu. There’s nothing new in the sensation, it’s just another one of million things that aren’t going to kill him; it will hurt and then it will become bearable and then it will become a weapon, another one in the walking arsenal that he himself is.

He can still be a weapon if it’s to help Gon.

Pain doesn’t really scare him, but the stench is unsettling. It’s the frozen atmosphere that clusters around freshly killed bodies – not rotten already, but unequivocally dead after every trace of warmness has sunk down, to stain the neck and the soft skin behind the ears with bluish webs of lumpy blood.

The ground is as soft as sand beneath his feet and every step is like going backwards, his soles sinking in crumpled dirt. There’s something dangerous waiting, something that makes his bones tremble. He’s ready to shatter and to recompose himself with spit and spite, though. He’s ready to fight, grinding teeth and clenched fists.

That aura, it’s Illumi’s and the En of Neferpitou and everything evil. It’s dreadful and scary and blank, like the stare of the eyes that are watching him until they’re not.

They don’t see him, they’re looking at something far behind him as if Killua’s body was made of glass – like it doesn’t exist.

He squints in the black – shouldn’t he be supposed to use Gyo, to be useful? – to give a proper look at the face in the epicenter of all that darkness.

It isn’t Pitou, nor Illumi. It’s Gon.

Killua falls so fast that when he’s down he can’t remember where the up was supposed to be.

“Fuck,” he says. His lungs are shattered, eyes divided by a pain sharp as a knife, as a- “Fucking needle.”

“Killua?”

He blinks behind his own hand. Squarish bands of light slide over the bed and reach Gon’s face.

“I fell,” Killua says.

“Yeah,” says Gon, eyes wide. “Are you okay?”

Killua blinks in the sudden orange. Gon has switched the table-lamp on and he’s looking down at him like he’s ready to fight a horde of chimera ants.

“Of course,” says Killua. He just needs to free his foot from the spires of his own blanket, piece of cake. “I just… A dream, you know.”

Gon blinks. Killua can’t really remember anything but the overwhelming sense of something awful coming. And Gon’s eyes.

“A bad one?” he asks.

Maybe. He needs something like the pain scale, which is also completely useless in his case – just like the painkillers that he’d like to get for that killer headache.

Gon materializes himself on the floor and pries Killua’s fingers away from his own forehead. Then, being Gon, he takes his time in sniffing out the band-aid.

“It’s bleeding again. Did you really get hurt at the gym?”

“It’s what I said,” says Killua, to his chin. Have they ever been this close? Probably. Killua pokes Gon’s face away, but he’s already on the verge of an untimely spontaneous combustion. “Leave it alone, it’s just a hole. Tomorrow is going to be fine… Do you even know what personal space is? How did you even manage to survive entire dates with actual women?”

“Oh, actually, in my experience women appreciate when you…”

That succeeds where thousands of volts failed and Killua’s brain melts.

“Okay, my bad! Let’s just don’t talk about this ever again!”

Gon shushes him, unimpressed.

“It’s really late, we can’t be loud… You are acting strange today, are you feeling alright? Your head is warm, you can’t get sick right now, Killua!”

Killua gapes and for that one split second he remains there, paralyzed under Gon’s scrutiny and Gon’s palm pressed behind his fringe.

Something way warmer than his head threatens to creep up from his throat. He slaps Gon’s hand away and starts fussing about standing up.

“Don’t be an idiot, of course I’m not getting sick, I don’t get sick,” he says, and tries really hard to retrieve his blanket without shaking. He can still feel Gon’s eyes staring at him.

“Are you really sure that nothing happened when I was with Palm? You would tell me if something did,” he says. He sounds so certain, as if there were no other options.

Killua looks at his own hands.

“Yeah,” he blurts, and there’s sandpaper on his tongue. He can’t get sick, but he feels sick, in a way that’s completely disproportioned regarding the situation. He shrugs. “Forget it, it was just a dumb dream. Dreaming is dumb, that’s why I never do it.”

He plops himself again on the mattress and sighs. Everything is fucking fine, he’s being a baby. Stupid Illumi always manages to mess his head up, it’s old news.

Gon looks at him from his own bed, roosted on the edge of the mattress like an owl.

“You don’t dream?” he asks, a bit of curiosity in his tone. He sounds way more like himself – he hasn’t really sound that much like himself lately, not unlike Killua.

“Yeah,” Killua says. He frowns, because it’s a truthful answer. Weird. “Never really thought about that, actually. I just don’t.”

Gon nods, thoughtful. Then he sighs, wishes a good night and turns the light off.

Killua listens to him ruffling his way under the covers as if he was bracing up for hibernation.

Killua too sighs, hard.

“I can hear you thinking from here, Gon.”

Sheets rustle again.

“You don’t dream, like, ever?”

Killua opens his eyes once again. A passing car casts sliding lights over the closed shutters.

“I don’t know,” he has to admit, after a brief reconnaissance of his own memories. “I guess I do, it’s just that I usually don’t remember. Is that weird?” He then asks, uncertain.

“I don’t know,” says Gon, every other bit unsure. “I mean, I just assumed that everyone dreamed. I do, a lot.”

“You also snore a lot,” Killua says. He doesn’t add that he thinks it’s the perfect background for a night of sound sleep. He ducks the flying pillow instead and yawns.

It’s been another long, stressful day after a very long stash of really long, stressful days. Killua falls asleep in the span of the next five minutes, listening to Gon snoring softly in the background.

Knov and Morel reappear the very next day right down their hotel. Their faces are dark and their shoulders tense and Killua feels again like he’s trying to breathe amidst a raising sand storm.

They’re going to see Kite and it’s like walking over scattered bones, like Killua is going to damage something with every step he takes beside Gon.

He can’t stop looking at Gon – Gon’s back – until they see him. It. Killua isn’t sure they could still call that Kite.

He has already forgotten everything about that dream – nightmare – but Gon’s blank stare.

He can’t forget it, because it’s there on Gon’s face the moments he realizes that Kite is now that thing and it’s their fault – and the chimera ants fault, Neferpitou’s fault.

Gon says he’s going to fix it, with a stare blank as a canvas, and Killua knows he means he’s going to kill. On Gon’s face, the most commonly used word in his life finally looks like something horrible.

**

Alluka loves girly things. Earrings and bracelets, without any concern for their actual value. She makes them herself with threads and beads and shells.

Killua has a pink-ish one around his wrist, now every time he feels the need to chew on his fingernails or scrap his palms he fidgets with the rounded beads instead.

“These ones are for Nanika actually,” Alluka says as she shakes her head, grinning. The hair beads clinks like wind chimes. “She likes the sound they make.”

Killua likes it too, so he hums accordingly. It’s pretty useful to have a jingling sister, it makes really difficult to lose her in a crowd.

Luckily, after the first enthusiasm about people in general, Alluka decided that she’s not that fond of crowds, much to Killua’s relief. Crowds are too loud and it’s too easy is to sneak needle people in and being tailed and become paranoid about being tailed.

Thinking about it, Alluka probably decided she didn’t like crowd just because Killua was starting to act like a nervous wreck.

To be impartial over their next destination, Killua played darts with some skewer over a flipped map while his sister cheered on him, which was in retrospect really morbid given that it was an accurate depiction of how one of his most recent nudges at death played out. He managed to miss every single city, so Alluka based their pick on how funny the toponomy sounded.

That’s exactly why they’re stuck on a cableway headed to the very ancient ruins of Gaggli Lal, in the region of Rsopurbalarul. They’ve got there two days ago and they still didn’t grasp the correct pronunciation despite the efforts of a very helpful local lady at their inn. She made them sit down and tried to educate them over tea and cubes of chewy rice cakes.

Killua still feels pretty uneducated, but at least he’s now full of rice cakes. That tea was also pretty strong, so he might actually be able to remain fully alert while they ride the most unsafe cable car he’s ever put a foot on.

“How many cable car have you ridden in your life, brother,” Alluka asks, because she’s a pesky kid and, anyway, that’s totally not the point.

“Enough,” he says, even if they were more things like spider eagles’ webs and other unsafe suspension devices.

“Wow, brother, look! It’s so green!”

It’s more than green, it’s lush. It spikes in verdant bulging mountains that carve curves in a sky so blue it’s like looking at the ocean from Whale Island.

Gaggli Lal is an interesting archeological site and Alluka gets to ride a llama frog, which is really worth the ten years Killua’s heart loses when she kinda face-plants onto the ground instead of dismount from the ride like a normal person.

And it’s funny. Killua laughs and makes her piggy-back ride him instead of an animal to get on the peak of the hill and look down at the serpentine of a very important river with a mouthful of a name.

They roll on the grass between sandy ancient ruins and they sneeze when the wind blows pollens and archeological dust.

Killua is there, he loves to be there, with her – he wouldn’t want to be anywhere else.

And, still.

Rsopurbalarul is too forest-y. Too many insects – flying around buzzing and twirling in their language like Flutter’s dragonflies. It’s too green – green like NGL. Green like Gon.

Killua looks at the site and sees something very old and ruined – majestic in his own way, but still dead. He’s pretty fucking tired of death by now.

“I love it here, everything is so big,” Alluka says that night, over her third helpers of rice cake. It’s just them seated on the front porch, every light in the inn already turned off. She had never seen fireflies and now they’re setting the whole meadow on fire, floating around in scattered patterns.

Killua had never seen fireflies too, before Gon pointed at them back when they were in the Rokario Republic and he was arranging that whole absurd date with Palm. It seems like a lifetime ago – when Palm was human and somehow way weirder that she is now as a chimera ant, now that they are friends.

“Where is your friend Gon now?”

Killua startles, it’s almost like his own brain made the question. It’s Alluka, though, her head a jiggling, swishing cloud of dark hair in the dark.

“I… I don’t know,” says Killua. The truth feels like sandpaper on the back of his throat. “I guess he’s still with Kite’s group. He sent us that cool video with the swans, remember?”

Hair beads nod, tingling.

“Yeah, that was beautiful. This too is beautiful,” she says, and it’s like her voice is smiling, her eyes gleam at the fireflies. “Thanks, brother.”

Killua coughs rice cake and shock.

“What?”

“I think I’m happy,” she says. “I wasn’t happy before, but I didn’t… I just read happy in the books, so I wasn’t really sure. I’m not even sure happy is the right word? I’ve always been happy when I was with you, but this is something even bigger, it’s big like I can do everything.”

Killua gapes and Alluka presses his nose between two fingers, giggling.

“You’re going to eat a firefly, brother.”

Killua opts to tickle her like when she was four. Then he picks her up when she yawns one time too many and jumps over the window of their room, wood creaking when he lands with the added weight – Illumi would be so disappointed. He will never know and that’s still such a relief inside Killua’s reptile brain.

“That thing, it sounds a lot like it, but I don’t think it’s happiness,” he says, when they’re plumped down on their respective beds. “I think it’s freedom.”

Alluka hums, blissful and already half asleep. Killua blinks at the ceiling and feels his body sink in the mattress, as if there was some kind of heavy core dragging him down.

Gon texts him that night, because he doesn’t know how time zones work. He’s finally returned to Whale Island, he thinks there’s something wrong with his Nen.

Killua stares at the little pixels on the message for so long that the phone slips through his finger and smashes on his forehead.

He’s got a headache again, an itching pain lingering between his eyebrows and Illumi’s voice is still louder than the cicadas, than his own thoughts – and that isn’t true, isn’t it? Those thoughts are his and no one else’s. Illumi isn’t inside his head anymore except when he is, there, in patterns lit like streetlights thatlead his thinking over the same mistakes, to the comfort of simple choices – dead or alive, useless and useful. Black and white, no middle ground.

Killua dreams of fireflies with Illumi’s eyes and an island so small you have to be there alone or you’ll drown into an ocean of blood.

*

It’s way too awkward at first and Killua can’t see it changing anytime soon.

He strengthens his grip on the phone and leans on the balustrade, looking every bit like a casual passerby.

He’s usually pretty good on the phone, or so he used to think. He used to think he was pretty good at anything – killing and fighting and being scary, that is the same thing as being strong – before he met Gon and found out that he had spent years being trained in all the wrong things.

He’s now an illiterate jerk who doesn’t know how to elaborate sentences anymore. Gon broke him.

“I’m sorry, I just… I needed- Sorry, Killua.”

Killua looks at the phone and doesn’t know what to do, what to say. Maybe he’s him, the one who broke Gon, really.

“It’s fine,” he decides then, because that’s really, really what he would have liked for someone to say when he felt like Gon is feeling right now. Drowning inside your own mind, thoughts swirling around like a bunch of slimy eels. “You’re fine. Everything is fine.”

“I know,” Gon answers, small and hoarse and troubled, like he’s been running for his life. He’s not: he isn’t in danger and Killua has no right to get all flustered about Gon’s dreams when he has his own to take care of. “I know it is and I’m so sorry…”

“Stop apologizing. You apologized already so you don’t have to do it anymore, okay?” Killua says, but he isn’t sure Gon’s really listening. He never really does.

“I didn’t want to call, really, I just… I was scared all of the sudden because, I mean, I don’t know why, but I was and… I’m really sorry, Killua.”

“It’s okay, Illumi isn’t going to track us just because of one phone call. I’ve got my methods.” He really doesn’t, but he’s sure they made a good job of obliterating themselves from the world in the last couple months, so even if Illumi has already bribed Milluki into helping him find Killua through a phone he changed last week, he and Alluka are going to be out of this region before the sun sets.

Maybe those are his methods, so he does have some. Good to know.

Apparently, his and Gon breathes have started to sync over the line, over a couple thousand kilometers and half a continent. That static rumble that’s threating to swallow them whole must be the ocean. Killua too looks at it from the bridge, blue, distant and on the diametrically opposite side from Whale Island. It’s hot over there and the air is a mass of salty humidity.

“It’s fine,” he repeats, useless. “It’s okay to get scared and it’s okay to feel…” what? He doesn’t really know, he should just shut his dumb mouth. He knows what it means to be powerless, he’s felt powerless over Illumi and over every single person who was slightly more powerful than him for such a long time that the sensation is simply engraved in his brain.

Gon, though. Gon’s been waiting for his Nen to return, thirty days under Knuckle’s Hakoware and they felt like half a century.

Now it’s unreported, impossible to gauge – potentially permanent and isn’t that the heaviest word of all. It must be like choking back in the safe, known wilderness of Whale Island, surrounded by familiar faces and quiet nights.

It’s like he went back in time. Like Gon – the Gon Killua’s stumbled on and learned to like, know, admire, need – hasn’t even existed in the first place. Like Nanika had to remodel what was left of him into something smaller, something less. Conservation of mass and all that jazz.

“What time is it there?” Killua asks, useless. He would be powerless even with Godspeed on when it comes about this kind of stuff – being a good friend. He still hasn’t really decided what that should mean apart from understanding that his first attempt wasn’t good enough.

“Early,” Gon says. “Or late. It’s night.”

“Let’s…” he doesn’t know. He starts looking for Alluka, she’s still seated with kids smaller than her, watching the marionette show. It’s pretty disturbing, those fractured woody skeletons that move at the tip of big fingers. He would have found some excuse to bail out even if Gon hadn’t called, to run away from the afterimage of Kite’s mangled body, of Pitou’s headless murderous intent. “Why don’t you try to get some sleep and I tell you all about how many new exciting candies I tried in the last month?” He says and waits. “You there, Gon?”

“Yeah. I’ll… I was trying to meditate, before calling you. I really, really try every day.”

“Did Biscuit tell you to?”

“Mister Wing,” Gon says and it does make sense. He’s always been more at ease with him than Killua ever felt. “And I’m trying. It’s just… I can’t really concentrate these days, I guess, and at night it’s like… The ocean is really loud,” he adds, like it’s an actual explanation as to why he’s performing an international call in the middle of the night.

“You shouldn’t meditate at night, you should sleep,” Killua says and he’s pretty surprised at his own patronizing tone. “I’m sure Wing said that too.”

Gon’s laugh is a breathy thing, soft and unsure, but it still glows like stars in Killua’s mind.

“He did say I shouldn’t overdo it,” he admits, small. It’s really difficult to tell breaths apart from the waves crashing on the cliff and from the buzzing sound of Killua’s own scattered thoughts.

“Anyway, I called just to hear your voice I guess… I don’t want to keep you from Alluka,” says Gon, like the concept isn’t embarrassing at all. “I’m… I’ll try and get some sleep now, you’re right. I’m okay, really, maybe I did eat too much at dinner, Abe made this giant quiche, you know… Thanks a lot, Killua.”

“No problem,” he answers, on autopilot. “Gon,” he adds, in a whim, because that’s all he is. His whole personality in a word. “You’ll get it back, you know? Your Nen, if you want,” he says, at those thick clouds that are starting looming on his head. “You’re what, fourteen? Biscuit didn’t even know what the hell it was at our age and look at her now, she’s a beast.”

“Yeah,” he says, and the distance stretches through them like some long, unpaved road. “Thanks, Killua. I’ll go now.”

“Yeah. Goodnight. Call, if…”

“Yeah. Say hi to Alluka, and Nanika too.”

When Killua nods, useless in the damp air, Gon has already hung up.

*

It’s winter when Killua gets another really dumb job to keep their finances up and about.

He didn’t have the time to blow up the money from Greed Island, the one that Goreinu made sure made it to both his and Gon’s account, but now that he has Alluka to take care of, he feels reassured if he still got some income then or there.

He lies on the top of a tree under the blanket of a sky so blue and dry it looks like blown glass. There’s no signal, his last message is a gif from Alluka. She’s now starting to get a hang of memes and Killua’s life has become a continuous exercise in keeping up with whatever the internet throws at them – he’s failing hard.

It’s more accustomed to stuff like this. Waiting in the dark in a pretty uncomfortable position, ears perked for any sound and eyes peeled. He kills the time trying to expand his En – it’s pretty fucking hard, but everything about Nen was before he actually grasped it.

The cold is turning his claws into a stiff bundle of nerves. He’s so fucking relieved when finally the bushes start moving with growing rustles.

Killua sighs and lets himself fall down, he lands on all four in front of the other four-legged beast. It looks at him with big, yellow, scared eyes.

“Don’t worry, I’ll be quick,” says Killua, voice calm, because killing is not what he does anymore, but he’s still so fucking good at it. Like it or not, it’s just how things are. The blood warms his hands up.

He comes back at midnight sharp, a sound from his pocket notifies him that his phone is now again in working order the moment he steps on the concrete of the road, but he can’t reach for it while he’s carrying two tons of crocodile boar on his shoulder. He’s already leaving a big ass trail because he didn’t know where to put that enormous, scaled tail, so he just let it hang.

When he returns to the sprinkle of cottages that the locals call village, there’s a tingling shadow waiting on the inn’s porch.

“Brother!”

“Hey you,” he answers, and he’s happy up until he remembers that he should be scolding her. “It’s late, why are you still up!”

“So that you could ask dumb questions, brother,” Alluka says. She grins and swings her legs over the fence. “It’s so big! Was it difficult?”

Killua snorts.

“Of course not,” he says, and drops the poor bastard down. It makes a big, loud thud that frees Killua from the trouble of knocking on doors.

The locals display a lot of uncommon emotion as for Killua’s record with clients, like gratitude for saving their crops and livestock. Killua blinks appropriately and lets Alluka managing their reward, which ends up consisting of a weird variety of pickles and an entire, smelly wheel of cheese.

“We should eat everything together, we can’t really carry this thing with us,” she tries to explain, to the distraught family who seasoned it with love for over three years.

“I hoped they would pay us with money,” Killua dares to say the following day, when he’s seated down around a big campfire with his portion of roasted crocodile boar in hands.

“Gratitude and food are still pretty awesome,” says Alluka, and she seems oddly at ease, sitting crosslegged while she tries to dip her dinner in some kind of garlic-y sauce people are passing around. “And they’re paying you, not me. I didn’t do anything.”

Killua doesn’t really know what to answer to that, so he starts biting on his dinner.

“We’d like to come with you, the next time you have to do something like this? We could help,” she says – they say. Killua glances at her.

“Or you could end up dead. That would be pretty inconvenient?”

Alluka puffs her cheek.

“I would not. We’re not helpless and… You could teach us Nen, you know? Well, you could teach me, since Nanika already know how to do stuff… If I was stronger, I could protect her too.”

“I’m the one who’s supposed to protect the both of you,” Killua says. “You don’t need Nen.”

Alluka’s lips vanish in a thin line, and it’s once again like she’s a motionless doll seated among dolls.

“Am I inconvenient?” she asks, out of the blue. Killua chokes on his meat and one of the people dancing about comes to pat him on the back.

It’s proof of how much self-control he’s exercising these days if the poor guy preserves his hands and his smile intact.

“What are you talking about?” says Killua then, voice low.

Alluka fidgets with her skewer, half the meat already gone.

“I’m just… Am I boring?” she asks, to Killua dumb face. “I feel a little boring, because I know that you could be doing a lot more… exciting stuff if it wasn’t for me, that’s all.”

“You’re not boring,” Killua says.

Maybe he’s losing his mind, but suddenly he’s thinking about Gon’s face while he faced Hanzo. When Hanzo broke his arm and Gon was just so pure-and-forgiving and everyone was so relieved and everyone was laughing.

Gon is never been forgiving, he’s just always been plain crazy, but all that madness was encapsulated in the tiny body of a good-mannered twelve years old and no adult realized it. And Killua found it so fucking interesting that he didn’t think of the consequences, he thought he couldn’t judge – he’s never been good at judging, just at assessing and those are two completely different things. “Well, let’s say that you are, that is, boring,” he finds himself saying. He watches Alluka’s face crumple and it pinches something deep inside his stomach – maybe he ate some skewer piece? “I can do boring, you know? I want to do boring stuff with you. We should go to the beach,” he adds, in a sudden inspiration.

“The beach,” Alluka says, bewildered. “But, brother, it’s winter!”

Killua looks at her over the fire and beams.

“Yeah, of course it is, sister. In this hemisphere.”

Turns out he’ll have to teach her geography too. He can’t really think about anything less boring, honestly.

*

It’s stupid and disingenuous, two things that Killua could seriously ponder to write in his own curriculum under ‘other abilities’. Just right after his main abilities as an assassin, video gamer and exterminator of now classified magical beasts.

She wanted to do something together, she wanted to feel useful and accomplished and Killua wanted to make her – them – happy. It’s still really, really stupid.

“You can ask her,” Alluka says, and she’s almost pulsing. Vibrating. “She would do it for you.”

Maybe Killua’s brain is glitching instead, maybe… There’s no time. They have to decide. They have the power to decide, the both of them. The three of them. It’s kind of exhilarating – having someone’s life glued at the tip of your fingers usually is.

Killua looks at his hands, the blood is dripping too fast. It’s a bright scarlet, arterial for sure. It’s so weird, pressing on the wound instead of letting it flow. It would be so easy to just let it flow.

“Call Nanika,” he says instead. He can feel the pulse under his hands, fainter now than before. His knees hurt, he knows it’s because he’s pressing them into the concrete, but he can’t shake this feeling of hurting all over just because – like it’s some fundamental fact of life. God, he needs to sleep.

“Killua,” she’s already there. Creepy and weird, she smiles like a child – she still sounds like one too. “Pet me?”

“I would, but then I’d muck your hair up with all this blood. Alluka wouldn’t like that, wouldn’t she?”

“Would not,” Nanika says, still smiling. The wind makes her hair beads tingling onto each other. Killua is going to buy her some more when they hit the next city.

How much time would an ambulance need to come there? With Godspeed, it will take them less than ten minutes to disappear.

“Nanika, you know I don’t like giving you orders. But I need you to do something,” he says.

It’s virtually risk-free. They’re in the middle of nowhere and the man is almost dead. Hypovolemic shock will make pretty unlikely for him to remember much more than his questionable decision to climb a rock face alone and without proper equipment. What a lucky set of circumstances.

“I do!” Nanika says. She sounds pretty excited.

“Okay,” Killua says then. He looks at the man’s face. He has a pretty funny moustache. He’s probably an idiot, but Killua has killed way better people for so much less. “Okay. Heal this guy.”

“Aye! Hand, hand!” She takes it herself. Killua blinks away the afterimage of Gon’s mangled fingers, the shredded wrist like the skin had been torn off the bone.

It has to be Nen, that energy that explodes and release itself. It stomps from above and then crumbles in ripples until it’s dispersed, mixed softly in the air.

Killua’s ears are still ringing when she’s done.

He blinks, and the man is whole and maybe a bit younger, expression relaxed, bone mended and blood already drying. That will be odd to explain. And also none of Killua’s business, at least if he can have a say in the matter.

“Done!” Nanika says, and she claps at herself with pure, childish satisfaction. “I’m good, Killua?”

“Yeah, you’re awesome,” he says, totally sincere. “I promise I’ll pet you, I just have to wash my hands before.”

“Okay. I’ve seen shooting stars,” Nanika says instead. She points at the peak of the mountain. “Fun!”

“Really?” Killua asks. “You had fun with that?”

“It’s fun with Killua,” she answers, like it’s the most obvious thing. “We go now?”

“Yeah, better go before this guy asks us what the hell is going on,” he decides. He stands up and picks him up. He’s also pretty heavy, so he makes a loud thump when he leaves him on the side of the road. There he hopefully won’t be run over by a car or eaten by a coyote. He feels like he’s done more than his fair share of good actions today, so the guy will have to figure the rest out for himself.

“I’m tired,” Nanika says then. She’s nodding already.

Killua catches her and picks her up way more carefully than how he treated the Very Lucky Dumb Guy.

“You can sleep, I’ll run. Sorry if it stings,” he adds, activating Godspeed.

They’ll be out of the way in less than three seconds. The mountains and the trees, the street down his feet and the night sky above, everything blurs in saturated lines of light and shadows.

No harm done, pretty much the contrary.

Killua strengthens his grip on Alluka’s body, they’re both sleeping already.

*

It’s the perfect crime up until it isn’t.

Killua stomps on a puddle and paints it red. He looks at the frightened lady with the stroller and smiles at her baby.

“We’re filming a movie. Horror. Kind of a big deal,” he says, Alluka still soundly asleep in his arms.

Those are covered in blood too, so are Alluka’s clothes.

The woman gapes, but she’s smart enough to stroll away really fast toward others, less bloody puddles.

It occurs to Killua that he can’t exactly show up in front of a receptionist while dripping blood all over with a seemingly dead sister in his arms, so he finds a pretty decent looking hotel and then secures Alluka on his back to climb on the wall.

This whole business is starting to get pretty inconvenient pretty fast.

The balcony on the fourth floor is where Killua decides to land. He peeks at the window twice, then jumps over the parapet to look at the bathroom too. It’s quite spacious and also empty, which was the essential requirement.

He’ll have to explain the broken window, maybe, but this kind of stuff is easily explained – and repaid – when you have a hunter license. And, anyway, no one would be impressed at the copious amount of blood on a person who is, in fact, not dead. Does it make sense? It probably doesn’t. Sometimes Killua hates his family for saddling him with a sorely warped sense of what’s normal and what’s not.

“Ehi, Alluka,” he tries, while he handles the knobs over the tub to get some hot water running.

She sniffs and hugs the carpet. In all fairness, it looks really fluffy.

“Allukaaa.”

“Brother,” she says, eyes squinted. “You are really pesky.”

“And you are really bloody. You have to wash yourself.”

“Mh. I’m sleeping,” she says, pretty reasonable. “Can’t wash sleeping.”

“Yeah, whatever,” says Killua, and picks her up. “Don’t make me wash you. It would be ridiculous and also probably a bad idea.”

Alluka nods and hugs him instead of the carpet. Killua is doomed.

“There are, like, a thousand potentially deadly diseases that you could catch through blood exposition. I can’t really think about any particular one right now, but…”

Alluka opens her eyes so fast that Killua almost lets her fall in the bathtub fully clothed for real.

“Brother,” she says, eyes clouded but awake. “He was climbing without gears. What if he wasn’t climbing at all?”

Killua frowns.

“Who?”

“Mustache Guy, brother, who else?” she says. “What if he wasn’t going up, but going down?”

“You lost me. What are you… Oh,” he says, at the bathroom tiles. What if he wasn’t climbing at all.

“What if he was falling down instead?” says Alluka. “Like. On purpose.”

Killua looks at her. Her eyes are huge.

“Suicide?” he says, slowly. He frowns. “Jumping down from a mountain, during the night of the shooting stars? That’s…” Quite poetic. Pretty dumb. Also worryingly probable.

“We heard the… splat. Not the climbing up part,” Alluka says.

“Climbing isn’t an especially loud activity.”

“If you’re a Zoldyck ninja it isn’t, I guess. But if you are a climber…”

“Which climber climbs at night, anyway?” Killua adds, now openly frowning. He should have thought about it, shouldn’t he? This whole nightmare fueled insomnia business is making him each day dumber. Being dumb is fucking dangerous.

“Maybe he really wanted to see the shooting stars,” Alluka tries, because she’s the most supportive little sister ever.

Killua looks at her.

“Yeah, maybe,” he says. “No way to know now, am I right?”

The water is starting to overflow from the edge of the tub. Alluka groans and leans her forehead on the crook of his neck.

“Just drown me, brother.”

He doesn’t, but he helps her to get in the tub and then leaves the door open because he doesn’t trust her to remain awake enough to not actually drown herself by accident.

He scrubs his arms clean with too-white towels and then scrubs the pavement too because he left a lot of footprints. He’s never been that messy while dealing with blood, is that because this time it was for a – maybe – good cause? Was it a good cause? What the heck is a good cause, even? What did actually possess him to think it would have been a good idea using Nanika to fix something he hadn’t broken himself?

He needs to wash his hands. Needs to wash himself: he’s still dripping blood all over.

What was he thinking?

He’s still looking at his hands when bare feet appear in his line of vision, spilling clean water for a change.

He lifts his chin and Alluka is a soft blob bundled up in a bathrobe, hair wet and eyes sleepy.

“We sleep?”

“You sleep, sure,” Killua says. “I have to… I’ve made a bit of a mess.”

“You didn’t,” she says, between two consecutive yawns. “We didn’t know Mustache Guy was also Suicide Guy. Maybe he isn’t,” she adds, plopping onto the mattress. She bounces and sighs, exhausted and perhaps a bit satisfied. “Maybe we saved him.”

“Yeah,” Killua says. He can’t fall asleep. He has to clean himself and everything up and also go to the reception and convince the entire hotel that they want to rent that specific room until further notice – would asking for, like, three days straight of sleep be too much?

“Nanika was pretty happy to help,” Alluka says, her voice already hoarse with drowsiness.

Killua blinks. He’s still seated. His limbs weight sixty-four tons each, moving it’s like trying to open the Testing Gate and Killua is so fucking tired of tests, at this point.

“Was she?” he says, and shifts a bit on the bed. They got a double, how lucky.

Alluka nods in the pillows and yawns again.

“Yeah. She’s said that before she fell asleep… She was really tired, though. I’m tired too. Aren’t you, brother?”

Tired is, in fact, a world that Killua would use to describe himself.

“I think I am,” he says, and looks at the splotches of blood on the carpentry. He doesn’t know how to get rid of them without destroying the whole room. Maybe he will, tomorrow.

“Sleep, then,” Alluka says and she’s snoring already. Killua frowns at her face, but it’s almost like laughing because, what?

“I don’t need your permission, you know?” He says, smile creeping up. “Some sister I have, really”.

He breathes. What the hell? He’s going to turn the lights off and sleep, who cares about hotel arrangements – who cares about blood, really.

He leaves some of it on the light switch too, before falling face-first into the mattress.

It’s like floating. Maybe that’s what Mustache Guy felt while he was falling down to splat himself too close to a couple of megalomaniac siblings with a complicated agenda. Killua would like to get a peek at that too, since he isn’t really sure what his own agenda looks like right now. Maybe he should open up his own brain like Pitou did with Palm and that hunter guy who was a hunter because Killua forfeited their match that time during his first exam.

Shit. He was a hunter because of that, how fucked up is this shit, really?

“Brother?”

“Yeah, Alluka?”

“It was cool, wasn’t it? Can we do it again?” she asks, in the dark. She talks like she’s dreaming, or maybe Killua is. “On someone who wasn’t trying to kill himself, maybe.”

Killua should seriously scoot over the covers. He’s going to gain some funny crick in the neck if he falls asleep in this position.

“Maybe. I mean. Let’s hope we don’t need to.”

“Yeah,” she says, and the mattress sways under her weight. Not that much weight, but it’s soft and warm when it comes closer to Killua’s own. He’s so massively tired that he’s got his own gravity at this point. It was never like that with Gon – Gon has always been a gigantic star, always focused on burning up.

“Night, brother.”

It’s not like Gon – it’s not half bad.

They saved a life, kind of. They’re not half bad, are they?

Chapter Text

They’re going to invade the palace in less than a day and Killua is stuck.

“You’re still thinking about it?”

Gon’s voice is uncharacteristically low, barely audible above Ikalgo’s breath and the insistent rustling of the forest that surrounds the shack.

Killua feels like he should be a bit more specific, so he just shifts position to look at him in the dark. He makes out the outline of his head and nothing more, no way to know what the hell he's thinking.

“About the king hurting himself, I mean.”

“Among other things,” says Killua, a sigh creeping out of his throat.

They’re sleeping on the pavements, it smells of old wood and dust and it creaks when Gon gets closer, elbow barely brushing Killua’s own.

“You’re right, though,” he whispers. “We should concentrate on Pitou and nothing else. I tried to stay focused, as you said, so I’ll try and stay focused tomorrow too.”

“Good,” Killua says, and somehow he earns another knot in his stomach. He’s still feeling a bit nauseous after spilling all that blood just a couple days ago, but he breathes the discomfort out like it’s some annoying symptom of poisoning, something unpleasant but definitely not lethal.

He’s eaten what Gon has found in the forest and drank plenty of water, they still have some hours to scrape some sleep together and Killua’s free: even if he isn’t going to be in his best shape, he’s still going to fight with everything he’s got because Illumi’s voice won’t be there to whisper lies inside his head. Tomorrow’s fight will be his own as much as Gon’s and he’s ready to give him his everything.

“I’ll try to stay focused too,” he says then, serious. Focused on Gon, on clearing a path for him to fight, even if he still doesn’t know how he’s going to help him beating something like Pitou, Godspeed or not. “I know I seem worried, but the plan is actually pretty solid. We’ll be fine, I’ll hold the ball for you,” he ends up saying, sleepy and so fucking tired. The silence grows for one, two, three seconds until he blinks and stutters a bit.

“I mean. The… I’m tired, we should sleep.”

“Oh, that ball!” Gon says and Killua should probably just quit on every interaction forever because he’s not going to survive the stress. “You mean the dodgeball thing!”

“Yeah, sorry, don’t know why I brought it up. I’m just pretty tired, I kinda rushed from that crappy hospital to meet everyone up, you know. We really should be sleeping.”

“Yeah, you said you were in the hospital, but what happened?”

“Nothing serious, I just slept it off. Tomorrow I’ll be completely fine so you don’t have to worry about it.”

“Okay, but…”

“Let’s sleep now, Gon. You can’t stay focused if you’re tired.”

Silence and crickets. And the solid presence of Gon’s body like a gravitational force that keeps Killua’s whole world together.

“Yeah,” he says, nodding and shifting. “Of course, you’re right. Goodnight, Killua!”

“Night Gon,” he answers so, so stupid. Why bring stuff up? The dodgeball and the hospital and whatever. Those are irrelevant things, silly stuff already in the past. He has to focus.

When he wakes up, Gon is standing already, stare steady and blank. The sunbeams from the broken window are showering him in a golden halo made of dust and light as he stretches like he’s ready for a good jog instead of an actual battle.

Killua sighs the sleepiness away and sits up. His stomach is still somehow full of lead, but his head finally feels weirdly clear – he’s sure of himself, so much it’s scary and exhilarating at the same time. He’s never been so sure of himself, of what he wants to do – to be.

It doesn’t matter what weird coincidence is going to screw their plan, because Killua has another script to abide by. He’d sacrificed his hands without blinking for a game; he’s going to sacrifice everything else for Gon, no questions asked.

Ikalgo stirs too, a tentacle raised to rub at his eyes.

“Let’s go then,” Gon says to the missing door, and he’s already stepping out in the sun, leaving them inside that dim-lit shack that smells of mold and damp wood.

Ikalgo yawns, wide and loud enough to startle Killua.

“Wow, he’s pretty pumped. How are you, Killua?”

Killua stands up too and the golden dust in his sight turns into falling sparks. For the span of a second everything is upside down until he breathes again and remembers how to wear a confident smile.

He looks at Ikalgo’s big round eyes.

How is he? Of course he’s fine. He must be and the dumb knot inside his stomach needs to disappear this exact moment.

“All fixed up, thanks,” he says, Gon’s back impressed on his retinas while what’s left of the tattered rag that’s pinned to the doorjamb flaps in his trail.

Ikalgo nods, smiling too. And Killua finds himself asking if that’s the kind of look he used to direct towards Gon and when the hell happened that he found himself on the receiving end of something like that – and when the hell happened that he started losing so much ground on Gon that now his back is the only thing he can hope to see.

**

People are just in a constant need for miracles and Nanika is starting to get excited.

Killua is starting to get nervous instead. He’s taken a habit of training his En as an alternative to losing track of time while he lays uselessly awake inside hotel rooms at night.

The first time he manages to extend his aura over their room walls, it’s also the time he gets a very specific crash course about nighttime activities of hotel guests. He has always wondered what a blow-job was supposed to be, now he’s got a pretty solid idea and it looks awful.

“But Nanika wants to do it again,” Alluka says, and Killua needs to shake his head really fast to concentrate on her – and their dinner, which consists of over half a mutton folded in flatbread. Kebab has become one of his sisters’ favorites, Killua is sure they’ve eaten it in every single regional variation and fusion recipe at this point. Alluka has quite the appetite for being a scrawny child – but Killua isn’t really in the position to talk: he’s been a scrawny child in baggy clothes for most of his life at this point.

“We have to be careful, though,” he says, with his most serious voice. They’re sitting on a bench, facing rolling hills that smell of licorice. The sky is flashing purple and red and the shadows are already so deep that Alluka’s eyes look as dark as Nanika’s. “Someone sees her, gets what she can do, and we’re screwed. The three of us.”

“You really think Illumi is still after us?” Alluka asks, pensive around the biggest bite. “They said we were free to go.”

“Illumi is… He doesn’t always do what father says, you know.”

“But mostly. I know you like father,” she adds. There’s no real judgment, it’s like she isn’t even capable of judging him, most of the time. It makes Killua feel honestly worse.

“I don’t like him. But he’s rational, I can work with rational… And he keeps his word. If he said we were free to go, we are.”

“But you still worry.”

“They said we could go. Not that we could use Nanika.”

“We’re not using her! She consented. I’ve read about it,” Alluka says. She wipes her mouth with her wrist and bracelets tingle. “It’s called explicit consent and it’s…”

“I know, I know!” Killua says, hands raised. “It’s just… It’s okay if Nanika wants to feel useful. I understand that and I’m okay with helping her and help people, I guess. We just need to lay pretty low while doing it. We have to be really smart, you know.”

“We are smart,” Alluka says. “You’re pretty smart.”

“Thanks, I guess.”

He doesn’t want to be controlling – he doesn’t want to be Illumi. Nanika just wants to help and she’s good at it. Killua understands the need to feel useful on a level so fundamental that he’s bound to choke on his own hypocrisy.

Months have passed, there’s no needle inside his head anymore, and still. He was actually less scared somehow when Illumi was inside his head for real and Killua could still blame him for the never-ending list of his own flaws.

“We’re fine,” Nanika repeats. She pets him on the head just the way she likes it. “We want to stay with Killua.”

“Yeah, I want to stay with you too.”

She nods and smiles in that hollow way that should be creepy but looks a lot like she’s just trying a bit too hard. Killua too is trying really hard, he can sympathize.

“I guess we would be fine if we, like, start planning things.”

Alluka nods, thinking hard, and presses a finger on her chin.

“We’ll need a lot of markers, then,” she says.

*

As annoying as it is, apparently planning is in their DNA, training be damned.

It’s what they do – it’s what they are. It must be a Zoldyck thing, Killua isn’t even angry. He’s actually pretty stupidly excited instead.

He fumbles with his phone and takes a shoot of both his and Alluka’s disgustingly overpriced and over-sweetened coffee. His cup says ‘Kelly Anne’ in a flowery speed-cursive. He sends it to Gon.

“You should at least pretend to help us, brother,” Alluka says. She snatches her cup back, covering her own ‘Olanka’ with her hand while she tries to get the straw to enter her mouth without diverting eyes from her notebook. “It must be a healing wish, we agree about that. But we did well with that missing kid at the mall last week, I think we could try to, like, widen our compass.”

Killua sips. If this hyperglycemic monstrosity isn’t going to wake him up, nothing will.

“I don’t know,” he says. Tapping on the table is like trying to set the time of his own thoughts. “I mean, Nanika herself doesn’t know the extent of her power, but it still looks like a Nen based ability somehow. She releases aura when she makes things happen.”

It’s Killua’s main concern. One thing is healing a stranded guy in the middle of nowhere, but making a lost child reappearing directly into her mother arms in a place as crowded as a mall is recipe for a disaster.

“Someone’s bound to sense her. It’s almost like she’s using Ren,” he adds, but he’s talking to his own straw, because Alluka is now intent on holding a green marker over her upper-lip.

“Who’s the useless sibling now,” Killua says. The marker falls down and Alluka’s eyes jump up.

“You are,” she says, matter-of-factly. “We’re doing this thing so that you can sleep, not loose even more sleep over worst cases scenarios.”

“There’s always a worstest worst case scenario. It’s my job to think about those.”

“You don’t have a job, you’re on holiday. You can relax,” she says, and leans over the table. “We’re safe, you know.”

“Until someone catches us using Nanika to fix stuff at random.”

“That’s exactly the point, brother. It’s too random,” Alluka says, and flips her notebook upside down so that Killua can analyze the extent of her newfound passion for charts and color-coded systems.

“We’ve fixed three people,” she says, and point at the first number written in bright green. “Mustache Guy, probably already dead again because of attempted suicide number two or maybe sound, safe and full of regrets. No way for us to know.”

“The Fainted Lady was almost nothing,” she carries on, stubborn and now giggling for the sugar rush. “It must have been a heat-stroke, she would have been alright even without us. But it was nice doing it, wasn’t it?”

“I guess,” Killua says. His phone vibrates, but he doesn’t reach to take it.

“And then the child at the mall. That was a bit risky, but still worth it, don’t you think?”

“What?”

“He’s not listening,” she says, to Nanika because evidently Killua isn’t worthy.

“I am. I’m…” Gon’s laugh is a string of pixel on the claustrophobic rectangle of his phone. “I guess we could. Widen our compass,” he says. “But I can’t really think how. Those have been accidents and it’s not like you can really predict when something is going to happen. That’s the whole concept of accidents.” He’s already thinking, though, phone just beside his elbow. “We can’t prevent stuff, but we can fix them easily. We just need to get in the right place at the right time, just like we did in the other cases. We need to set up an intel… What?”

“Better,” Alluka says, smiling beside her straw. “You look better when you have stuff to think about.”

“Are you implying I don’t think enough?”

“I’m implying you ruminate too much. Thinking about practical stuff is your true call.”

Killua frowns.

“I don’t ruminate,” he says. “Do I ruminate?”

“A little bit. It’s worse when you didn’t sleep. Did you sleep tonight?”

“You’ve seen me sleep, I was beside you,” he rebuts. Maybe he sounds a little bit too outraged to be convincing. Maybe he was doomed from the start because Alluka is just that perceptive.

She hums, unimpressed, and starts drawing weaving meanders around her notes.

*

In another time, another life, Killua would have asked Milluki. Today, he has to get ingenious on his own.

“Electricity and frequencies aren’t the same things, are they?” says Alluka one day, looking at a parked police car.

They aren’t the same thing, but Killua gets where she’s getting at, as more often than not happens. They’ve spent more than five whole months glued at each other hips now, it’s like being kids all over again and so, so much better.

They used to heal birds and insects, hedgehogs that had been stupid enough to cross Mike’s path and then ended up on their playground.

The playground is way bigger now, but apparently with a hunter license you get to choose from an overwhelming amount of easily downloaded radio scanner apps on your phone for free and you can use them to choose your own rescue mission.

It’s also pretty interesting in a morbid way, so Killua spends a lot of time listening to 911 calls seated onto the railings of little balconies while Alluka sleeps off Nanika’s last performance on yet another hotel bed.

With the city buzzing under his feet, Killua feels the need to start smoking and wearing dark trench-coats or whatever it is that decadent superheroes do these days.

He resorts to chewing on gummy bears instead, plucking little limbs and heads so he doesn’t have to grind his teeth in his sleep. He can’t decide if different colors mean different flavors. There’s again that sandy taste in his mouth, a painful crick in his neck.

The police and an ambulance are on their way for the accident at the industrial district, he can follow the lights flashing through bricks and roofs, but the sound is lost on him.

Alluka is snoring quietly over the window that he left ajar. Her new nightlight draws five-pointed stars and planet over the otherwise depressing wallpaper. Killua bought it mostly because he was starting to get crazy after staring at the ceiling one night too many and she complied because she’s overwhelmingly magnanimous.

He checks the time on his phone. Two forty-three and another sunny, twenty-five degree hot day on Whale Island. He still has the weather forecast app set on there, he’s always forgetting to change it and, anyway, why bother? It’s not like he and Alluka can’t simply change place when they don’t like the weather.

They don’t even need a weather forecast app, the whole concept of forecasting is enough stupid as it is. He presses his thumb on the display. Instead of uninstalling it, he searches for his last calls.

He counts one, two, three rings. The sound is distant and windy, the signal already weak. Calling Gon is like digging for something lost, every time he does pick up is opening a box and fumbling through old stuff. Killua’s starting to forget what he put there and sometimes he ends up cutting himself with fringes and old splinters.

“Killua!” he yells, over static and the omnipresent rumbling of the sea.

“Hi, sorry. I meant to call you back before but…”

“Oh, don’t worry, I’m just glad you called now! Is everything okay?”

“Yeah, why’d you ask?” he whispers and Gon’s voice lowers too.

“Because you’re whispering, did something happen?”

Killua doesn’t facepalm, it would be painful both for him and those gummy-bears.

“No, it’s just… It’s late here. Alluka is asleep so I have to keep quiet.”

“Oh, thank goodness, you scared me for a sec,” Gon says, and sighs half a laugh. “So, nothing bad happened?”

“No,” he replies. Nothing happened, but now Killua has become the kind of person that requires for something bad to happen to call his best friend, isn’t he?

He looks at his reflection on the window glass, he’s got the phone in one hand and the gummy bears bag in the other. And he looks ready to jump down.

He slips his left foot over the railing, back to the balcony.

“I was just… What are you doing?”

It’s brief and almost not-exactly there, but Killua knows Gon – he still knows him. Gon thinks fast and a little pause is enough time for scraping up an answer, something that people would consider acceptable to talk over the phone.

“Homework, you know. It’s morning here… Well, almost noon. I’m bored out of my mind,” he adds, and that sounds true, and it’s even more painful. “Abe is making her octopus soup, though, so at least there’s a good smell around.”

“I remember that. It was awesome,” Killua says. “I miss Abe’s cooking,” he then adds and it’s a cruel thing to say. Maybe it’s just who he is, cruel. He swings both legs on the sides of the railing. “I don’t think I could eat it now, though. I’m having trouble thinking about octopus like food after I met Ikalgo.”

Gon laughs, wholeheartedly, and something sparks inside Killua’s ribcage to prickle at his windpipe.

“I think Whale Island is like hell for him? We eat so much seafood year-round!”

Killua nods toward the nearest lamppost.

“No improvement about…”

“Nope,” Gon says. They don’t even say the word out loud now. Such good pro hunters, keeping hunter stuff secret. “I tried what Biscuit and Wing said, meditate and all that, but it’s still like there’s something blocking it.”

Killua doesn’t know what to say. He looks at Alluka, she’s shifting under the covers.

“It’s okay, Killua,” says Gon, like it really is. “I’m okay. You saved my life.”

“Yeah,” he answers. Talking with him on the phone must be like talking with Kurapika, now; Kurapika’s voicemail, which is the most annoying thing in the known world. “Is homework bad?” he asks. He feels as thin as a paper sheet, he’s sure the wind could toss him like confetti.

“Pretty much. Math is always the worst,” Gon says, graciously. He’s always had a personal kind of graciousness, sturdy and polished. Killua misses that too. “And… aunt Mito told me to write a report or maybe it’s more like a journal? About everything I did since I left Whale Island for the first time.”

Killua blinks and for a moment he’s sure he’s crying, which doesn’t make any sense until the sky rumbles and the rain starts to fall more consistently.

“Sounds like…” He doesn’t know. He swallows the aftertaste of sugary bears. “And is she going to read it?”

What would it be like, the hunter world filtered through the lens of Gon’s eyes. Adventurous and exciting, so full it might explode and overflow that little house over the cliff, that little sleepy island shaped like an animal.

“I don’t know,” Gon says. “I don’t think she would if I asked her not to.”

Maybe Killua is nothing more than a self-centered jerk, but Gon sounds a lot like he’s asking for his approval – his permission.

Would that be okay? If aunt Mito read a journal full of fights and killing and almost being killed, would that be okay for her, for Gon? Would that be okay for Killua if aunt Mito knew she cooked for and tucked in a professional assassin? Does she know already? He didn’t even think about it before. Killua is baffled, and terrified.

“Maybe she should. She’s your mom,” he says. Maybe she can help you, he doesn’t say. Help you like I couldn’t, like I still can’t.

“Yeah,” Gon says, as if they were pondering about the mid-seasons, or lack thereof. “Maybe the good parts. There are a lot of good parts,” he adds, and that’s true. Only it makes everything a thousand times more difficult.

“How is Alluka? And Nanika, too,” he says then, old good-natured Gon.

The rain is starting to feel like pins over his armpits. Killua retreats, crouching over himself. He looks inside to see Alluka shifting again under the blanket. She must be cold.

“They’re okay, Alluka’s head is full of hair beads now, but she’s thinking about getting dreads or something.”

“That would look cute,” Gon says.

Killua groans.

“Please, not you too, I think Nanika is already supporting it.”

“What are you doing now? I mean, not now-now, you said it was night, so…”

“Still traveling,” says Killua. “And some stuff. I mean, projects. We have some kind of project, something we do together. Pretty useful and shit.”

“That’s cool, Killua! What kind of…” He’s cut off, swallowed up once again in another time and place, where Killua can’t really reach him. “Oh, sorry Killua, that was Mito. Lunch’s ready, I…”

“Go, it’s fine,” he says. He swallows hard. “Call me if you get bored. Call Knuckle if you need help with math, though. I never really got a hang of that shit.”

Gon laughs, but he’s so many miles away.

“Yeah, I really should. And… Yeah. Thanks, Killua,” he says.

They say goodbye at the static. Killua doesn’t know who hangs up first. The rain has soaked him up for good at this point and he leaves wet footprints on the floor.

“What time is it on Gon’s island?” Alluka asks, sleepy and hoarse.

Killua closes the window.

“Noon. Didn’t want to wake you up,” he adds.

“We could drop by one of these days, make it a surprise,” she says.

Shaking his head makes water fall.

“No, it’s… We can’t just turn up unannounced, his aunt wouldn’t be happy. And he’s got school to take care of, we shouldn’t distract him. Or are you two already tired of dealing with me alone?” he adds, and he’s joking. He is, of course, but he can’t say that he isn’t also relieved when she launches herself out of bed to slam into his chest.

“I’d never!” she says, high pitched. She hugs him like she’s going to squeeze him dry and Killua melts.

*

Nanika can magically resolve every problem with a giggle and a flash of light, then all that Killua has to do is find a bed for her to rest and something to entertain himself until Alluka wakes up, craving weird food combinations that Killua makes a point of hunting down like it’s some A-rated mission from the Hunter Association.

Just right when he’s starting to think that they got in fact a good grip on this thing and paranoia is nothing more than a symptom of his usual brand of existential crisis, the van thing happens in a good, old unpredictable fashion.

They’re intent on playing shiritori once again with Alluka doing double rounds to say Nanika’s word, when the guy driving the van falls asleep with the foot on the gas pedal.

It’s a lazy early evening. The van passes beside them in a swirl of air and hits the sidewalk right before the café like some kid losing control over their skateboard. It grunts and then leans on the side, crushing two tables, five chairs and three people with their respective drinks. The cheery sign on the sidewall assures that the vehicle was dutifully carrying the best soft-drinks for your happy hour.

Killua finds it ironic for the entirety of the second that his ice cream needs to fall over his own shoe. Nanika is already out, then, waiting for his words, and Killua is so, so stupid. He looks into her hollow eyes and he has to – he orders and she goes.

She touches people airily, walking from one heap of smashed organs after the other until everyone is magically back to health and sorely confused.

They sprint away, fast, when the halo of Nanika’s power is still lingering in the air.

Killua realizes he was using Godspeed when they’re already back at the hotel, Nanika still curled up between his arms, face in the crook of his neck. The receptionist gives them A Look, but doesn’t ask.

“You think someone’s seen us?” Alluka says, when they’re back into their room. Her palms are smeared with fresh blood and there’s a deeply sore expression on her face.

Killua looks at her while he scrubs the blood away with some too-white hotel towels, thinking about hygiene and disinfectant in a way he never felt the need to when he used to stick his own bare hands inside people’s chests for a living.

“I don’t know, there was a lot of commotion, we should be fine. But I think it’s time for you to learn some Nen,” he adds.

In other circumstances, Alluka would have burst into cheers. This time, she nods at him, serious, and starts packing her and Nanika’s things.

Chapter Text

It’s a night of carrying people on his back.

Meleoron was big and shaking with nerves, clinging on his shoulders for dare life. The tall girl with the stuffy nose – the missing tile from their plan – was way lighter and as ghostly pale as Killua himself. He had thrown her to Palm and she caught like they’ve always been synchronized; she promised like she owed Killua one, as if it wasn’t the other way around.

He has run to Peijing with Godspeed and the forest was a spiky cloud of green and black, air prickling as it crashed against his aura. The castle is still there, pinned on the sky like a postcard – everything muted and stopped, clenched like Killua’s own sweat, burning cold inside his throat.

Everything stopped when he saw Gon and understood that he was already late. Not second nor minutes, but years late. Entire decades had passed and Gon was still running in circles with massive legs and hair that made no sense at all. It’s going to become a mess of mud and soil as it drags on the ground leaving a trail of blood that Killua’s shirt isn’t going to stop.

And it’s good, it’s fine. Dead things don’t bleed, they just become heavier and cold, but Gon is still burning on his back, even if he’s shrinking by the minute. Blood is pounding inside Killua’s ears and their pulse – his, Gon’s – are out of sync.

“Come on,” he says through gritted teeth when one of the rhythms drops and he knows – he knows it isn’t him, because his heart is trying to choke him instead.

The city is only a couple minutes at his speed even if the trees are trying to bury them in darkness, but Gon’s head lulls on his shoulder like a massive drop of molten lead and Killua knows he doesn’t have two minutes.

He should scream for help. He should stop and cry because everything is falling apart and he knew it – he was the one who knew how this thing was going to end and decided to act cool because he hoped that he would have been already dead at this point.

Then Gon pushed him away and now Killua doesn’t have a plan – for not being dead with Gon and living on his own. He never had one.

He stops as he counted second three of Gon not being there anymore and it’s so contradicting that Illumi’s voice inside his head sounds calming for a change.

He doesn’t need to count the ribs, he knows where a human heart is even if he can’t recognize Gon anymore, shrunk and bloody like he’s decaying.

He can’t remember why his brother taught him CPR, but for the first time in forever is completely grateful for a training that made him come up with the disturbing idea of becoming a human defibrillator.

**

The plan was to just go.

Killua bought two intercontinental tickets that very evening and then he had to cancel because Alluka didn’t wake up from her nap. She doesn’t wake up and Killua starts to panic.

It’s a process, really.

First, he lets her be; puts his phone on mute and goes to the reception, asking to book their room for another couple of days.

The van accident is on the tv, but it’s a local channel in a local language. Killua doesn’t know the local word for ‘miracle’, but at least the debate has somehow been moved between nerdy white coats and ancient religious figures with garish garments. Both God and Science must be enough good of a decoy even for people like Silva himself, really.

He tries to sleep, too, but he ends up reading one of Alluka’s pocket book. It’s about aliens and spaceships and it keeps him entertained until noon, when his stomach starts to growl.

Alluka is still asleep even when he returns with Azian take-away and lots of smelly sauces.

She sleeps while he eats and she sleeps through the night when Killua wakes up screaming, claws scratching at his own skin while he tries to pull out needles that have never been there.

She’s still asleep at dawn, and when the sun is up and high and Killua has scarfed down the leftovers instead of leaving her alone to hunt down some breakfast.

He waits for hours, seated right beside her, ears ready to catch any change in her breath, in her heartbeat. They both remain stable through that night and the next, until it’s morning again and Killua has already called Kurapika every five minutes and Biscuit for the third time.

“If that’s the condition, there’s nothing you can do,” she says, when finally Killua spills more details. “This very hypothetical person will remain asleep until the conditions of their ability aren’t going to be fulfilled.”

“But let’s say that I don’t really know what these conditions are. Let’s say, for example, that they usually sleep for no more than twenty-four hours after they use their ability. It shouldn’t be possible for the condition to change right away, am I right?”

“Theoretically. But, again, if you don’t know the conditions to begin with, the pattern variation may be perfectly normal and you’re panicking over nothing. Why are you panicking over this hypothetical person anyway?”

“I’m not panicking,” he says, eyes glued to Alluka. “Why do you think I’m panicking.”

Biscuit sighs, loud.

“There’s always an exorcist, as a last resort. A good exorcist should be able to relieve this person from the condition… We aren’t talking about Gon, are we?”

Killua has to physically remove the phone from his ear to look at the display.

“Why do you think… of course not. It isn’t about anyone you know,” half-truth. “It’s just a minor inconvenience. I’m traveling, stuff happens.”

“Stuff happens. You’re really convincing, I honestly thought you were a better liar… Anyway, I gotta go. Call me if something happens, don’t do anything incredibly stupid.”

He doesn’t or at least he tries. It’s difficult to know when he isn’t even sure what stupid thing he’s done this time to end up in this situation.

He retrieves Alluka’s notebook, double-checks his own memory and he’s trying to find some direct link between orders and hours of sleep – a pattern, an algorithm, anything, when Alluka stirs and then mumbles something that loosely resembles the word ‘noodles’.

“Alluka,” Killua says, eyes wide and pencil wielded like a sword. The little rubber bee on top is smiling.

“Brother, can we have noodles for breakfast?” she asks, slurred voice and bleary eyes.

The pencil falls as Killua crushes her in a hug.

*

They keep the room. It will be the longest time they ever stayed in the same hotel and it’s dangerous.

Killua’s brain thinks it’s dangerous, like that, full sentence red and gleaming, flashing steadily behind his own eyelids while he fights to keep them open.

Healing people is the most taxing. Multiple people can be a week of sleep, finding something lost varies from a couple hours to an entire day. Other stuff, they’re too random to make for good data.

That doesn’t stop Alluka from trying. She writes everything down in an explosion of colorful markers and they start working around the phrasing.

“Healing something specific is way better than healing everything,” she says, bee-rubber tapping on her chin. “If it’s just ‘heal his nose’ it’s way less heavy on her than ‘heal this guy’, because she then will have to heal him whole, even if he isn’t hurt. Does this make sense?”

Of course it does, so much that they should have thought about it way before. He should have thought about it: Alluka and Nanika both are his responsibility; if Nanika is hurting Alluka, putting her to sleep for days at a time, that’s something Killua should manage.

He’s doing such a poor job, slouched over the headboard with his feet on a pillow.

He startles when the notebook comes shut, note papers flailing about.

“I want to watch a movie,” Alluka says, like that was the natural conclusion to all that data gathering.

“Don’t you want to sleep a bit more?” Killua asks. She looks at him and shakes her head, stubborn.

She moves around, still sluggish. She drags her feet on the carpentry and she needs a pause to locate the charger and maybe herself, before setting up the computer right on the tray from the room service.

Killua feels a pang at the pit of his stomach. Was he wrong? Is Nanika something that shouldn’t be messed with, something that has a fee, even if Killua himself isn’t touched by it – directly, at least.

“You okay, brother?”

“What?” He blinks and she blinks back.

“You’re making funny faces. I told you, you shouldn’t get cheese on your pasta. I really think you’re lactose intolerant.”

Being baffled is pointless with Alluka, she’s just like that all the time.

He scoffs.

“I’m so not.”

She drops herself on the bed again and Killua bounces with the mattress.

“Jeez, don’t react like I’ve accused you of being an assassin,” she says, as the music starts to get louder on the screen.

Killua blinks at it, then he turns towards her. She raises a finger and presses his jaw closed.

“I know, I’m hilarious,” she says, and then Killua can only sit very still while she nests herself on his lap and yawns like she put on a lullaby instead of, apparently, an entire horror movie with werewolves.

Killua doesn’t even get the title before he’s asleep, the weight of Alluka’s head grounding on his thighs.

*

“You should teach her, it isn’t like l have anything more to teach you.”

So, Biscuit is ditching him. Figured.

“I’m not a teacher, I’m a very crappy student at best.”

“Of course you are,” says Biscuit and since she’s a bipolar hag, she sounds almost fond. “I’m assuming you don’t want to use the initiation method on her or anything, so it will take time. Take your time too, when she will be ready, you’ll be too.”

Killua blinks and looks at the phone for three, long seconds.

“Are you bullshitting me with some second rate martial-arts movie quote?”

Biscuit grunts so loud Killua almost drops the phone. When he recovers it, she has already hung up.

“Crazy hag,” he says, dull. He’s out of option and gravely out of energy – again. He needs a plan.

“Supplies!” Alluka says, while she pops on the seat right in front of his and occupies a third one with food. “Crackers. Chocolate. Coffee. Weird thingy with apricot jam. Water. You choose.”

He takes the coffee and Alluka side-eyes him like he’s getting a shot of ecstasy in front of some middle-schooler.

“That bad?” she asks.

Killua looks at the cup.

“What?”

“You only choose coffee over chocolate when the universe is right about to collapse,” she says.

Killua throws a glance over the window. The train beside them is starting to move, but the optical illusion makes Killua’s brain wobble while it tries to adjust.

“Did I seriously manage to miss the universe collapsing before? I thought it would have been a pretty big thing.” And someone would have screamed about it on the Hunter website. Kurapika, maybe: a worldwide cataclysm might be about that one thing that would make him find the time to catch up with people.

Alluka sighs as the loudspeaker announces that they’ll have to sit still for two hours and a half.

“Eat your chocolate, brother, and then get some sleep. I’ll be okay, I’ll try and meditate my aura nodes open or something,” she says, eyes already closed, legs dutifully crossed.

Killua nods.

“Or something,” he says, because he’s just that bad of a teacher. He bites away a big chunk of chocolate, nuts and caramel and tries to relax enough to fall asleep.

That, in retrospect, was an obviously bad idea. Killua would like to blame his lack of decent sleep if that wasn’t the point already.

At least he doesn’t really fall from his seat, but Alluka snaps out of her meditation like she has been kicked. Killua looks at his own foot: he has kicked his sister, he’s now so low on the evolutionary scale that he’s going to evolve into an amoeba.

“Sorry,” he says, with something that resembles his voice.

Alluka looks at him like he’s already turned into a single-celled organism. She reaches out with a hand but Killua’s own arms don’t respond. He looks at her fingers until she curls them back and sighs.

“It isn’t getting better,” she says, uncomfortable. “You said it was getting better.”

Did he? Killua says a lot of stuff every day. Every dumb minute, actually.

“It’s not that bad,” he says. “I bet it looks way worse than it is. I’ve already forgotten what was about.” That’s the truth. He sometimes adds a bit of it in his daily discourses, so that his blatant lies would look more plausible. It’s a personal recipe, original flavor, took years of honing.

As expected, Alluka isn’t impressed.

“Yeah, sure. Or we could talk about it like normal families would.”

“We don’t do normal well,” Killua says, which is also the truth. Where’s his medal? Not inside his pockets, he’s sure, but a buzzing phone is as good a diversion as anything. He hears Alluka mumble something over Leorio’s text.

“Bad news?”

Killua blinks.

“No, it’s… pretty good, actually.”

That’s exactly what graduations and degrees are, he knows that even if he doesn’t do normal.

What would normal people do?

He texts congrats and also emojis of various kind. Leorio’s an old man, he will probably appreciate it.

Leorio writes pretty fast for an old man too, but you have to be pretty dexterous to begin with if you want to become a doctor.

“Ehi, we’ve been invited to a graduation party,” he says, brows still furrowed. “It will probably be rated r and also dumb.”

Alluka is munching on the weird thingy and now her fingers are sticky with apricot jam.

“Will Gon be there?” she asks, like it’s nothing.

Killua falls from his seat, then, because a man can only take that much.

*

This whole ordeal is bound to be the dumbest thing Killua ever took part in, chimera ants bullshit included.

“Stop that, brother, you’re going to hurt yourself.”

“That’s unlikely,” Killua says, but he puts some effort into keeping his claws out of his own hands. Sisters are the worst, really.

Alluka is holding onto his wrist and scrutinizing the platform on her tiptoes. That effort puts her at every other people height, so it’s actually completely useless.

Killua has already catalogued every single brunet spiky head and opted to let his own weird color do all the work. You really don’t need to push yourself so hard to find Leorio on a train platform since he’s tall enough to find you himself.

“Man, I can’t believe you’re here, I was almost already resigned to see you in a postcard, you know?”

He looks really happy in a genuine, dumb way. Leorio is genuine and dumb, so it makes sense.

Killua shrugs.

“Why though. We’re traveling, it’s not that difficult to arrange traveling in your direction.”

Leorio looks at him, still beaming in that weird, fond way.

“Yeah, well, apparently it is for someone,” he says, wistful before he shakes his head like he’s determined to forget his previous thoughts altogether. “But not for you, I guess. You know, Killua? You really are a good friend.”

Killua’s always thought that enhancers were terrifying, but emitters are the fucking worst. If Alluka turns out to be one, he’s going to quit Nen altogether and become an oyster fisherman on Whale Island.

“You’re being weird. It’s no big deal.”

“It is, I’m getting a degree,” he says, eyes wild behind those ridiculous little sunglasses of his.

Killua shakes his head, already exhausted.

“Sure, right. So, if you have to, like, study your dissertation or whatever it is that graduating people do, Alluka and I are going to find ourselves someplace to crush.”

Leorio blinks at him like he’s spoken something different from the lingua franca they usually share.

“No way,” he says. “You’re my guest. Why the hell do you think I got a guest room for?”

“I don’t know. Your relatives? Other friends whom you see more than once a year or when Gon tries to kill himself?”

“That’s what happened?” Alluka asks, unimpressed.

“Gon’s an idiot. He’s always trying to kill himself in some dumb way,” Killua says. “My friends are all dumb.”

“Please excuse my brother, he’s sleep deprived and also very rude.”

“That’s my line,” Killua says. Then he blinks and the world blurs. Would it be considered odd if he decides to lie on a bench and close his eyes for a couple minutes? “The rude one, not the sleep…”

His En stretches like it’s a spilled drink. He twirls on his heels, ready to fight, but that’s it: nothing at all apart from an entire train station teeming with people.

“What is it,” Leorio asks, wary while Alluka sighs.

“It’s called paranoia. It’s this really nasty habit of thinking that the world is out to get you.”

“It’s not paranoia if-”

“No, you’re right. It’s…” she starts and then stops abruptly, like she’s seen something in his eyes. Something small and jittery, probably Killua’s own brain. “It’s alright brother,” she says, in an openly sedating tone. Killua blinks at her, then looks behind his shoulder again – just to be sure – but he knows that there's nothing there. They aren’t being tailed. That’s just stupid. Killua’s stupid brain is making up stupid stuff.

“The station is always a mess, it was probably someone who was trying to pickpocket you… Smart enough to know when to quit, actually,” Leorio says. He laughs, but he’s also looking at him with that same face he had after Gon was healed – watching the both of them with some complex mix of feelings that Killua still isn’t able to make sense of.

He puts a hand on his shoulder and Killua shivers stupidly. He hides his hands in his pockets and scoots over Alluka.

“Let’s try to stay out of trouble for at least two seconds after we put feet on the ground,” he says, pretty much exhausted.

He tries to concentrate on Leorio’s guide like Alluka’s is already doing.

Lipona is… loud. That’s the first thing Killua gets to notice when the station spits them out in a roars of steps: everyone yells really loud while they’re intent on doing pretty basic stuff like walking and talking on the phone.

It’s a different kind of chaos than the one in Yorknew. There everyone is intent on carrying out some kind of business that must be of the utmost importance and they’re always quite frank into letting you know that you’re bothering them with your simple existence.

Here, Killua has to snatch Alluka away from the ambulant vendors who want to sell her scarfs and tourists guides and, for some reasons, garlic. Here the buildings’ appearance is old and marred, but a bit solemn too, as if they were patient grandpas parked on their armchairs. The people look weirdly friendly, like they’re gathered because there’s some kind of enormous family reunion that would take place everywhere – and you’re invited too, please bring your friends and relatives.

It turns out Leorio is really enthusiastic about having them there, even if Killua doesn’t really get why. They haven’t even brought him a present for his graduation, because Killua didn’t think about it, and he’s still insisting on paying for their food.

“If this isn’t the best pizza you’ve ever had in your life I’m going to eat my degree certificate in front of the whole student body.”

It would have been quite the show, but that pizza is literally the best Killua has and probably will ever have.

Alluka is munching on her crusts like they’re the best part. She looks at Leorio the same way she looks at people they sometimes end up sidetracking with during their trip; the hint of additional curiosity is directed towards him instead, like Killua is acting weird.

Maybe he is – it’s just that being around Leorio means a lot of things. First of all, it means he can actually relax. He would have smacked his own head for a thought like that only one year ago, but the truth is that he trusts Leorio to watch his and Alluka’s back. He knows the place, he can use Nen, he’s at ease and he’s also stronger than before.

“You trained,” he says, interrupting some rambling about the beauty of the big harbor that plunges in the biggest gulf of the state with the whole city.

Leorio’s eyebrows flutter.

“I did,” he says, and grins. “Didn’t want to fall behind… I trained with Cheadle, she’s the new chairwoman. Worst months of my life.”

“Most productive, you mean. You’re stronger, I can feel it.”

“Jeez, don’t act so surprised, man. I wasn’t that bad before.”

“You could barely use Ten when we were in Yorknew, that was pretty bad.”

“I wanted to buy you the best sfogliatelle around but I guess I’ll have to punch your teeth out instead.”

Alluka laughs, but it’s difficult to know if it was at Killua’s expense or at the weird word.

Leorio still buys them, the unpronounceable pastries, and they’re actually pretty good. They would have been even better with chocolate but Alluka pinches Killua’s arm really hard when he tries to suggest it to the seller.

“I think she’s definitely my new favorite Zoldyck,” Leorio says, when they’re on the promenade and the sea is battering on the breakwater, sprinkling salt like seasoning.

Killua’s hair is already damp and curly and Alluka is practically bouncing from the fence to the other side of the sidewalk, leaving powdered sugar and crumbs of puff-pastry on her wake. Killua hasn’t seen her this lively for days after the van thing.

“Yeah, mine too,” he says, and Leorio laughs.

“You’re my second choice, though.”

“That’s not really a compliment. And, anyway, you and the others got to know only the weird side of the family. My Grandpa is cool, he knows a lot of awesome anecdotes about people he had to assassinate in weird ways.”

“Those must make for such heartwarming bedtime stories,” Leorio says, and shakes his head. “Man, I think I missed it, the craziness you bring with you. It’s almost like I am the most boring person in the world at this point. You and Gon got to save the world while I was here, doing menial stuff like getting a degree.”

“We didn’t save the world. We… I still really don’t know what the heck we did, honest.”

“That’s what he said too. I totally didn’t understand what happened back there… Sorry, I always talk too much,” he adds, even if Killua is pretty sure he hasn’t done anything at all to stop him. Maybe he’s at the point when he can simply spill out discomfort, like an enhancer with liquid stuff.

“Brother, mister Oreo! Look at the sea, is huge!”

Alluka is pointing at something. Killua has to squint to see.

“Alluka,” he says. “Are you trying to light the sea with the flashlight on your phone?”

She blinks at them, then at the sea, vast and dark.

“Oh, I see,” she says, ashamed. She slips her phone back inside the pockets of her shorts.

Leorio laughs so hard Killua has to literally peel him off the fence.

*

Leorio was born in the city, but not the shiny part. The apartment he’s living in now is, though. Right beside the University, top floor of a big, modern building.

“Here they are,” he says, pointing at the sky. It’s another sea, but lit and swarming with cars and lampposts. Alluka asked, and so he took them on the roof, seemingly incapable of just going to sleep. Killua can’t decide if he’s excited to have guests or just stressed about his dissertation. “You see them? Those big buildings that look like triangles? Over there, way over the dome.”

Killua tilts his head and he’s got twenty on twenty of vision, but he can’t really see much more than vague shapes cutting the bluish of the sky with their split contours.

“They’re the hives, that’s what people call them,” Leorio says anyway. “Why someone thought that it would have been okay to make pointy buildings, I’ll never know. People were bound to get at least nervous, no surprise they started selling drugs and guns and breaking stuff and each other. It’s crazy.”

“How many people live there?” Alluka asks.

“Too many,” Leorio says, with a grimace.

“And you lived there too?”

“Yeah, before I got my license. It’s like a different city altogether… When I was a kid, coming here from there was an actual journey. For a lot of people, it still is.”

“Is your family still leaving there?”

“I took my parents away first thing first, got them a quiet place in the countryside. You can get a loan at zero interest with a hunter license, it’s really wild.”

Killua watches him while he laugh, like he’s still uncertain and almost scared at the concept.

Then Alluka starts yawning and Leorio insists on giving them his own bed, because it turns out that the guest room is in fact a pull-out couch.

“I really don’t want to know who else stayed on your bed and what kind of activities were they interested in, but my little sister isn’t sleeping there,” Killua says, like they haven’t slept in more unsanitary hotel rooms in the past few months. They scream at each other until Alluka grabs Killua’s ear and wishes Leorio a good night using the bossiest tone ever.

“You’re a menace,” Killua says, ear stinging.

She’s sprawled on the mattress like she owns the place. It’s pretty comfy to be a couch, Leorio really is an old man who loves luxuries.

“Maybe we should help,” Alluka says, in the dark. “About mister Oreo’s place.”

“His place seems pretty good to me,” Killua says, because this is going to end up in a fucking pit.

Alluka shifts on her side to face him.

“You know what I mean. The hives.”

“That would be way out of our range, you know.”

“But you’d like to help,” she insists, like it’s obvious. Killua didn’t even actually realize it, but maybe yes, he would like to help.

“He’s going to help himself, you know? He’s going to go back there, once he’s become an actual doctor. He doesn’t need our help, he’s got things covered. You know,” he starts. “You can’t always solve everything. You have to let people do their own thing, especially if they’re your friends.”

Killua’s own words sound dumb inside his head but at least there’s no embarrassing silence, given that in this city silence doesn’t even seem to exist in the first place.

“That’s why we didn’t go to take Gon before coming here?”

Killua doesn’t really fall from the mattress, but a loud clunk surprises him from below and they might find themselves scrunched between metal and pillows tomorrow.

“That doesn’t have anything to do with Gon,” he says. Sputters. “Why do you…”

“But it’s just natural to want to help the people you like, isn’t it? Me and Nanika, we always want to help you.”

“You don’t need to. I’m okay, it… It’s me the one who’s supposed to take care of you, not the other way around. Now sleep, you’re always tired. You sure you’re okay?”

“I am. Today was really fun… I wrote down the pizza place in my notebook, so we can eat there if we happen to come here again someday.”

She seems pretty satisfied with that. Killua sighs and waits until her breathe evens out in a solid slumber.

Killua drifts with her, limbs made of lead and head full of cotton, until he’s standing in the dim light of a maze-like cave. He’s thinking about hives but it’s more like an ant’s nest and it keeps spilling people in an orderly queue and Killua keeps killing them, methodically, until his hands are numb and he just wants to stop, but he can’t move – his body won’t move.

He wakes with a start and the city isn’t as loud as his heart while it tries to escape from his ribcage. There’s a coppery taste in his mouth, he spits blood in the sink and growl because he hates when he ends up biting his own tongue like that – like an idiot.

“Ehi, everything okay?”

Killua doesn’t kill him. It’s pretty courteous of him, really.

“Don’t just appear like that,” he whispers, because he’s going to kill Leorio and then himself if they’ll end up waking Alluka.

“Appear in my own house?” he rebuts, yawning. “How unexpected of me.”

“Shouldn’t you be asleep? You’re going to collapse during your graduation-thing, you know?”

“My dissertation is already so boring and full of data that I’ll consider it a success if the commission won’t fall asleep like dominos… I can’t sleep,” he adds, a bit more quietly. “I’m in the mood for some milk, too. Join me?”

“Milk? What are you, five?” Killua says at his lanky shadow.

“Chocolate milk?”

“I hate you,” Killua says, and tails him right over the kitchen. He almost cut his head when Leorio moves to turn on the light, but it’s the dim one over the stove and Alluka is still snoring softly on the couch, back turned on them.

“You look like shit,” Leorio says, but while he’s offering chocolate milk, so Killua has to refrain from killing him if he wants to actually drink it. He accepts the mug and scoots over when Leorio gets ahead like it’s just natural that Killua would follow him.

He does. They end up out of the door and over the roof again, mugs on the floor while Leorio makes two folding chairs appear from the darkness of a cabinet.

Summer isn’t even there already in that hemisphere, but it’s hotter in this city than in any other place Killua has been. Apart from NGL, maybe, but he remembers his time there as cold and prickling, like he was continuously steeped in light, stinging rain.

“If you were of age, we would be drinking scotch. You want some scotch?”

“You’re the worst,” Killua says, and looks at the glowing magma of city lights over the rim of his mug. Alluka has read some tourist guide when they were on the train and that’s why Killua knows that the looming heap of darkness in the background is a dormant volcano. Humans are so bad at choosing their places of residence. “What’s your dissertation about, anyway? You know you can’t talk about Nen and stuff, don’t you?”

“I’m not dumb, of course I know,” Leorio says, legs crossed. “Actually, it’s about the mortality rate of curable diseases in economically disadvantaged areas.”

“Color me surprised,” says Killua and takes the push on his shoulder without flinching away.

“I’d like to color you anyway since you’re as white as a ghost. I mean, worse than usual. I would prescribe a vacation if I didn’t know that you’re already supposed to be on one, you know?”

“Jeez, you really are a doctor.”

“I take that as a compliment,” Leorio says. He seeps for a bit while Killua asks himself how on earth he ended up talking with Leorio out of all people on a roof out of all places.

Leorio sighs.

“Kurapika doesn’t make me act like a friend,” he says, quite abruptly and with a hint of some deep-rooted frustration. “He’s almost impossible to get a hold on. I don’t even know where he is right now, if he’s still on this continent actually,” he laughs and it sounds hollow. “And Gon… I invited him too, said I would have come to his island and took him myself if necessary, but he was pretty stubborn in refusing. Polite, of course. I mean, he always is, but he wasn’t going to change his mind.”

“He has school going on and stuff. He works on boats and at the docks. I’m sure he would have come otherwise,” Killua says, like he needs to justify him. “I’ll make some lame video for him, we can make fun of you even like this, don’t worry.”

Leorio whistles.

“How thoughtful of you,” he said, but he is the one who’s thoughtful – pensive. “I’m not telling you this because I’m hurt, I know he has stuff to sort out. And I’m not even hurt because of Kurapika, really. As I said, I’m the boring one, you three have always been the ones with lots of shit going on and, really, given what kind of shit it usually is, I’m pretty fucking grateful for my life.”

Killua drinks his chocolate milk, but it doesn’t do a bit to lessen his bone-deep exhaustion.

“And I know you probably have a lot of shit going on too even now… But you came here anyway. I really appreciate that,” Leorio says.

“You’ve told me that already. You’re going senile, really.”

Leorio grumbles, but he doesn’t punch him.

“What I mean… Kurapika doesn’t want to be helped and I don’t think I can even start to fathom how I could help Gon. You know he’s having problem with his Nen, don’t you? Of course you do,” he then adds, before Killua has the chance to nod. “So, you happen to be the only one left and you’re here so… Can I help? Make me help.”

Killua blinks at his mug. Leorio is looking at him, like, for real.

“There’s nothing… Why do you think I need help. I don’t,” he says. “I’m fine. Never been better, I’m… Alluka is great.”

“Yeah, I can see that. Gon is great too. And somehow you’re always the one who ends up looking really pale and jittery while escorting them around to chase their dreams,” he says, in a pretty irritating wise tone.

Killua plops the mug over his knee, because he really doesn’t want to waste milk chocolate by spilling it over Leorio’s face.

“I don’t… I’m fine. Everything is fine. It isn’t Alluka’s fault, or Gon’s, it’s…” What is it? He doesn’t know. He never actually stopped to think about it, because he is okay. He has to be. “I’m okay. I just can’t sleep, that’s all.”

“Okay,” Leorio says, cautious. “Insomnia. That sucks, but there are a lot of remedies.”

“No, it’s… It’s not insomnia. I do fall asleep,” a lot, aboard various means of transportation and over horizontal surfaces and Alluka’s shoulders, too. He doesn’t say that, he sips at his milk and his throat is again covered with sandpaper. “I just can’t remain asleep. I’d really like to, but I can’t.”

“I’m confused,” Leorio says. Pretty legit.

No more chocolate milk, what a pity. He’d really like another round.

“I dream. Stuff. It keeps me up.”

“I see,” Leorio says and now that the mug is empty, Killua should really use it to beat that shrink voice out of him. “Is this a new thing? I mean, has it gotten worse?”

Killua thinks. His brain has been acting up for quite sometimes, now. So long and so bad that he finds it really difficult to catalog stuff and retrace patterns.

Until he doesn’t, because it’s that fucking obvious. It always has been.

“It’s because of the needle,” he says, blinking. The city lights blur, everything melts in itself for a long moment of pure vacuum. “It’s because of the fucking needle.”

Leorio is looking at him and then at his own mug, like he’s wishing to fill it with something alcoholic.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about, but I’m sure I’m not going to like it.”

Killua nods, feeling so worn out – and so relieved all of the sudden. Leorio looks like a lanky stick-figure in the dark.

“We’ll need a lot more chocolate milk, though,” he says, and he means it.

Chapter Text

He’s awake. He’s well. He’s running.

“Killua!” He gallops towards him screaming in the corridor like they aren’t inside a hospital. Besides him, Morel is carrying his IV pole like he usually does with his enormous pipe. Leorio is talking, cellphone in hand, but Killua really can’t focus on him. He can’t focus on anything but Gon, who’s running and yelling and well – like new. Like nothing happened.

“Hey Gon.” He hears himself saying it, somewhere outside is own head. He’s smiling, he knows he is, but the walls are so damn white and his head starts pounding at the same rhythm of Gon’s steps. Killua looks at him and he’s again a mangled body, hair flowing, eyes blank and sad beyond all help.

Killua blinks and something happens – something breaks and his knees are made of shredded glass. Alluka’s hand is tiny and cool into his own. She strengthens her grip until he starts breathing again.

“Killua, I… Thank you so much!” says Gon, he brakes and almost knocks him off. “Leorio said you were searching for a way to heal me!”

Killua’s eyesight blurs. A hand, big, materializes itself on his shoulder; he has to blink the fog away to recognize it as Leorio’s. He’s studying him with open concern and Killua realizes that he must look exactly how he feels: like someone who hasn’t slept in days.

“Yeah,” he says. “Couldn’t leave you rotting there, you know. You were starting to smell funny.”

Gon laughs, loudly, and everybody else – Biscuit and Melody and Knuckle and Palm, Ikalgo and Melereon too – look on the verge of hysterics.

Alluka tugs at his shirt and makes herself small behind his shoulder.

“And who is this?” Leorio asks, spying over him.

Killua gives Alluka a meaningful look.

“They’re friends. They’re cool,” he says, as she studies them with curiosity. This is the first time she sees people who aren’t family or butlers or fucking needle people. This is the first time she can talk for herself, introduce herself.

“I’m Alluka,” she says, voice small. It’s a start.

“She’s my little sister, she’s going to stay with me for the time being,” says Killua, looking at everyone but Gon. He can’t do this right now – he just. Can’t.

“I didn’t know you have a sister!” Gon says. He and Alluka look at each other, smiling, and that’s a start too.

“Well, all’s well that ends well or whatever,” Morel says, scratching his head. He sounds weirded out from the anticlimactic epilogue and Killua thinks he can sympathize.

Palm smiles at him. She’s seen him breaking down like a toddler in the midst of the battle, so there’s really no harm in letting himself leaning to the nearest wall and maybe closing his eyes a bit while Biscuit and Ikalgo pester his sister with curiosity and affection.

Has his body always been so heavy? It’s like his heart has grown bigger and older, but more spacious too. Enough for other people to ensconce themselves in, right beside that enormous crater that Gon was so determined to leave vacant. It’s a difficult thought, it makes his head float.

“Killua, listen.” It’s Gon, his voice quavering and uncertain.

Killua opens his eyes and looks at his scrunched up face, his tilted eyebrows. He looks smaller inside that stupid hospital shirt, ghostly and unreal.

The afterimage of his horrific transformation will be forever plastered at the back of Killua’s mind like some viscous substance, thicker than blood. It’s been undone – but it just can’t be undone and it makes him sad and tired, and eager to move and fight. Try and be a better friend, a better brother, a better person.

He shakes his head, smiling, and raises a hand.

“Not now, okay?” he says, and Gon’s lips tremble, but Killua can’t… It’s been undone, but it can’t be undone. “I’m really happy you’re okay. I’ll make you apologize, but right now I really seriously need, like, a bed?” He would take any horizontal surface at this point. “Are there any beds in this place?”

“It’s a hospital. It’s full of beds,” Meleoron says, looking at them both like he’s afraid Killua’s going to punch something. He wants to, a bit.

“I don’t want to sleep in a hospital. I don’t want Alluka to sleep in a hospital,” he adds, because that’s the most important thing, since he’s pretty sure he could sleep right then and there if Ikalgo would like to stop people from stomping on him. He would, he’s such a good octopus really, and he’s looking at him from his vertically challenged position like he’s ready to offer his own big head as a pillow. Killua would take it, he’s slept on it while he was bleeding out like a dumbass and it has been an honestly pleasant experience overall – apart from the detail of his impending death, of course.

“I’m staying in a hotel, I’ll book a room for you. I’ll book rooms for everyone!”

This has to be Leorio. Did Killua close his eyes?

“Brother?”

He smiles even before opening them again.

“You’re still tired?” he asks.

Alluka twitches her nose and yawns. They both laugh.

“A bit. That was difficult, Nanika is all worn out,” she says, voice small while she points at Gon. He’s still there, smiling at everybody, but with a slightly wistful expression, so unlikely on his face. Knuckle swoops on him and drapes an arm over his shoulder.

“We must take you to Shoot now! He’s been dying to see you!”

“Quite literally,” Palms says, pensive, and Biscuit laughs because apparently she’s the fastest at grasping black humor.

From then on, it’s a blur. Killua’s only concern is to remain glued to Alluka and when they got to the room, he doesn’t even really know where the others are gone. Where Gon is gone – ah. He’s fucking tired.

“Get some sleep,” Leorio says, as he gives him the keys.

“Jeez, you sound like a real doctor now,” says Killua. It was an attempt at humor, but Leorio pats his shoulder like he’s said something nice instead.

“And you sound like you’re dead on your feet, it’s actually concerning. You’ll take care of him, am I right?”

“Sure,” Alluka says. She looks thrilled at the idea. “Let’s go, brother.”

Killua catches Leorio’s spiky hair for a fraction of second before the door closes and Alluka’s hand is already clasped on his fingers.

“Your friends are nice,” she says, way more lively than she should sound, given how tired she sure still is.

“Yeah,” says Killua, and isn’t it the actual truth for a change.

He sits on the edge of the closest bed; there are two, twins, like it has always been in the hotel rooms he used to share with Gon. He lifts his eyes from where they drifted on the carpeting and raises them from Alluka’s boots to the hem of her skirt and up until her face.

Seated composed on the bed, she looks like a doll. She looked like a doll when she was into that vault, hidden like goldbricks – like something dangerous.

She’s so different from anything even remotely resembling Gon, but somehow Killua’s brain can’t consider it a flaw right now – quite the contrary, in fact.

“Let’s sleep,” he says instead, and he’s already drifting.

**

Something that was there – has been there for most of Killua’s life – isn’t there anymore.

It makes a lot of sense. And, as a lot of things do, it also sucks.

But it’s also an explanation, something real and practical, something way more reasonable than ridiculous stuff like conscience and puberty. Needle in, needle out: it’s the variable inside the dumbest equation ever – Gon is right, math sucks.

That morning Alluka made some pretty flat pancakes that tasted like sugary omelets and Killua had to scarf down half Leorio’s portion because apparently his stomach gets upset when he has to do important shit like explaining months of work in front of a crowd of presumably competent people.

Killua made him sit down to untangle his tie from his head while Alluka made sure of counting the copies of his dissertation and then she spent a lot of time trying to figure out why they had to be that many.

“We are ready,” Leorio says, when they finally actually are. Standing in front of the door, he looks a lot like someone who doesn’t want to inhabit his own skin – Killua feels it on a very deep and personal level, so he shoves him out with a kick and they’re ready to go.

“You think he’s going to be alright?” Alluka asks, when they’re finally seated on pretty uncomfortable chairs, high over the bleachers of a chamber that looks a lot like a pretty old cinema full of stuffy, velvety seats.

“Sure he is,” Killua says, and he actually believes it. If there’s something Leorio is accustomed to, is defying every possible expectation by doing stuff like surviving the hunter exam. This should be a breeze.

“I think he’s going to be sick,” Alluka says, as she opens another gummy-bears packet. Killua shoves his own hand in and they start munching while the first student goes off to the podium to desperately point a laser pen toward really ugly slides.

It’s pretty fucking mind-blowingly boring for over an hour of medical blabbing and incomprehensible questions over the ongoing murmur of the bystanders.

Leorio should be next, but before him a tall, thin girl with the longest curly hair climbs in front of the microphone to discuss a thesis on some heart disease or whatever.

Killua is an expert on hearts, after holding so many in his own hands during his life. The slides start blurring into each other over the panel, flickering, and he needs to blink away a dizzy spell.

Maybe it’s a sugar rush from those addicting gummy bears; maybe it’s that those quivering lights are making that ridiculous pace-maker schematic pulsing at the same time with his own heartbeat.

He had stopped thinking about it for sometimes, water over bridges and all that, but yesterday – last night – he started talking with Leorio of all people, spilling something he told only to the medics that had to tear Gon’s mangled body from his claws, back then. And Leorio, who is so dumb and such a good friend, looked at him with dilated pupils and a hand extended stupidly in the middle, like he wanted to pat Killua’s shoulder but he was afraid of shattering him at the same time.

Killua still feels shattered when he thinks about his hands over Gon’s chest, electricity fluttering from his palms as he tried to gauge how much was going to make his heart beating again – how much was going to kill him for good.

He has always thought that humans were fragile things, as his brother taught him how to break them with the minimal possible effort, but he never thought about himself in those terms – never would have thought about Gon of all people in those terms.

He was dead. For entire seconds, Gon has been dead and somehow Killua still feels like no one else actually realized it, not even Gon himself.

Leorio apologized again like it was his own fault and that didn’t make things right in the slightest.

Alluka crushes the plastic bag full of candies between her palms, keeping her breath, and Killua knows that Leorio is now the one walking clumsily in front of the committee. He can see his Adam’s apple bouncing up and down from there.

“I really think he’s going to feel sick,” Alluka insists, in a whisper.

All things considered, Killua isn’t sure that removing that needle was such a good idea, now. Is this how people – Leorio, his sister, even Gon – live? Constantly dealing with a blinding earthquake of confusing emotions? Constantly fighting to find balance and reason in spite of every struggle?

Killua doesn’t get it. He thought his brain was malfunctioning because of the whole chimera ant bullshit. The whole Kite thing and going into actual suicidal missions without Gon knowing and crying in front of Palm of all people and Gon trying to kill himself alone and him, Killua, failing as a friend and a human being.

And it didn’t make sense because Killua has done so many terrible things, took so many lives, that this whole ordeal should have left him at worst a bit shaken, but not destroyed. Not literally gutted, like he instead sometimes feels, when he falls asleep and then a nightmare springs him up on the mattress and makes him bent over the toilet until the nausea and the distorted memories stop spinning inside his skull like rattled splinters.

He should have known. That needle made him forget Alluka – stop caring, numbing his memories of her like they were coated in soft, unoffending cotton. Like it wasn’t his problem anymore. That needle made him feel okay with a lot of things like he couldn’t even really see them.

Killua has always pitied Mike, in a way. That big, strong creature sealed behind gates that he could have overcome in a single jump, constantly waiting to fulfill his boring duties just because he ended up being born there instead of somewhere else.

Leorio didn’t know what to say, which must have been a first. Killua too doesn’t really know what to think, but it must be it, the thing that made him cautious and numb, and saved his and Gon’s life when he had to choose between that and Kite’s; when even a split second of hesitation would have meant death.

That needle made him efficient and strong, it protected his brain from the aftermath of every mundane atrocity, made his sleep deep and dreamless, put his mind at ease – mold it just in the way Illumi liked it.

It saved Killua from hating himself too much to bear and, at the same time, it made him being the most despicable person for his own standard.

How is he supposed to rebuild everything from that? It doesn’t even seem possible.

“Yes!” Alluka exclaims, a bit too loud. Leorio is answering questions without faltering. It’s actually quite the show, he looks almost professional, he looks in control – sure of himself because this thing is his thing, this is what he wants to be.

Killua envies him like he envied Gon, what now looks like a billion centuries ago. He looks at Alluka, who’s clapping and grinning like they’re at a concert instead of a degree-thing, and for a moment is scared shitless at the thought that she, too, is going to stop needing him.

“Oh god, brother,” she says, and grasps his fingers like she’s expecting to squeeze toothpaste from them. “He’s at the top of his course. He’ll have to wear a hat.”

Killua frowns and looks down.

“Oh god,” he says too, when the very old lady from the commission tries to put an actual graduation hat on Leorio’s head. “Didn’t he say hats weren’t going to get involved? He lied to us.”

“He said it wasn’t traditional in this country, I don’t think he was lying… Look, I don’t think he knew? He’s going to die under that hat.”

Killua has too much fucking gummy bears in his hands. He shove the bag back’s into Alluka’s chest.

“Wait, this… I have to fucking record this!”

When he’s going to upload the video on the hunter site, they’ll have to fly the country or Leorio is going to make them pay.

*

It’s super weird. Killua knows it is because even Alluka looks like she wants to bolt.

“How come you have such young-looking friends! How old are you even, sweetie?”

Sweetie is, unfortunately, Killua himself. He looks from the woman to his sister a couple times to be sure she isn’t confused or maybe suffering from some kind of severe myopia.

Besides him, Alluka is goggling. She is cute and also four years old in Killua’s mind perpetually, while he feels eighty-four and has back pains, so nothing about this interaction makes any fucking sense.

“I’m fifteen,” he then says, looking straight into the old lady’s glasses. “How old are you.”

“Leave him alone, auntie, why don’t you… Just go there okay?”

She doesn’t seem convinced, the auntie, but Leorio has a couple hands as big as shovels, so he literally just pushes her and her bouncing mass of curly hair back over the rest of the family.

“Sorry about that, aunt Cristina can be…” They don’t get what aunt Cristina can be, even if Killua has a pretty solid idea, because Leorio is already sucked in by a lot of look-alike relatives with spiky hairs and long legs.

“This is mental,” Killua says, but the food is really good. Aunt Cristina has made savory pies for an entire army and Killua did his best to be an accomplished one man army since he was, like, five, so he feels kinda entitled to make them disappear.

“It’s pretty nice, actually,” Alluka says, munching on some kind of tart and swinging her legs over the bench. “And homemade food is the best? Like, every time we eat homemade stuff is always better than everything else even if I don’t know what I’m eating, really.”

“That’s true,” Killua says, and thinks about aunt Mito’s fish-balls boiled in that thick, inconceivably spicy octopus broth that made Killua’s eyes waters like he ingested actual poison – and that made Gon die of laughter, that little shit.

“Do you think that our mother knows how to cook? Or father.”

“Probably survival stuff,” Killua says, because that’s exactly what he too knows how to cook. “But I can’t really picture mom cooking.”

They look at each other for one split second and it’s all they need to go full hysterical, because really.

“Kill, dear, I wanted to make you a birthday cake but I think I killed these egg-shaped baby chickens a bit too much, darling.”

Killua chokes on aunt Cristina’s food and Alluka has to pat him hard on the back.

“Fuck, you sound identical. Look, I got chills.” He does, goose-bumps over his arm, and Alluka laugh so much she’s going to fall off the bench.

She sighs and plops her cheek on Killua’s shoulder, smiling.

“He sure has a lot of relatives. And friends. And people,” she says.

Killua too looks at the swarming army of Leorio’s entourage and feels a bit befuddled.

“He’s a pretty friendly guy, I guess,” he says, because the dozen of not Leorio-like people that are passing by must be his fellow student and friends or whatever.

Killua has always thought that it must have been Gon’s fault if he and Leorio and Kurapika knew each other even before the start of the hunter exam, but maybe Leorio too had to be an active factor in them sticking together. It’s an odd thought. It means that Killua was completely fucking incompetent on a whole new level.

Alluka is watching the display of very loud familiar affection with her eyes peeled and a weird tilt in her eyebrows, like she’s trying to find some kind of trick, the explanation that will finally help her make sense of all this food arranged casually onto folding tables and bursts of laughter and spilled drinks on public ground.

Leorio’s mother has a stern smile. She says something in her language to the both of them and Killua accepts the plastic plate she’s handing because he’s pretty sure he would suffer some kind of consequence otherwise. He sniffs it, and it’s definitely some type of pasta, which still doesn’t explain why the lady then decides to pinch both his and Alluka’s cheeks before vanishing again in the crowd.

“It’s lasagna,” Alluka declares, after some attentive internet-searching and a second helper just to be sure. “I don’t think we’re supposed to survive this ordeal. Didn’t you say it would have been rated r and also dumb?”

“It is pretty dumb. And cousin what’s his name is pretty rated r,” he adds, because cousin What’s His Name has got some killer armpits and he’s now pole dancing around a lamppost. “I guess I figured it would have been more… Well, less family and more bachelor-ish,” he says. “I mean, knowing Leorio.”

Knowing Leorio, the bachelor party does indeed exist. Killua would have been really disappointed in him otherwise.

Problem is, the bachelor party is in fact full of bachelors, all crowded inside Leorio’s small apartment. And all already pretty much drunk after the grand total of three minutes alone with a liquor cabinet – under Killua’s records, that figures like old-man Leorio confirmed.

He took a sip to make Linda o Lisa or whatever to shut the fuck up, but he lost all interest in alcohol after Illumi’s explanation about brain damage and excruciating training sessions that entailed working around every kind of reflexive depressant. Chocolate just tastes that fucking much better, too.

“So are these your infamous friends? The ones you’re always leaving desperate messages on the voicemail?” Linda is a doctor too today, so she has earned the right to make stupid decisions and ask stupid questions. It also elicits funny reactions on Leorio’s face, if you’re keen on finding funny stuff like clinical depression.

Something inside Leorio’s eyes dies. It’s probably his brain.

“So, everyone knows Kurapika,” Killua says, eyes searching for Alluka. She’s over the couch with a bunch of girls and, from what Killua can detect by lip-reading, they’re talking about natural hair conditioners. She sticks her tongue at him and Killua turns his pupil back until his eyes get white just to gross her out.

“They don’t and that’s not… I’m not desperate! This is Killua. He’s a very good friend who totally knows how to use a phone!” Leorio is choking on his alcohol.

“Kurapika doesn’t,” Killua says, to a very interested Linda. “But I can give his number to you and you can give it to everybody else so we can do a flash mob and call him all fucking day long until he snaps and comes to murder us.”

“You sound weirdly serious about the murder part,” Linda says, but she’s smiling. Sweet summer child.

“You should stop stressing over that Kurapika guy, Leo,” girl-doctor number two says, and she sounds pretty deadly serious too while studying Killua over her wide glasses like he’s some kind of interesting skin condition. “This one seems way nicer.”

“I think this is my cue to leave,” Killua says. He shoves his glass in her hand and backflips himself out of the way with a maneuver that elicits a round of applause.

“You’re such a showoff, brother,” Alluka says, giggling while they retrieve their toothbrushes for packing.

Now that Killua got to know his mom, Leorio makes a lot more sense somehow. It’s a scary thought, given his own mother, but maybe one can’t really decide how much he’s going to be influenced by his parents, for better or for worse.

That’s why he isn’t really surprised when Leorio insists upon escorting them both right down the street, trying to give them direction like the internet wasn’t yet invented – like Killua hasn’t already organized a wildly specific map of relevant locations and possible escapes inside his brain from the first moment he put foot out of the train.

Leorio pats Alluka’s head once more like he’s petting a kitten and looks at Killua with the same enraptured madness that Mrs. Paladiknight used to shove lasagna on their plate during the previous un-bachelor-y party.

 “You’ll try to stay safe, won’t you?”

“I haven’t been unsafe one day in my life,” Killua says, unfazed. Leorio half-laughs because is just enough dumb to find him funny. “We’re traveling in a totally safe way. You’ll be in way more danger working inside some filthy hospital.”

“Hospitals aren’t filthy,” he rebuts. Then he frowns. “They’re good ground for bacteria and infections but that’s because of the people and… Whatever, why am I even trying, when I now have a way more sensible Zoldyck to talk to? Alluka, will you make sure your big brother isn’t going to die stupidly?”

“I swear that, if we die, it’s going to be epic,” she says and, really, Killua is raising her right at this point, if Leorio’s reaction is an actual frustrated growl.

“Okay, sure, you do you… Hey, I almost forgot! Aunt Cristina has a bit of an obsessive fixation over food storage. She packed some leftovers for you guys. I put them in the fridge, Alluka, would you…?”

“Sure,” Alluka says, and looks at the both of them with blinking, knowing eyes. “I’ll be right back with sensible timing.”

Leorio just gapes, but she’s already trotting back in the building.

“She’s a menace,” Leorio says.

Killua doesn’t really know what to do but looking proud, so he shoves his hand in his pockets and shrugs. Leorio shakes his head.

“You sure you’ll find the station no problem?”

“Jeez, old man, I’m a hunter. I can find a station,” Killua says, and Leorio nods. “Just go back to your rated r party doing rated r stuff without me and my sister minoring around, okay?”

“If you were a real minor, you would have died to partake in my awesome rated r party.”

“I’m so fucking lucky to be such a fuck up, then,” he says, and Leorio looks oddly on the verge of hugging him. He abstains and Killua thanks whichever deity is assisting him today.

“You’re so not,” Leorio says, though, before thinking harder. “And everyone is, in their own way. Anyway, I won’t even mention the level of fucked up of putting needles inside people’s brain…”

“It’s a Nen technique, don’t make it sound weirder than it already is.”

“Weird isn’t even remotely the word I was going for,” Leorio says, decidedly more sober than his bachelor party should allow him to be. “More like sick or depraved… Evil, too, I think would fit. I’ll let you choose.”

“You’re already thinking about quitting medicine and become a linguist instead?”

The dirty look, he probably deserved it. Leorio sighs, surprisingly patient given his character and his brand new degree.

“Anyway, about that nightmare thing… I guess prescribing you shit would be an exercise in futility.”

“Of course it would be,” says Killua, because he’s actually already tried to churn a bottle of sleeping pills just to make sure. They made him pretty thirsty and left a dusty aftertaste in his mouth. “I’ll be fine.”

“If you need to talk with someone…”

“I’ll be fine, Leorio,” he says.

Leorio sighs.

“I’m sure you’ll be. No reason to suffer alone while you’re working on it, though. So… Just call, okay? Or message me. Or talk to Alluka, too. She seems pretty well equipped to handle… well, anything?”

Killua scoffs. It’s not Alluka the problem, there.

“I should probably punch Illumi,” he says, because it’s suddenly relevant.

Leorio nods.

“Please, let me help.”

“You’ve already punched Gon’s dad, is this some kind of collection you’re trying to start?”

“Punching my friends’ shitty relatives? We should totally make that a thing,” Leorio says, lighter. He smiles again and Killua feels the urgent need to kick him and run, because one shouldn’t be allowed to be that sappy.

“Anyway, I’m serious, call if you need anything,” says Leorio, and it isn’t a question. “I’ll be soon all caught up in some hellish internship, but I’ll let you know where they’re going to ship me off, okay?”

“You make it sound like war,” Killua says.

Leorio blinks like it obviously is a war, one against diseases and government taxes and anti-vaccination movements.

Killua shakes his head.

“Listen, I guess it’s no use, but… Any news from Kurapika?”

It’s a sore spot, not unlike Gon. Maybe even more, judging by Leorio’s bent eyebrows.

When did it happen that Killua’s own existence took the same sad, pitiful turn of Oreo’s life?

“Figured,” he says. “I’ll let you know if he ever happens to pick up the stupid phone.”

“I’ll do the same,” Leorio says, exactly when Alluka’s steps start sprinting down the stairs, backpack a bit heavier on her shoulders. She grins at them.

“Everything set or you need more time?”

Killua shoots her a glance.

“Let’s go, we’re going to lose the train.”

She nods. Her hair beads clink, it’s the sound she does when she smiles.

“Thanks a lot, mister Oreo, I had a lot of fun hanging out with you.”

“It’s Leo… You perfectly know that,” Leorio says, defeated. “You two, I swear… Have a safe trip. Thanks for coming all this way, really.”

Alluka flashes him a thumb up. They’re already off over the sidewalk when Killua stops in his track.

“Oh, I almost forgot,” he says. “I posted your embarrassing video on the Hunter forum. The one where you wear that stupid hat and read that ridiculous oath about the stone-disease or whatever, you know? There’s already half a thousand view!”

Leorio’s face does a weird crumpling thing and his glasses almost falls from his nose.

“You little… I hate you, Killua!” he yells, but they’re already jogging, even if it’s really difficult while they’re laughing too.

“Love you too, old man! Take care!”

“You’re a mean, mean creature,” Alluka says, but when they’re finally set on the platform, waiting, she refreshes the video at least a thousand times to make all the funniest screenshots.

Chapter Text

Gon is all healed, safe and sound and it’s great, Killua feels great about it.

Killua’s brain has instead decided that it feels like a wreck and has punished him with half an hour of meager sleep spent dreaming a convoluted, stressing alternative reality where everyone and their dog was a remote-controlled needle person inside one of those boring real-life simulation games that Milluki was obsessed about when he was twelve.

It had left him worn out and nauseous and for some long, blinking moment, he couldn’t really remember who that small pile of blanket that was snoring softly on the other bed was.

At least Alluka seemed to be able to sleep like a rock even after those last rushed and tiring days, so Killua could lie on the mattress with his head under the pillow until suffocation started looking like blissful nothing. He washed his face three times this morning before breakfast, but his cheeks are still sporting creases from the pillowcase.

Leorio’s forehead is deeply creased too, for other reasons.

“I have an exam in, like, two days, but with those fucking election and everything that’s happened it’s bound to be a disaster anyway… Are you sure you don’t want company, you two?”

“Three,” Gon says, pointing at Alluka. She smiles. “And I’m okay now, no need to worry!”

Leorio looks at him, who’s once again dressed up in his undying green shorts and beaming like an actual ray of sunshine. Killua asks himself if Leorio too is having a hard time dissecting that image from the heap of bloody bandages and the wheezing sound of machines breathing for their friend like Killua is, but maybe that’s not even the point. Leorio isn’t looking at Gon, but at him. Killua promptly covers his face with his own hair.

“We’re going to be fine,” he says. “And you’d be useless anyway. What Nen type are you, again?”

They leave with Leorio’s remote middle finger appearing in front of them in pure emitter fashion when he’s already walking away, towards his dock.

Theirs is on the exact opposite direction. The airport is swarming with hunters, since finally everyone is returning to their activities after the whole election bullshit.

“So, who’s this Cheadle person anyway,” Killua asks, hands crossed beside his head and Alluka tugging at the hem of his shirt.

“No idea, I voted for Pariston,” says Gon, like Killua should at least know him instead. Not that he cares, really.

They’re going to the world tallest tree and then it will be it.

He’s dreaded this moment so much during the last weeks that, now that has come, Killua doesn’t even know how to feel.

It seems like a lifetime ago, when Biscuit told him that he should have overcome his cowardice or leave Gon. A lifetime of a needle stuck up inside his head – a lifetime of being scared of Illumi.

He scraps at his forehead, where he still feels the faint sting of something there.

“Gon,” he says, over the rim of his cheeseburger.

Gon’s explaining the concept of fast food to Alluka with the same amazed expression he had when it was Killua the one who disclosed those truths to his enfant sauvage self.

“Yes?” Gon says, ketchup smeared on his wrist and cheeks full of chips.

“Alluka and I,” he starts and it’s simple, really. They’re just words. “We’re going to take you to the World Tree, but from then on I think we should part ways.”

Here, done. Look at it, solid and smooth in the middle of the table, between their cokes and the rumbling white noise of the airport.

Gon blinks as the loudspeakers announce Leorio’s flight in lingua franca right before blurring in foreign tongues, all merging into an indistinctive mess.

“You mean… Oh, okay,” says Gon. He blinks again and tries to sweep his face from the sauce. He ends up with ketchup on his eyebrow and Killua has to suppress the sudden, nonsensical instinct to extend a hand and wipe it off with his thumb.

He presses all of his fingers on the edge of the table, hoping he’s not going to leave a dent in the cheap metal.

“Listen, Killua, I’m really sorry about-”

“It’s not because of that,” he says. He looks at Alluka, who’s watching them like they’re going to implode and leave her alone with half bitten chicken nuggets and empty trays. “I just… You’ve found your dad. And that’s super cool, I’m really happy for you and I’m happy I’ve helped you with your family stuff, but right now…”

“You have your own family stuff,” Gon says, eyes so wide and bewildered, like part of his brain is still trying to process the information even if he’s already outputted the correct answer. He too looks at Alluka, smile uncertain but there. He shakes his head, and nods. “Yeah, of course I understand. Of course.”

“So we’re going to take you there and then we’re going to travel for some time on our own.” Killua’s voice, it sounds so reasonable, way better than it was in his mind rehearsal that night. “Alluka has never been, well, anywhere. And we can’t stay too much in the same place in case our family changes idea and starts pressing again for us to come back home.”

Gon is smart. He nods again and looks at the them both with resolve.

“Sure, I understand.”

Of course he does. It’s perfectly reasonable.

“But, Killua,” he starts again and this time the table creaks under Killua’s fingertips. “I still have to apologize to you, properly. Ging told me how.”

“Did he?” Killua says, his voice sounds really dumb outside his head.

Gon nods.

“Yes, so listen, please. I’m really, really sorry about what I said to you back then, that it wasn’t your business. You’re my best friend and you’ve always been by my side and I didn’t mean to hurt you.”

“Jeez, this is intense,” says Killua. He’s not shaking, it’s more like the table is, and Gon and maybe Alluka, who’s watching them with the biggest eyes. “Is this what Ging told you to say?”

Gon blinks.

“Ah, not exactly. I mean… He said that when you apologize to a friend, you have to be sorry but also make a promise!”

“A promise,” Killua says, confused. “Ging really is a complicated guy, isn’t he?”

Gon grins.

“Maybe. So, the promise is about what you’re going to do that’s different from what you did!”

“Sounds like good advice.”

“Yeah. So...”

“It’s fine,” he says, and it’s a lot like breathing again after an intense training session in water torture. “You’ve been really mean, but thanks for apologizing.”

“Brother,” Alluka says, incredulous and half-awed.

Gon gapes, but then he’s already biting his tongue and laughing.

“Yeah, I was. I really am sorry, I’ll be a better friend from now on and I’ll never say anything that mean to you again.”

“It’s fine,” Killua repeats and for a bit it almost is.

This is what he wanted, for Gon to be Gon again, with his Gon-body and his normal voice instead of that unbearable mockery of puberty. This is what he wanted, Gon’s apology while they steal chips from each other and roam airports pointing at every dumb thing they see in cheap souvenir shops. Everything back to normal, no tension between them.

It’s when they’re already taking off, hostess explaining where they could find the bathrooms, that Killua realizes that, no way, it’s not enough.

Gon apologized and Killua feels better about it now, water under bridges and all that. He may have overreacted a little bit, too.

But this, everything that led them here right now, on this airship, it’s something different. Being accused of not being enough – enough close, enough of a friend, for him to get involved in Gon’s revenge, in Gon’s life – it was hurtful, but it’s not even remotely the real problem.

Those apologies, they were for Killua, for Kite.

They weren’t, though, for the only person Gon must apologize to and vow to do better in the future. Killua’s most important person, the one whom he failed because he was too weak and too coward and too scared of shattering everything like it wasn’t already falling apart without him even trying.

Gon is teaching the secrets of janken to Alluka. Killua looks at the both of them, laughing and chanting, and suppresses a shiver. He thought it would have been simple: make Gon better and then make him apologize – forgive and move on.

But how he’s supposed to forgive Gon for killing Gon, when he can’t even forgive himself for letting him do it in the first place?

**

The last blasting news is that she wants to go to school; the pretty old one is that Killua wants to give her everything. He doesn’t know where to start.

“We need an elementary school certificate. And, like, a surname that doesn’t make people fly,” Alluka says, calm and business-like, as if she wasn’t dying to ask him.

“That would be such a cool superpower,” says Killua. He keeps at scrolling the hunter site homepage, but no useful diversion pops out. No one’s been killed in a bizarre manner, no one’s publicly insulting Ging Freecss for whatever reason – that’s actually a common occurrence. Gon’s always participating in the discussions as a non-official moderator. People love him.

He resorts to watching Leorio’s graduation video once again just to increase the visualizations and piss him off.

“Brother.” Alluka is still seated across him, ice cream halved. There’s some on one of her ever-growing hair beads.

“Sister,” Killua says, and then the ice cream ends up on his nose too. He licks it away while Alluka fakes a gag.

“I read about it. It sounds fun,” she says.

Killua isn’t going to get out of this, is he?

“It sounds abysmal.”

She looks at him, eyes peeled, until Killua is sure Nanika is going to pop out in the middle of a café.

“Normal and fun,” she insists.

“That’s an oxymoron,” says Killua, not impressed.

Alluka can pull off an impressive eye roll these days.

“And you’re a moron. Bill’s on me,” she says, and sprints from the stool before Killua can protest.

Last week she happened to babysit twins from their innkeeper of the day and she got her first ever salary. She has quickly learned how to use it to make a point of when she thinks Killua is acting like a jerk.

Killua takes his license back from the terminal. On the dark screen, his reflection looks a lot like someone who’s in sore need of a vacation. Or a good night sleep. He thinks about stupid Leorio and chocolate milk, maybe he should get some of that, but Alluka may be onto something with that diagnosis of lactose intolerance.

He looks at the people walking by in tiny bikinis and straw hats, at the trail of sand coming from his own shoes and he despairs.

“Ready to go?” Alluka asks, change tingling in the pockets of her cherry-red sundress. She still shorter than Killua and so, so much more adjusted at life. “You look a little pale. I mean, even for you.”

Killua needs a less perceptive sister. He’s really fucking scared, and completely blessed.

She loves him so much, but apparently she loves home-made meals and normalcy too and Killua gets it, in an oh so painful way. He gets it since the first time he put a foot inside Mito’s house and he gets it now that aunt Cristina’s leftovers are still haunting their minibar back at the hotel.

“We should go some other place,” he says. And then breathes, too, because you have to if you want to, like, remain alive. “Maybe somewhere with a decent school.”

Alluka screams and hugs him tight. Killua was already doomed from the start.

*

It’s way more difficult than what he had anticipated. In his experience, the world outside the hunter association tends to be.

“And she has to pass some kind of exam? And we have to fill out all these papers… We don’t even know her birthday.” It’s a painful thought, that one. Tsubone or Gotoh would know, but Killua really doesn’t want to call them.

Gon hums, slow and thoughtful. He’s become slower and more thoughtful than ever before in the span of the last months. Killua doesn’t know if it’s because of Whale Island, because of the new rhythm of his nen-less self or because of him.

“You guys can totally make it up then,” says Gon. The wind is blowing through the phone, Killua can almost smell the ocean. “If no one knows the truth, then it can’t be a lie.”

“The name, though,” says Killua.

“You can use mine. People don’t like Ging, but at least he’s not assassin-famous, just pesky-famous.”

“We can’t steal your surname, Gon.”

“I don’t mind,” he says. You can take everything from me, Killua hears, as he blinks at the bare ceiling of yet another hotel room.

He shakes his head, the pillow falls down.

“And it would be quite pointless, we need something Illumi wouldn’t think of.” Which cut their options, and Killua’s mental energy, to a solid zero.

Gon is humming again. Maybe it’s the wind. Maybe is that white noise that sometimes fills up Killua’s brain from the bottom of the stomach up to the head.

“Maybe he isn’t even chasing you anymore. It’s been almost a year.”

“Maybe,” says Killua, one ear listening to the sound of the shower. Still running, Alluka has a lot of hair. “But we aren’t in the position to assume. Illumi is unpredictable and our mother is persistent, and…”

Gon laughs, still thoughtful.

“You don’t sound like you want to do this thing at all, Killua.”

He breathes.

“Not yet,” he admits, in a whisper. The spiky ball growing between his ribs, it must be guilt. “It’s just… I’m trying to teach her the basis of Nen, but she can’t really protect herself or Nanika. And I can’t really protect them if I’m not there. And I’ll still need to work at some point, I can’t simply leave her at some school and go.”

“You never stopped training,” Gon says. It’s just regret, not bitterness. “Maybe you’re even stronger than Illumi now.”

“Maybe,” he says, but he knows Illumi and this isn’t a matter of underestimating himself. “I didn’t stop, but it isn’t like he stopped either. And even training isn’t like it was back then, you know.” He doesn’t say ‘with you’, but the thought is enough for the perpetual lump of his throat to grow as big as Gon’s spiky head.

“Yeah, it isn’t,” Gon says. Big pause: there is always a lot of those between them these days. “Hey, I have to…”

“Yeah,” says Killua, over the lump. “Don’t worry. Out to catch something big?”

Gon giggles a bit and it’s almost like there’s some kind of lump back there too. Or maybe Killua is hearing things.

“Lots of oysters, we hope. It’s a good period.”

Lovely. It sounds fucking lovely. Killua hates oysters.

“Have fun, okay?” he says instead.

“Don’t worry too much,” Gon says, because he can be such a dad for someone who never had one. He hangs up and Killua is alone again with school papers and that looming sense of upcoming dread.

“So, how’s the boyfriend,” Alluka yells, over the howls of the hairdryer and the bathroom door.

He chooses to ignore both her and another e-mail notification from the Hunter Association. He opened the first one last night out of boredom and he’s definitely going to ignore all the following. Gon too was in the list of recipients and he didn’t bring it up so Killua definitely won’t, thank you very much.

He opens that stupid radio scanner app instead. You can always bet on the universe to provide distractions in the form of fresh tragedies.

“What do you think about fireworks?” Killua asks, when Alluka finally remerges from the bathroom with hair as fluffy as a cloud.

“Why, are we going to a fair?” she asks, eyes sparkling.

“I was thinking something a bit more exciting,” Killua says and of course she’s all in.

*

Phone calls have the uncanny ability to happen always at the worst possible moments.

Killua breathes between his teeth and lets the phone vibrate inside his pocket.

He steps on the metal beam, lightly, lightly. The catwalk looks totally unstable. These are some pretty fucking unsafe labor conditions and he should really think about pressing charge or whatever it is that sensible citizens do in cases like this.

In a case like this, Killua jumps. He lands on the railing, over the stairs. Everything is metallic like an aftertaste at the base of the tongue, so the stench of blood doesn’t even register under noses that don’t belong to Gon Freecs.

He’s acting stupid and he knows it. Fireworks factories accidentally exploding in the middle of the afternoon aren’t something he should like to meddle with and sure as hell isn’t something he’d like his sisters to meddle with.

And here they are, doing the morally right thing even if Killua has never been sure about morals one day in his life.

Nanika’s watching him, her face is too close to the stained glass of the window and blazing fumes of flames that spread around like poppies.

Killua tries to shoo her away, but she’s just staying there, eyes opened, fists closed.

The phone starts ringing again and Killua has to hang up on Biscuit before he slides on the railing to get closer to the bloodbath without getting burned. Seriously, people these days.

“Come, Killua, come!”

“Not yet,” he says, to the window. “It’s dangerous. Just stay there, I’ll take them to you.”

He’ll just have to slalom between unexploded exploding materials, it isn’t that difficult: he leaps over the nearest countertop and its surface feels scalding on his feet even in between the soles of his shoes. It’s a game like the floor is lava only the floor is full of fireworks ready to ignite a chain reaction.

The people who didn’t pass out are also frightened. Killua really prefers for the people he helps to be conveniently unconscious.

“Help,” one of the guys say, but it’s more like he’s asking for some kind of divine intervention. He’s missing a hand and Killua has to find a way to reach him without the risk to lose some limbs himself.

The floor is lava, but the walls are covered with bulging, silver machinery. Killua can’t really fathom their purpose, but if they’re still unexploded that’s enough for him to deem them as good climbing material. 

He jumps and twirls until he’s at reaching range for the guy’s feet. He drags him up upside down and probably in a way that would have made collectively cringe the entirety of Leorio’s faculty members, but he manages to pile him up over two other people and then make it out of the window without anyone barfing on somebody’s feet, and that seems a lot like an accomplishment.

“Heal all their burns and this guy’s hand” he orders to Nanika, trying to be really specific really fast but knowing full well that he’s putting Alluka asleep for days. He cringes at the thought, but Nanika is still smiling. “I’m going to get the others.”

“Who are you?” the handless guy asks. Killua looks at his clouded eyes for a second before chopping him at the base of the neck. He faints immediately. “Well, let’s hope he’s not going to remember this. I’ll be right back!”

“Aye, aye,” Nanika says, serene.

The phone rings again while Killua is climbing back inside the window.

“Biscuit,” he answers, speakers on. “Can I call you later?”

“No way,” she says, and she’s probably on speakers too because she’s like that. Killua is sure he’s just a footnote over some kind of evil plan he doesn’t want to meddle with. “You’re coming.”

The other injured guys are now pretty much dead-looking, but at least they still have limbs attached. There’s a woman who’s missing a big portion of her nose. Light is seeping through the big hole in the ceiling so her mangled face is on display.

“Is this about that? For real?”

“Of course it’s about that. You didn’t answer on the site but you did see the e-mail…”

“Yes. No. I…” The heath is suffocating. He should probably activate Godspeed but if he goes too fast the risk of making something critical catch fire would increase a bit too much for his comfort. “It’s just… I am busy, that’s all. So, thanks for calling and all that, we’ll catch up later, okay?”

“Don’t you dare hang up on me, Killua Zoldyck,” she says and, well, she’s pretty scary after you’ve witnessed her actual form.

Killua swears mentally and tiptoes around fireworks.

“They’re going to give you that stupid star, want it or not, so better show your face and catch up with people while you’re at it… Are you even listening to me?”

“I don’t care,” Killua says. “About the star. Didn’t Ging dodge his third one for… I mean, I think he’s still dodging it.”

Biscuit hisses and Killua almost drops the phone on Injured Lady’s face. Not that it would have made any difference, she’s already pretty bloody.

“And how on earth did you come to think it would be a good idea to act like Ging Freecs out of all people?” Biscuit asks. She’s probably massaging her temples right now. Killua would like to do it too, but he’s got both hands occupied by blood and unconscious people. He should pile them up, maybe tie them with a bow.

“Fuck my life,” he says instead, but too low under his breath for Biscuit to hear.  “I just don’t care about this kind of things. Morel too and I bet that Knuckle and Shoot and everybody else really don’t, so why…”

“It would be a good thing for Gon,” Biscuit says, going full lecture tone just up until she’s not, and she starts to sound troubled instead. “And for you too, you know? There’s something… What is it that happened, because something happened and I- You know I feel responsible for you two. I am your teacher.”

These people aren’t heavy, but carry them is a pain. He tilts his head, trying to get rid of the shoe that’s blocking his vision, but then he feels the phone slipping inside the collar of his shirt. He doesn’t swear – being around Alluka has made him become such a polite guy, really.

“Didn’t you say I didn’t need one anymore when I asked for advice about my sister?”

“You don’t need a Nen teacher. But sure as hell you need…” He doesn’t really know what he needs because the phone definitively slips from the crook of his neck and almost falls on living flames. Killua snatches it with the tips of his fingers and balances it like it’s a yo-yo until he’s again on solid ground with his load of unconscious idiots stocked on his shoulders.

“Killua,” Biscuit says. “You have to come. If you don’t, Gon won’t too.”

It’s the sound of a rubber band: something inside Killua’s brain snaps.

“Then call Gon, why are you even talking to me!” He’s not sure she gets that, though, because that’s when the pavement explodes, which is pretty inconvenient.

Grandpa Zeno loved to overshare a lot of really weird stories about incredible stuff that happens while you’re fighting for your life. Killua tends to dismiss them instinctively based on the fact that he highly doubts Zeno has ever been in actual danger while fighting, given that he’s pretty much one of the most powerful people alive.

That thing, though. The thing where everything is just so slow and the explosion looks like bulging suds, like the growth of a carnation caught on time-lapse.

Killua bolts. He throws people through the window and then throws himself and there he is, out in the fresh air just right before the wall explodes too.

It fucking burns a whole lot.

“Killua!” Nanika screeches, eye-holes wide and mouth agape.

“Everything’s fine,” Killua says, and pats his shoulder to put out the flames. It’s a weird sensation, one of the pain is less accustomed to because of how much of an inconvenience burning scars are to heal. He feels an impromptu pang of empathy for the people now scattered around in uncomfortable positions. That too is a weird sensation.

“What the hell is happening here!”

Killua turns and almost choke, because Nanika is there, on full display, and she’s pointing at the people, like she’s probably tried to do all along.

The entire fucking city and the police and the firemen and the ambulances and the generic piece of shit bystanders who gathers over tragedies like scavengers.

“It’s her!” a guy that looks like he needs to still be in high school says. “The ghost of the van accident!”

He’s pointing at Nanika. Everybody eyes shift on her and Killua blinks, which is exactly the timespan he needs to blow up any residual charge and go full Godspeed. He takes Nanika and flies, so fast that the next explosion is barely a tap on his earbuds while the wind shifts against them like water.

He runs and they’re on the next building, then the next and then another one. The impact of the jumps makes his teeth clash together.

It’s up on the bell tower where the last iota of aura fails him and they almost fall, over the bells and down for meters and meters of dark stairwells.

He’s been so stupid. So careless, so fucking…

“Killua,” Nanika says, looking puzzled in his arms.

“I’m sorry,” he says, as he finally lets her go. He’s probably left bruises on Alluka’s body, he’s just… He needs to think. They can’t remain there. They have to disappear.

He swallows and it’s like trying to eat a whole spider eagle egg in one bite.

Killua can fix this – Nanika can. Nanika can fix this no problem at all, that’s what she does best. That’s what Killua needs her to do best, because then they make sense, the both of them. Then, he too can be the kind of person he likes, instead of just being Killua, who carelessly throws injured people around while he chatters on the phone about his menial stuff, because he’s wired this way. It’s just how he is, at the core, and there’s no amount of running from that.

He has to order something. Like, going back in time. Way back when they were little, way back before he met Gon and way back before even Nanika happened.

His eyes burn more than the blisters on his arms.

“Nanika,” he says instead. “Take us somewhere safe.”

“Aye, aye,” she says, uncertain but obedient as always.

Killua isn’t going to use her anymore, he can’t. But it’s just fitting to the absolute mess that is life has become that his last request implies teleporting directly on Biscuit’s lap.

She screeches like a pterodactyl and Killua can’t really blame her.

*

As far as home decor goes, Killua can’t say he is an expert.

Hell, he can’t say he’s an expert on homes in general, actually. He might as well become one if he insists on fixing his pupils on every single piece of furniture but the armchair Biscuit is trying to not scratch with her pink painted nails.

She used those hands to hand him a blanket for Alluka. She was already asleep when they materialized themselves between Biscuit and her guilty-pleasure cooking contestant show on channel five.

She threw her phone on Killua’s head with remarkable reflexes and he made himself being hit because at this point he doesn’t even know.

“Would you at least explain how you and your sister managed to teleport inside my living-room?”

Killua frowns as she splatters some smelly cream over his burns with a bit more violence than the label probably recommends.

It’s a good question. Killua keeps looking at the display of gemstone that covers the faces of two walls like a library and frowns.

“I’m not sure. I mean,” he adds, when Biscuit too frowns, and in a really minacious way. “I know how we teleported, I just don’t know why we ended up here.” He turns towards the door on the left. Alluka is asleep over Biscuit’s queen-size bed, but Killua doubts that she too would know the explanation. Killua will have to ask Nanika and he’s not sure he’s going to like the answer.

“You understand that this doesn’t explain a single thing,” Biscuit says, and sticks a band-aid over the bridge of his nose even if Killua can’t really remember why he should need one there. He isn’t going to complain, though.

Biscuit’s going to explode, Killua can feel it in the air, but he honestly doesn’t know what to do.

And then, just like she was pulsing with rage, she exhales and deflates completely, hands useless in her lap. She’s wearing pretty ridiculous fluffy slippers – they have bunny ears and Killua isn’t even surprised.

“I knew something was off. I knew it,” Biscuit says, brooding. “You and your evasive answers and calling to ask about Nen and now you simply appear out of nowhere with second degrees burns and a fainted sister…”

“She didn’t faint, she’s just asleep,” Killua says. “It’s… It’s the cost of her Nen ability,” he adds. Throw a little cobble, watch it fall and look at the ripples it makes.

Biscuit scoffs.

“So she was the one we were talking about. Of course. Like, she mastered Hatsu in a handful of weeks? Well, she is your sister.” She’s both bewildered and skeptical. “Are you telling the true? And if you’re not, why on earth are you not telling the truth?”

“It’s…”

“Let me guess. It’s complicated.”

Killua’s shoulders fall. The blisters prickle under the gauzes.

“Family stuff,” he offers.

Biscuit nods, knowing, and starts collecting items from her first-aid kit like the disinfectant is deliberately trying to get in her way.

“Your family, yes, the one you’re still running from. You told me that, even if you didn’t tell me why, and that’s okay. I mean, I’m dying to know because it sounds potentially worth like three novels with a thick plot, but I’m a patient woman…” Killua rolls his eyes, “and I shall not pry.”

Killua folds his arms and tries to lean his back on the chair without ruining Biscuit’s handiwork.

“Alluka has this wild ability. It’s super awesome, so my garbage family used to keep her hidden and my extremely garbage oldest brother tried to kill her off… That’s the thick plot, really,” he says.

“It isn’t really thick. It’s more, like, super sad,” says Biscuit, grimace on her face and one fluffy bunny tapping nervously on the carpet.

“Whatever,” Killua says, neutral, because he doesn’t feel ready to acknowledge that right now. He’ll probably never be. “Point is, we tried to lay low for sometimes, but it’s… She should be able to do what she wants. And I should protect her while she does it, but apparently I’m still super fucking scared that our garbage brother is going to pop out and slaughter us or worse.”

Biscuit squints, surely while she’s trying to imagine something worse than a slaughter – a needle planted inside Killua’s head for good, to live like a puppet so that Illumi could have complete control over him and Nanika, Alluka left alone like some useless appendage. He winces at the idea and finds Biscuit watching him intently, a growing crease on her forehead.  She sighs, liquid and heavy.

“What kind of ability are we talking?”

Killua’s brain is a frightened animal, debating. It’s still Illumi? That voice at the base of his mind that tries to talk him out of trusting?

“You’ll be in danger too if I tell you.”

“You think I’m weaker than any of your garbage brothers? Think again,” Biscuit says and she is, like many other time, glowing with confidence, her body a small star bursting with pressurized energy. She’s strong, in that defiant, unapologetically cute way. And maybe it’s because she’s a transmuter or maybe it’s because she’s just stupidly kind in a way so convoluted that Killua’s own convoluted mind can appreciate fully – easier than Wing’s matter-of-factly praises or Kite’s grumbling comments.

Thing is, Biscuit is his favorite teacher, one of the strongest people he knows and she’s safe. She wouldn’t hurt him, she wouldn’t hurt Alluka.

“It’s a weird story, and a long one,” he says. “I never told it to anyone.”

“Not even Gon?” It slips from her lips, so she sealed them right after. “Well, I like to pry, you know?” she says, finger raised. Killua’s eyes bust up Gyo on habit, but she’s just pointing at the big clock on the wall. That too is covered with more shiny minerals than any sane person would find advisable.

“We have time.”

Chapter Text

Killua’s left leg is sorely asleep, Alluka’s head has been using it as a pillow since the sun set. His eyelids weight a ton each and he don’t want to fall asleep, to risk waking up screaming and rustling like a mad man. So he endures and pinches his wrist.

“They still look like jewels,” Gon says, face plastered to the window. Out there, cities are spread over the landscape like twinkling jam, like constellations. Gon’s expression mirrored on the glass looks way more like he's watching a graveyard lit by candles.

Killua pets Alluka’s hair, to soothe himself more than her, but Gon’s smiling when he turns towards him, hands still glued to the glass.

“Do you remember the Hunter exam?” he asks. “It was the first time on an airship for me! I thought it was huge and I was so excited!”

“Yeah,” Killua says. Does he really have to answer that? “I actually know how to drive one, but I had never stopped to just watch out of the window while I was learning, so it was kind of a first time for me too.”

“You can do the most incredible things,” Gon says, still smiling. “Like when you used that echo-thing to try and catch old man Netero’s ball? That was incredible, I was super impressed.”

“Rhythm echo is just some cheap assassin trick,” Killua says, and his eyes drop on Alluka’s face. She’s drooling on his pants. “Everyone can learn it.”

Gon shakes his head, half a laugh lingering between his lips.

“I don’t think I could, I’m too loud.”

“You’re not, you figured out Zetsu on your own… And, anyway, it’s not like you have to kill people, so you don’t need to learn.”

He didn’t want to sound that harsh. That rough itch inside his throat, it must be anger – and then shame, because why on earth is he even angry for? He’s here, with Gon, it’s their last trip together and he should be… He doesn’t know how he should feel.

Gon too, he looks troubled in a way that’s almost pitiful.

“Well, I killed Pitou,” he says. “And other chimera ants too.”

“That’s different. It was a war.” Killua says it aloud for the first time and it makes a lot of sense. It was a war. There weren’t good people and bad people, not for real. There were sides and goals, there was survival involved. It was different from anything Killua had ever done even with his upbringing.

“I guess it was,” says Gon, pensive. He stretches his arms and then he presses the palms together, finger intertwined like he’s praying. “Killua?”

Killua tilts his head. The lights have been dimmed for the night ride, but he can still make out Gon’s face in enough details to know that he’s worried.

“Is it okay if I don’t really feel anything about it? About killing those chimera ants?” he asks. “I was so relieved when Morel said that Kite was okay… Well, almost okay. Alive. But so many things have happened and I…”

“You’re asking the wrong person,” says Killua, head shaking. “I… Really, I’m just happy that you are alive.”

Gon blinks, and his smile is openly sad now.

“Thanks, Killua. I don’t even know what you did… I think I don’t know what everyone did since I’ve seen Kite that broken. I haven’t been a good soldier at all. I… I haven’t been a good friend at all.”

“You’re a good friend,” he says and something twirls inside his stomach. He really hopes it isn’t his dinner. “You’re my best friend. I couldn’t really say that before because I didn’t have other  friends, so I didn’t know what that meant, but I think I know now,” he doesn’t say ‘thanks to you’, because saying this kind of embarrassing stuff is already so difficult and, anyway, Gon must already know, he’s not stupid. “So, you really are my best- fuck, what’s that face for!”

Gon – laughs, but he’s leaking, face scrunched and hands fretting about.

“I- yeah! Sorry!” he says. He sniffs hard and rubs his sleeves on his face. “Help, I don’t know how you can always be so calm, Killua. I think I’ve never cried so much like this last month.”

Killua finds himself gaping, but he doesn’t say a word. He doesn’t feel like crying anymore, honestly: he’s just dry and deeply tired, like he’s been waiting for something stressful to happen – it’s a bit like getting whipped, the worst part is always the anticipation of the pain, not the pain itself.

When even Gon falls asleep, the blimp is dipping in the dark over the sea and Killua spends quite some time trying to decide if those wobbling mass over the horizon are mountains or clouds. They’re both, he discovers when the sun starts to rise and Alluka stirs on his completely numb legs.

“We there?”

“Not yet,” he says, as she rubs her eyes and looks at Gon’s lying form like it’s some kind of puzzle she has to solve. “Oh, is that it? The world tree?”

Killua blinks and sticks his head over her shoulder. There’s a tall line crawling up toward the sky like a ladder, it stands black over the sun that’s finally creeping out in soft tendrils from the mountain.

“It really is tall… So, Gon’s dad wanted to see it so bad that he had to go immediately?”

It’s… What?

“No, Gon’s dad is just a bit of a jerk,” says Killua. “Just a different kind of jerk than our familiar brand of jerk, I guess.”

Alluka giggles and yawns. Killua lets his eyes wandering over Gon, snoring quietly on his own elbow, legs propped up the seat. He debates within himself if he should wake him up, because Gon would love to see the sunrise and the tree from there, but his eyes catch Alluka’s form.

She looks pretty content just to stay there and watch outside the window, fingers fidgeting with one of her hair beads. Killua looks at the sun outlining her like she’s catching fire and feels the urge to remain silent instead, while she breathes shining moisture over the glass, raptured.

Knowing Ging, he has probably planned some crazy stunt for Gon, like making him climb all the way to the top of the tree: he will have as much time as he likes to see it.

Alluka has yet to see anything.

Killua finds himself pretty excited about that when he isn’t just terrified.

He realizes he hasn’t slept one bit when they’re already landing and Gon is fumbling through his backpack, searching for Ging’s hunter license. He still has to give it back to him.

“You have one too, like this one?” Alluka asks, interested.

“Yep. It’s pretty useful.”

“Maybe you should take one too, Alluka!” Gon says, like that’s simply the best thing anyone could hope for. Killua hits him in the head – not too hard, it would be a pity to kill him after that he had done so much to try and keep him alive.

“Alluka isn’t trained and, anyway, she’ll decide this kind of stuff when she’ll be at least, like, eighteen.”

“Wow, Killua, you sound a lot like aunt Mito,” Gon says. Killua hits him again, but he could live with being an aunt Mito kind of guy, honestly. Aunt Mito is awesome.

They get out on a platform packed with tourists, Alluka’s eyes glimmering with a mixture of bewilderment and sheer panic. Killua drapes an arm on her shoulders to keep her closer – Gotoh would be pretty happy with how much he’s complying with those dumb rules.

Stasha isn’t a big city. More like a bunch of houses grown around the world tree because of the world tree itself.

Alluka points and laughs at the umpteenth pairs of world tree earring and the world tree schnapps bottles and the world tree hats. They end up taking a group photo and strolling about, munching three local fried pastries, as big as their eponymous beavertails and overflowing with sugary toppings until there’s really nothing left to do to delay the moment.

They’re going to text each other if something happens, and that’s all there is to it.

He turns, because they’re going to text each other if something happens. What the hell. What the actual fucking hell – he turns and Gon is already a small speck of green and black, walking away with resolve, ready for the next adventure, because that’s just how he is – what he is.

“Brother?” Alluka asks, frowning lightly and there’s something creeping up her face, she’s closing like Nanika is coming about but it looks a lot like-

“Sorry,” Killua says, fast – faster than guilt, both for her and himself.

“Are you sure,” Alluka says, eyes clear.

“I am,” he says, and he is. This is the thing he was searching for, his thing: this is right. “It’s family time now, and for the first time in my life it doesn’t contemplate the need to dispose of corpses. I think it’s wonderful.”

Killua is well aware of being the less humorous person on the planet and then – she gets it. She can laugh at this kind of jokes, because she was there too. Because she, too, is made of the same blood of Killua’s own, the same of the other players in that shiritori game their parents thought was funny, as if their mother has ever been funny one day in her life – as if any single one of them has ever been funny one day in their life. Maybe Grandpa. Grandpa could be pretty funny sometimes.

Alluka smiles.

“Let’s play shiritori on the way back,” she demands, in that whimsical tone that’s theirs – hers and Nanika’s together.

She starts with Gon and she has already lost.

**

Killua told her, about Nanika and the wishes. Biscuit knows that it’s the reason Gon’s alive and that makes five people now, Alluka and Nanika included.

Killua’s grandpa uses to say three can keep a secret if two of them are dead. He never said anything about how keeping secrets hurts the bones, though, how it’s like carrying a bag full of stones.

Killua does feel lighter, but the soreness in his muscle is so deep it looks impossible he’s ever going to recover. Maybe he should ask Biscuit for one of her magic massages or whatever it is that her embarrassing Hatsu does.

Alluka is still sound asleep. Killua started by stroking her hair gingerly and he ended up curled in a ball beside her, eyelids so heavy that keeping them up is like trying to open the testing gate. He tries, though, and keeps trying until he’s not sure if he’s asleep or awake and the shadows in the room all look like Illumi’s tall form, his gaze burning and prickling on Killua’s skin. He can see him, leaning over Alluka from above like his body is made of hanging clothes, hair like dripping oil, boiling, leaving blisters in its wake – Killua jolts awake at the sound of the door cricking.

“Ehy,” Biscuit whispers, face dark in the dim light. “I’ve made dinner, thought I asked if you wanted some.”

Killua blinks away the thick cloth that’s fogging up his thoughts and nods.

“Yeah,” he says. “Coming.”

“Take your time,” Biscuit chants, and walks away in soft steps, hair flowing untied on her back.

Alluka snores and snuggles a bit closer to Killua’s elbow. He peels himself off, careful, and slips out of the room leaving the door only slightly ajar.

Biscuit’s house looks a lot like a museum, or maybe a jewelry store. Killua isn’t accustomed to any of them and frowns at his own reflection instead than actually watching the exhibit of glowing gemstones. There’s one that’s the exact shade of Alluka’s eyes and, besides that, a big rock-thing that’s cut in half and sprouts crystals that change from rich brown to a vibrant orange under the light.

“That’s a geode. Isn’t it beautiful?”

Killua flinches so bad that he almost ends up crushing the glass to use the geode as a throwing weapon.

Biscuit’s face is unimpressed if not vaguely concerned. She studies him from head to toe.

“The kitchen is right here.”

“You cook?” Killua asks and now he’s the one who’s concerned. She’s wearing an actual apron, frilly and with a pattern of chili peppers and bunnies.

 “I am an adult, you know,” she says, and looks at the ceiling like it’s at fault for saddling her with such a dumb pupil. “Now stop acting like a ghost and go cut some bread, would you?”

It’s phrased like an order and Killua’s brain doesn’t even conceive the possibility of disobeying her.

The kitchen is small and filled with the smell of something known but difficult to grasp beneath layers of mixed spices.

“What’s that,” asks Killua and he’s hostile just from habit. He’s actually pretty sure Alluka would love whatever it is that’s boiling in that pot.

Biscuit is definitely a witch, cauldron blowing fumes on her face while she stirs a thick, yellow-ish mixture.

“It’s just ciorba,” she says and Killua does his actual best to look confused. “Soup, it’s soup… Hope you like potatoes because I didn’t have anything else in the pantry.”

Killua thinks that he doesn’t know a single person who doesn’t like potatoes, but he also isn’t sure how to talk with Biscuit, here, in her kitchen while she’s cooking dinner without being prompted. It’s quite surreal, like that first time at Gon’s family table when everyone was praying and Killua didn’t know what to do with his own hands and thoughts.

“Really? So much for being an adult,” it’s what he says instead, because, well.

“Excuse you,” Biscuits rebuts, wooden spoon wielded like a sword. “I also happen to be a hunter, you know? I’m never at home, so appreciate your luck and eat your damn soup.”

Killua stomach growls. He retreats to cutting the bread in thick slices, crumbles piling on the table.

They sit down, facing one another over the garlicky fumes rising from the plates. Killua takes his spoon and studies Biscuit as she blows away the steam from a small helping of mushy vegetables.

“Eat,” she orders, without even looking at him.

Really, there’s no way one could disobey her even if he really, really wanted to piss her off.

Alluka is right, though. Home-cooked meals always make everything better.

*

Killua washes the plates and puts them high on the draining rack. The water drips down in the sink with residual suds.

There’s still soup inside the pot and Biscuit wrapped the remaining bread inside a napkin, for Alluka.

Killua is at a loss.

“Here, I’ve done some research,” Biscuit says, flailing a hand to call him over the screen of her laptop. “You said someone recognized your sister… That must be why.”

That is – he knows what that is, and still, his mind goes blank. The audio is up and there’s a voice commenting over the mess of motion, but Killua’s ears are made of cotton.

The best soft-drinks for your happy hour. It’s written in colorful letters on the side of the truck.

In the middle of the chaos, Nanika looks like a confused child, messy hair and hollow expression. She’s highlighted with a red circle as she moves toward the next victim. She touches the person’s hand while everyone is still screaming – then she disappears in a flash of blinding light barely caught on camera if not for the trail of blurring waves of pixels.

“It’s me,” Killua says, Gyo up and then rewind, play, rewind. “That’s my Hatsu.”

“I suspected,” Biscuit says, chin on hand.

“Fuck,” says Killua, ears buzzing. Play, rewind, play, stop. “Fuck. This is bad… Milluki is going to know. He already knows.”

He sits down, but it’s because Biscuit is standing up and shoving him on a chair.

“Who’s this Milluki now. Is that even a name.”

Killua doesn’t say ‘you’re called Biscuit’. He rubs his eyes instead, hands itching.

“It’s my piece of shit older brother with awesome hacker skills,” he answers. Whoever uploaded that thing, has scaled up Nanika’s face – it’s fuzzy and looks more like a bad post-production edit than an actual person, but Milluki would know.

“Milluki is going to found out if he hasn’t already, and then…” and then they’ll be back to square one. Alluka shoved inside a vault and Killua – he doesn’t even know. He couldn’t leave her there alone, not again, but he’s not sure he could survive in that house too, not without a needle pinned inside his brain.

“Fuck,” he says and he’s shaking. Or maybe it’s his head that’s wobbling. “I’m a fucking idiot. This shouldn’t have happened. I’m so fucking stupid.”

“Jeez… Is your family really that much scary?” Biscuit asks, almost joking. Her voice is always a pitch too high than necessary

Killua have to really, really divert his eyes from hers. He hears her sigh.

“The video has less than a couple thousands visualizations on Eyetube, which is virtually nothing. The guy who uploaded it is a recognized fibber, he believes in ghosts, aliens, conspiracy theories like the Flat Earth and the Dark Continent… He’s got his share of followers but I’m ready to swear that they’re all cut out from the same cloth. No sane person is going to actually believe that your sister is a magical healing ghost.”

A magical healing ghost. It sounds ridiculous and so, so fucking wrong. She isn’t a magical healing thing, Nanika is their sister. He swore to protect her and now he’s going to fail her and Alluka both.

“No need to look all upset now,” Biscuit says. “You’re going to be fine and, anyway, no one besides your family knows about your sister’s ability, it’s not like you’ll be hunted at every corner from now on. Breath,” she adds, a hand on his shoulder, and Killua has to put on a conscious effort into doing just that, because he forgot to exhale somewhere between imagining his father face if he knew the risk they’ve taken and Illumi’s face at the prospect of having again everybody on his side. The risk Killua took, just because Nanika looked happy – even if, fuck, isn’t that what he should do? Make her and Alluka happy and free and… Safe. In the end, it was always the safe part that counted the most and Killua failed exactly at that.

Biscuit sighs and closes the laptop. Then, unprompted, she pats him on the head like he’s a really odd pet – an iguana, maybe. Killua sure feels like his blood has turned into some cold mercurial liquid at this point.

“It isn’t the end of the world, you know? Keep it together, you’re better than this.”

Killua blinks, the table and Biscuit and the whole frilly furnishing of her kitchen look like nonsensical abstracted splotches, patches of colors free of outlines.

He nods. She’s right, as she is most of the time. It’s just that it’s the end of the world – his world – just a tiny bit.

This is the proof that she was right all along. That Killua isn’t good enough; that, needle or not, he’s going to be forever scared and he’s going to fail his most precious people and mess them up and make thing worse because, deep down, he's still nothing more than a coward.

He should have been stern and told Nanika that she couldn’t use her powers, make her and Alluka hate him and stand his point at the cost of their love.

Alluka, who is ten thousand times braver than him, would have done it: she cried but didn’t hesitate one bit when she had to choose between pleasing him and protecting Nanika.

He doesn’t know when exactly happened, but he’s got a steaming teacup in his hands and Biscuit big, worried eyes studying him like he’s a different person. And maybe he is, because of that needle and because of Alluka and Nanika, because of Gon and because of those ants – they changed them for real, it wasn’t just a cheesy one-liner.

“It’s really shameful for a teacher,” Biscuit says, looking weirdly puzzled, the line of her lips bent like the tea tastes bitter. “I can’t believe I managed to explain myself that bad.”

Killua doesn’t choke just because he didn’t actually get to sip at his own tea.

“What?” he coughs, and Biscuit shakes her head.

“I just… I think I got it all backwards. The whole hands thing was a pretty glaring red flag, but it was just a game, even if it wasn’t, and…”

“A game?”

“Greed Island! The dodgeball match!”

It’s about one billion years ago, yeah. Pretty funny. Those were good times – lots of fun. Killua had a lot of fun on Greed Island.

“What about that now,” he asks, completely at a loss.

If Biscuit isn’t going to chop his head off with an uppercut this time, maybe Killua should start to believe he’s somehow earned himself an actual lifelong immunity from her fists. He still doesn’t know why, though.

“You made Gon pulverize your hands like it was nothing,” says Biscuit.

“It was nothing, it was a game,” says Killua. “Gon made his own hands explode in the span of the next couple weeks, or did you forget that?”

When loose, Biscuit’s hair are long and fluid, curly ends swinging around while she shakes her head at what must be Killua’s own blatant stupidity.

“Yeah, and that was crazy, but you… You’re always letting other people screw you. With a smile, even. It’s like you’re somehow convinced that you deserve it or, I don’t know, that you need to do it just to earn the right to stay with them.” She looks at him intently and it’s not pity but sure as hell Killua doesn’t know what is it and what he should do about it.

“It’s not like that,” Killua says, and he means it. It’s not like that. Not people in general, just Gon.

“I hope you didn’t break up because of what I said, you dumbasses,” Biscuit says and Killua’s brain short-circuits like he’s activated Whirlwind. He knows he’s still somewhere inside his own body, but it’s like he doesn’t really need to be there to react – and how should he react to something like that. Breaking up, she said, and Killua does feel like something broke back then, sure, but you have to be two to break up, otherwise you’re just crumbling on your own like a dumbass. 

Biscuit, though, she doesn’t even seem to register the absurd phrasing she used. She said it like it was normal, like it was the proper way to call that.

“Did you talk to him about that? Of course you didn’t… Boys, I swear,” Biscuit is still chatting, a sigh compressed under the roof of her mouth.

And isn’t that the truth? Being boys or girls or whatever doesn’t have any real weight in this matter, not at all. The weight is all Killua’s instead, because that’s just how he’s been wired from birth, from the same day someone decided that he was going to keep breathing to became the best assassin in the bunch and nothing else.

He’s just so desperate and ridiculous and plain bad. It has to be it, the reason, him being bad and nothing more. It would have been okay, really, if him being bad wasn’t also damaging Gon to the point of actively helping him autodestruct. 

He looks at the door, over the walls Alluka is still sound asleep and, fuck this, he’s done the exact same thing to her. Because she and Nanika wanted, he put them at risk instead of being strong and say something.

“Fuck,” he says, and he’s not crying. He’s just – leaking. Because he’s bad and full of holes from all the needles, invisible, that Illumi put inside him to mold him, shape him like something his family could use. Could love, and for them it’s the exact same thing.

“You’re not bad,” Biscuit voice says and Killua doesn’t know how much of that was inside his head and how much he’s spilled crying like a traumatized five-year-old over tea and a couple kind words. A bit of human concern, that Alluka desperately tried to throw at him but because it’s her – her that is his responsibility, her that he’s supposed to protect – Killua couldn’t accept it. “You’re a really good friend, you know that? I’m so sorry for what I told you back then, that you had to leave Gon. I thought you needed a push, but now I think I was misled in my judgment. As your teacher, that’s quite despicable. Can you forgive me, Killua?”

She hugs him and it’s the weirdest feeling, being able to breathe so much better even with his nose buried inside someone’s hair.

*

Killua wakes up and he’s pinned on the bed. He powers through his own weight like it’s glued to the mattress and coerces himself to sit straight.

He can’t remember the last time he slept for real like that, but somehow his body is still thirsty for that combination of very soft pillows and bewildering hairy blanket. He makes a compromise and gets up with the pink monstrosity draped around his shoulders.

There’s chatters in the house, frilly like everything that meets Biscuit taste, and Killua is so concentrated on discerning the words that his eyes don’t really process the fluffy heaps of silky black that welters on the ground in unison with every sharp sound.

Hair piles up and then gets scattered when Biscuit slippers step near, just as soft.

“Brother!” Alluka says, and she’s smiling in the mirror. She turns and Biscuit stops in her tracks, scissors in hand.

“What do you think? I think miss Biscuit is really good!” she says, hand lifted to palm her hair on the side. Tufts are bulging in every direction, wispy and thick.

“Of course I am,” Biscuit says, a hand on her hip. “A girl needs to know how to style her own hair.”

Alluka grins, strong and open, until she meets Killua’s eyes.

“You don’t like it, brother?”

Killua is still there. His feet didn’t move from their spot in front of the bathroom, but he can’t really feel his body if not for the cold liquid center of his stomach.

“You… It looks good,” he says, because it’s true – it looks good, hair soft and wild, framing her face right under her chin. “Didn’t you say you wanted to grow dreads last month?”

“Dreads are super cool, but I like this too,” Alluka says, and Biscuit nods because apparently she’s now an image consultant. “And I can still put some hair beads on even if it’s shorter, you know. Nanika agreed,” she adds, before Killua could even formulate the thought.

 “And it’s good for camouflage! This way, it would be difficult to think about that video when someone sees me.” She says it like it’s the most reasonable thing in the world. Like it’s a sensible decision and – it is, Killua realizes: it’s the most sensible decision, making herself looking different from those frames where Nanika’s hair was very visible and definitely recognizable.

Killua looks at Biscuit and maybe he’s going to shred her to pieces, fuck hospitality and favorite teachers.

“You told her,” he growls. “Why on earth did you-”

“I’m happy she did,” Alluka says and she’s the one ready to growl, now, seated on that stool with her back straight up and a towel on her shoulder, like a mantel. “You would have just agonized over it without saying a thing and we would have been in more danger anyway.”

Killua’s blood is exploding.

“This is not something you should be stressing about!”

“Yeah, sure. Better let you stress yourself sick over it so that you can’t sleep and can’t fight and we die or worse,” she rebuts, still composed like a doll, but with her fists curled up on her knees. “Why don’t you thank miss Biscuit and tell me I’m pretty instead?” she says then, half smiling half uncertain but so, so hopeful and concerned. “Please, brother. Let us help.”

Killua gapes. His eyes shift on Biscuit, palms open toward Alluka and a stern look on her face.

Killua exhales.

“You’re not just pretty, you dumbass,” he says, exhausted and so darn blessed. “You’re beautiful.”

Alluka beams.

Chapter Text

At first, an encyclopedia could be filled up with all the things that Alluka doesn’t know.

For some reason, Killua’s got an understanding that brothers should be the ones to teach you important stuff, like doing accurate impressions of your parents and farting classical music with your armpits. 

Illumi taught him how to dislocate his joints and put them back together, so Killua changes his right hand from superhuman claws and back to normal while he studies the bright, dancing trapezoids that sip through the window from the headlights of passing cars.

Alluka hums in her sleep and smiles. 

Gon must be way up to the peak of the World Tree, right now. He'll be completely concentrated on Ging, in that absorbed, absolute way that's one of his most compelling quirks.

So Killua shakes his head and adds videogames and yo-yos to his mental list. He adds darts, then removes it and looks intently at the ceiling. Hotels should seriously think about investing in more interesting paint than boring, plain white.

He knows some stuff about counterfeiting and auctions. He tilts his head: Alluka’s drooling on her pillow and she will probably be pretty uninterested in Zepile’s expertise. 

He knows a bit about exotic animals, thanks to Kite, but mostly thanks to Gon. He knows a bit about friendship too, thanks to Gon, and that’s what keeps him up blinking at the ceiling until pigeons start cooing. The garbage truck spooks them off and wakes Alluka, who decides to throw herself on his stomach demanding breakfast. 

Killua knows way worse ways to fake being woken up. 

He stretches and yawns. He splashes water on his face until he feels more like a person and less like the human embodiment of an ongoing existential crisis, even if he’s starting to think that it’s likely his actual personality at this point.

One shouldn’t be allowed to think about this kind of stuff without sugar pulsing through his veins, so Killua buys his sister the biggest ice cream for breakfast and they go strolling through the park to discuss important matters.

 “Okay, but chocolate,” he says, because what else is there to say?

Alluka shakes her head. She does that a lot, like she wants to play the hair beads together. Even from beyond the border of the region, if the light is right you can see the tall, thin trunk of the World Tree standing out in the sky – but maybe Gon is gone already, Ging doesn't look like the type to stay in one place for more than a couple days.

“Chocolate is chocolate. But ice cream is… The possibilities are endless,” Alluka is saying, extremely serious. “Cinnamon! Cookies! Peanut butter! Salted caramel!” She swings her cone in the air to make a point.

Killua shakes his head, he turns his back to the World Tree, because there's nothing to see there anymore.

“Chocolate isn’t predictable. It’s a classic.”

“You’re so classy with chocolate on your nose, brother,” Alluka says and then laughs so hard that pigeons take off around them in a rumble. Killua crosses his eyes: no chocolate in sight.

“You weren’t this pesky as a kid.”

She sticks her tongue out. 

“You’re melting, though,” she says, and Killua has to refrain from swearing in front of his pure, little sister. 

She’s so pure, really – clean. 

They finish their ice-creams and Killua washes his hands under the spry of a public fountain. The water freezes him, it clears his thoughts. 

Alluka is clean. They isolated her, and it was so fucking unfair, but somehow… Alluka never killed anyone. Not with intention – she was never taught to kill. To fight or fly, to roll with the punches, to endure. 

Alluka is a blank page and Killua’s got the pen in his hand. 

He blinks right before her face and he’s horrified. 

“What?” she gasps, like Illumi has suddenly ambushed them from a literal bush. 

Illumi is here, but not inside of a bush. He's inside Killua’s head, again, maybe forever. Killua growls and pushes it under the fountain’s spray too. The water is so cold it freezes his brain. 

“Brother, what are you doing!” yelps Alluka, and she’s already grasping his head with her fingers. She takes the sleeves of her vest and uses them to dry his hair just like that, like it’s the most natural thing in the world. 

Killua feels so bad, so fundamentally nauseated, he’s sure he’s going to cry. 

“Alluka,” he says then, over fabric and rivulets of water. “We can do whatever we want now, so… What do you want to do?”

Her hands slip down, like she hasn’t really grasped the words – or the whole concept. She presses a finger at her lips, while her other hand rests gingerly on Killua’s shoulder, warm where cold water is still dripping from his hair.

“I think I’d like to do that, brother.”

Killua frowns and turns around. 

Alluka is still pointing, her pupils sliding to follow the heads of the people skating around on the rink. 

“Skates? You skate?”

“No,” she says, eyes gleaming. “And you?”

A girl falls, screaming. She lands on her bottom and starts laughing so hard when she manages to drag her friend to the ground.

Killua grins. 

“Nope. Let’s try.”

The guy at the booth throws them a skeptic look and two pairs of shabby-looking skates. 

They spend a lot of time figuring out how to pull them on and then how to reach the rink without faceplanting. 

Alluka is so loud she’s going to get some really bad sore-throat in the span of the next tree second, just like Killua is going to get some sore-everything if he keeps on stressing about preventing her from fall. 

“This is the best thing ever!” she yells. She’s so wrong – posture, speed, balance. 

Killua presses on his heels and reaches out. He manages to grasp her from the scruff of her neck before she slams into the fence. He redirects her with a push so that they’re once again following the way the rink bends. Alluka can’t stop laughing. 

“You’re so good, brother! Teach me!”

“It’s a bit like the skateboard,” says Killua, even if Alluka hasn’t ridden a skate once in her life. “You have to bend your knees and, the head, it has to be over your center of gravity or you’ll fall…”

That’s how Killua teaches himself to skate backward, so that he can take Alluka's hands and stabilize her while she fights with her feet, a concentrated look on her face. 

It’s funny, exhilarating in a different way from training and battling. It’s so relaxing it’s actually scary.

That’s why Killua speaks – that’s why he doesn’t deserve nice things, really. 

“When I asked what you wanted to do, I didn’t mean right now,” he starts. He needs to ask, because back there, for a moment, his mind – his whole brain – was again trapped in that kind of mentality that is Illumi’s. The one that makes people decide what’s best for you because they love you – but it isn’t a good kind of love, it’s the kind that smothers and strangles you until you don’t know where one ends and the other begins and who you are supposed to be anymore. “It was more of a general question.”

Alluka’s eyes shift from his feet to his face.

“Yeah, I know,” she says, and smiles. “But I don’t know the answer so…”

All of Killua’s blood is rushing through his head. He loses his balance and steals Alluka’s. They bounce on the fence, breathless.

“Shit, I- I didn’t mean it like that!” Killua says. “I didn’t want to pressure you or anything, you don’t have to decide right now, I would know, it took me two whole years to find something resembling a purpose and you…”

“I want to stay with you,” says Alluka. She’s standing up already, on skates she has never used before, in a city where she has never been before – an entire world she’s never been a part of. “Right now, the only thing I want for sure is to stay with you, brother. Doing this kind of thing with you,” she adds, swinging a bit on her wheels. “It’s what Nanika wants, too.”

That kind of love, is the one Killua knows best. And the one that Alluka doesn’t need at all to have in her life. 

Luckily, Killua might have been a very lacking big brother, but he’s a fast learner. 

“Good enough,” he says, and extends his hand. Alluka takes it right away. “We can do this kind of thing, the three of us. After all those chimera ants and paranormal whishes stuff, I think we’ve earned some time off.”

Alluka beams, and if Killua have to judge who's less likely to fall from their skates in the span of the next half-hour, he would for sure bet his hunter license on her. 

**

It has to be him, Killua knows that. Actually, he wouldn’t trust anybody else with this task, not even Morel. Biscuit, maybe, but Biscuit has her own agenda just like usual, and Killua is evidently a pawn in her evil masterplan. 

“Try not to be late, I know how you guys can be when you become engrossed in each other,” she says, hands on her hips while she oversees their movements as they pack. 

“You make it sound like it’s something dirty,” Killua says. He’s already exhausted, his chance of survival are slimming to none very fast. 

“Isn’t it?” says Alluka. She doesn’t even lift her gaze from the shirt she’s folding. Killua doesn’t have the slightest idea of who taught her that; he proceeds into messily roll up a pair of jeans. 

“Shut up,” he says and Biscuit growls something about failing at his education. “I wasn’t talking to you, old hag.”

She pinches the bridge of her nose and exhales.

“You’re the brattiest of my pupils, you know that?”

“Whatever. Anyway, I’d much prefer if he asked that himself, maybe he’s not…”

“He wanted to ask you, he’s just… It’s been a rough year. Cut him some slack, would you?”

“If he needs help, he should ask for it. It’s what the rest of us mortals do,” Killua says, and he’s not even sure why he feels so… wounded, almost. Like there’s something raw and burning where his diaphragm should be. 

“I see,” Biscuit says, with her horrifying actually adult tone. She’s leaning on the doorjamb and studying him hard.

Killua feels instantly like shit.

“Sorry. What I mean is… I’d prefer to be sure he hasn’t been coerced in wanting me there, that’s all.”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Biscuit says and she’s actually cooing, now. “Gon adores you. He’ll be ecstatic. Jeez, you are such kids. One year is nothing at all for a friendship like yours. You’ll see for yourself.”

“It’s going to be alright, brother,” says Alluka. She zips her backpack closed with a satisfied hum and nods like she’s wording some kind of primordial truth. “When you’ll see him you’ll know what to do.”

Biscuit blinks at her, baffled.

“How are you two even related,” she says and Killua doesn’t throw his own bag at her because he is, in fact, surprisingly well educated despite his upbringing. He should probably thank Tsubone and Gotoh for that, though.

Before they go, Biscuit pats him on the shoulder affectionately and literally pinches Alluka’s cheek, then she shoves a colorful umbrella and a bag full of sandwiches in her hands.

“People always give us food,” Alluka says, when they’re out in the rain and Killua is trying to decide if those blobs on the umbrella are little bunnies or little frogs and why on earth someone in his right mind should buy such a monstrosity. 

“They probably think I’m neglecting you or something,” he says, regarding the food. 

Alluka doesn’t respond and they start walking through little, wet streets. The water is flooding in rivulets through the cobblestones and Alluka chatters away about how happy she is that she put on her boots instead of something less warm. 

Her short hair frizzling in the humid air is a constant afterthought, the lack of tingling is so wrong after an entire year of being loud… She’s subdued, her steps barely more audible than Killua’s own. What did that woman said? Melody, that’s it, she said his footfall was estinto. 

Killua doesn’t want for Alluka to become like that, he doesn’t want to extinguish her and Nanika – for them to have a bit of freedom but controlled, like some kind of regulated recreation time. And sure as hell he doesn’t want to be her jailer. 

He stops in his track over the small bridge. The river is a streak of steps that lunge forward in little waterfalls. The rain is small, too, and there’s a weird upbeat rhythm sung by the water, up and down and inside Killua’s own head. 

“Alluka, listen…”

“Wait, Nanika wants to talk to you, brother,” she cuts him off. 

Killua nods. They wait for a couple to surpass them, stopping under the umbrella, watching at the stream and the opaque wall of the mountains fading inside the clouds. 

“Hey,” Killua says, when Nanika is out, face paler than mist and smile uncertain.

“Killua is sad,” she says. “Killua doesn’t like me anymore?”

The sound of the river is so deep that, for a moment, Killua is sure he fell over the bridge. He’s still there, though, claws wrapped around the balustrade.

“No, what… No,” he says and then he feels drained and powerless, because she didn’t need for him to say it. “How do you know I…” Does she read minds? Killua thoughts it was just about her and Alluka, but they don’t know. They don’t know the real, true extent of her power. “How do you know where Biscuit was? How did you know we would have been safe coming here?”

Nanika tilts her head. The haircut frames her chin nicely, she looks even more like some kind of ink drawing. 

“Killua wanted that,” she explains, like it’s obvious.

“But I didn’t tell you. How could you possibly know if I didn’t tell you.”

 “Because I love Killua,” she says. “I know when Killua needs something, because I love Killua.”

“I love you too,” Killua says, because it’s the truth. “You’re my sister. But you’re also something else and…” She’s too powerful, and Killua isn’t equipped at all to deal with something like that. Not if he doesn’t want to shred his and Alluka’s life to pieces, the fabric of the whole universe to pieces. “It’s a power that’s a bit too much for, well, everyone. We don’t need it, me and Alluka. Would it be too much to ask you to just… be? Like, I don’t want you to go away, ever, and I want to hang out with you, so maybe we should just do that instead of… Nanika?”

She’s looking at him with her big, hollow eyes, eyebrows furrowed in a kind of confusion that’s in a way more open than any of Alluka’s own expression, like the emotions of a child. 

“But isn’t Killua sad?” she asks, doubtful. “I did what Killua said because he was sad. But he’s sad now too.”

“What do you mean, I’m not… No, wait. What do you mean by sad?”

“Sad,” she repeats, simple and so strong. “Killua wants to be good. Do good things, I help.”

Killua blinks, the wind is hindering the trajectory of his thoughts or maybe it’s rearranging them in something that almost makes sense. 

“Yeah but… I thought that was what you wanted to do,” he says. “That’s what Alluka said.”

“Yes, because I love Killua.”

“You don’t… You did that stuff, those orders, because you think it would have made me feel less sad?”

Nanika nods, so fast her hair gets even messier, but she’s smiling now.

“Do good things to be good!” she says. “Killua wants to be good, I help do good things.”

It’s just so simple, isn’t it? So devastatingly, stupidly simple. Alluka has been asleep or half-asleep for entire weeks of bone-deep exhaustion just because Killua didn’t realize it was all his fault to begin with.

“Nanika… You don’t have to,” Killua says, and he’s going to laugh, maybe. Maybe he’s going to cry, one out of those. “You didn’t have to do that stuff just because you think it made me feel better… It’s not your fault if I’m,” sad? Is he really sad? Was that it, that stupid insomnia and those feelings like claws grasped at his ribcage and trying to be happy and knowing that, anyway, it isn’t something he’s allowed to be if not for Alluka’s sake and that should be enough? That should be enough. 

And then, doing those things, it did make him feel better. Like he could be a good person, but being a good person sounds like something that doesn’t even exist in this universe. Something you need to be born with, like Leorio. Like Gon. Maybe like Kurapika way before the spiders poisoned his life and stomped on his heart. 

But Killua isn’t like them, he’s born and he’s been fed under dark ceilings and a darker mindset. He’s bad and that’s all there is to it. He tried to undo it, desperately, but it can’t be undone – carelessly saving people in that unorganized, unqualified, egoistic way isn’t going to make him less bad. Or less sad, for what matters. None of those people was the one he wanted to save – or die for.

“Nanika,” he says even if it’s not necessary, because she’s there already, looking at him. “You don’t have to help me with that anymore, okay? Alluka and I, we’ll take care of you and praise you… If I can make you happy, then I’ll be happy too.”

She looks confused, again, but she’s just like a child and she trusts him in an unconditional, unapologetic way.

“’Kay, Killua,” she says. “I love you.”

The rain, it stopped. The air smells of petrichor and feels less heavy with every breath. They stay under the umbrella, though, so they can walk hand in hand until they reach the station.

*

She doesn’t hate him, because she and Nanika both aren’t capable of. Really, Killua could do the worst things – be the worst – and Alluka and Nanika would love him anyway. 

It’s both a comforting and despairing thought. 

Alluka moves the cursor over the bin icon and the e-mail is flushed. 

“Maybe next year. When stuff will be a little more stable,” Killua says. He doesn’t say ‘when I am a little more stable’, but Alluka is already humming, mouth closed.

“It’s fine, brother,” she says, like she wasn’t dying to do this thing, for all that Killua still doesn’t really get why. “I’ve been out of school for my whole life, it’s not a tragedy to wait some more, isn’t it? And it’s not even that big of an experience. I just read too much rom-com about proms and clubs and homework. Homework doesn’t even sound that fun, does it?”

That’s rhetorical, obviously. Killua gets rhetoric, he isn’t brain-dead for fuck’s sake. His eyes are still lingering on the computer screen; there’s one pretty official e-mails from the Association about that thing, still unread, and a second one from Knov. Killua knows that that, too, is about that thing because Ikalgo made an entire group chat about it and Killua had to say hi and suffer over a seven minutes long vocal message in which three minutes were spent cursing over the hardships of operating smartphones with tentacles for hands. 

“And I think I have my plate already full with all this aura stuff. My Zetsu isn’t coming up half bad, I’d say. Miss Biscuit gave me a lot of cool advice,” Alluka is saying. She closes the laptop’s case on Killua’s fingers. “Anyway, I’m starving. Azian take-away and illegal streaming? I think it’s time we watch Your Sister is a Werewolf Two.”

“When did we watch the first one? I would remember something called like that… Also, whose the sister,” Killua asks.

“Ah, sure, you fell asleep after the first ten minutes… Well, I’m sure we’ll find something funny. Be right back!”

Killua springs seated on his bed but he doesn’t fall because he still knows how to move his body properly even if he slept a grand total of two and a half hours since they left Biscuit’s home. He now holds the new world record on Puzzle Bubble and he isn't even properly ashamed about it. 

“Wait, what? Where are you going now,” he says.

Alluka has the gall to sigh. 

“Azian, take away. You’re having grilled dumplings and spicy pork soy noodle because you’re predictable and I was thinking about sharing some kung pao chicken because I’m generous. Is that okay?”

Killua closes his mouth. 

“Yeah, what? Okay, I’m coming with you, just give me a sec… Where are my shoes?”

“Stay here,” Alluka says, her own boots already in place. “It’s literally thirty meters, I can walk for thirty meters.”

“Of course you can,” Killua says, at the dust thriving under his bed. No shoes in sight. He’s still hanging upside down from the mattress when he looks at the window: did he leave them out there after they come drenching from the latest rain spurt? He can’t remember.

“I’ll be right back!” Alluka says and the door is already closed when Killua’s head returns upright.

“What,” he says, at the empty room. “It wasn’t… I didn’t give you permission!” he yells, and he’s very lucky if she hasn’t actually heard him or he would have been in for quite a lecture on parental figures and overstepping boundaries. Killua looks at the door. 

Dumb. He’s acting dumb. Nothing is going to happen: Alluka is her own person and Killua isn’t going to imprison her in a cage made by his own Nen, even if the possibility of Illumi tailing them has spiked from zero to one hundred in the span of the last week.

He breathes.

Thirty meters is three and a half over the very literal boundary of his En perimeter, even now that most of his training actually consists of increasing his range one tiny millimeter at a time. 

He remains roosted on the bed for five whole minutes listening at his own heartbeat picking up the pace before his aura stirs up, Ren growing and shaping itself under Ten guidance. It’s not big, but Killua isn’t stupid and this is his thing: he doesn’t know how to apply to schools and can’t remember the undoubtedly compelling plot of a movie called Your Sister is a Werewolf, but he knows Nen – he’s seen and touched and fought with many different Nen users at this point and he has a great teacher – that’s actually Biscuit’s advice.

He doesn’t need a massive area covered if he can just squeeze his En like toothpaste to make it reach the area he really wants to cover. 

It’s not a perfect equivalence in volume – not yet – because his Ren can do only that much, but he sprouts an unglamorous, mushy En that must be at least a decent forty-five meters. 

His shoes are actually under the nightstand, three people are walking in the hall right now, toward the elevator, empty. Thirteen, fifteen, twenty-four people between his own room and the reception, two receptionist, six people between the counter and the couches, there’s a dog, people people people on the street and Killua starts sweating. 

He’s out of the room barefoot and his En is now a messy blob around him, twenty meters at the very best, because Alluka isn’t there. She just fucking vanished.

It’s something that must have a perfectly reasonable explanation and Killua breaks his brain on it while he sprints with Godspeed from the third floor to the exit leaving a faint trace of fizzle and a couple blinks in his trail. 

He comes to a halt when he realizes he doesn’t really know where Alluka was supposed to go either. Dumplings and soy noodles, his mudded brain says. He has to think. 

He breathes and spread his En once again, this time a full-blown sphere, encompassing everything in its wake. 

Feeble auras of uncountable people swarming around with their cars and their phone and their tiny dogs with big ears and their backpacks and takeaways wrapped up in foil and cardboard. 

Killua blinks and he’s already over the guy trying to get on his bike.

“Jesus,” the guy says, and almost drops the package. “Where the hell…”

“Where did you get this food?” Killua asks, wild.

The guy sweats and extends his hands like he’s willing to give up his dinner. Killua tries to scrape back his spilled bloodlust. 

“No, I don’t need yours, I… Just, where did you buy it?”

The guy’s frown grows. He’s going to throw up and Killua couldn’t care less. He points over Killua’s head. 

Figured, there’s a glaring red paper lamp over there. Attached to the big sign that screams Azian food. 

“You know, man. It’s good food, but not that good,” the guy says at last, baffled. He rides that bike like it’s going to win a race when Killua looks at him just right before bursting into the place, aura crinkling. 

Alluka is the only one that doesn’t turn to look at him. 

She sighs and leaves the money over the counter, because the very tall woman at the register is looking at Killua with her mouth agape. 

“Brother, where are your shoes,” Alluka says then, with such a desperate tone that Killua actually feels ashamed. 

He clears his throat. He doesn’t ask ‘where are you’, because she’s there even if she’s not and Alluka may be a normal kid for all that concerns training, but she’s a Zoldyck and, even worse, she’s smart. She figured out a perfect Zetsu the exact same way Gon did while tailing Hisoka. Sometimes it really looks like it was just Killua the one who needed people – Illumi – to explain stuff to him.

“I thought it would have been a good exercise,” she says, while they walk back to the hotel trying to don’t get shrapnel under Killua’s dumb feet. 

“Yeah,” he says. 

“I didn’t mean to scare you,” she says. “I just wanted to get some food.”

“Yeah,” Killua repeats, weakly. 

“I didn’t think you would have gone ballistic and tailed me.”

“I didn’t… I just tried to sense you with En. I didn’t go ballistic right away,” he tries. 

Alluka’s lips flatten in a thin line and Killua almost bolts out of his own skin because that’s Dad Disappointed Face and it’s so fucking wrong on his sister’s that he almost faceplant over a lamppost. 

Alluka guides him gently on the sidewalk.

“Are you nervous because of Illumi or because of Gon?” she asks, suspecting, and both the names elicit a weird, electric-like sting in the middle of Killua’s sternum. He coughs.

“I’m not nervous, I’m just… Both, I guess both,” he ends up saying, because she looks ready to hit him with packages full of Azian food and that would be a total waste.

“Brother,” Alluka says, and she’s radiating frustration and something else, something loving that Killua doesn’t really deserve. “Should we back off? We could go straight to the Azian continent to eat real Azian food… I mean, it’s so dumb to call it Azian food anyway, isn’t it? I’m sure there would be, like, a million different cuisines there!”

Killua gapes in front of her smile, but he’s thinking about the other four, excited minutes of Ikalgo’s voice message; about Knov’s unread email, about what Biscuit said – a year is nothing for a friendship like theirs, isn’t it? Even if they broke up, they didn’t really break up, not as far as Gon knows despite all the dumb struggles happening even right now inside Killua’s own guts. 

He shakes his head.

“We should go,” he says, and Alluka’s eyebrows flip up, “but only after we’ve survived this dumb reunion.”

Alluka nods, and looks sincerely relieved for someone who is usually pretty enthusiastic at the prospect of tasting new food.

“Well then, we’re going to eat and then you’re going to sleep,” she says, resolute. “Sleep for real, I mean. I’m going to uninstall Puzzle Bubble.”

It should sound threatening. She pets Killua on the head the way Nanika likes and it’s really maddeningly affectionate instead. 

Chapter Text

God, he wants – no, he needs to sleep. He’s this close to dying.

Alluka had to literally tuck him in bed last night, her and Nanika taking turns in waking him up every time he started to stir uncomfortably. Killua didn’t suffer through any full nightmare, but he didn’t even get more than three scrambled half hours of actual sleep while his sisters braided a dozen bracelets to keep themselves awake. Now there’s a mess of beads and threads on their bed and on both nightstands and their own wrists. 

“This was the worst idea ever. The worst. The worstest.”

“It’s fine,” Alluka says, bangs covering a really bad pink-eye. Her short hair is a messy cloud now, ready to fizzle in waves at every change in the static. Killua loves it sincerely, it suits her and Nanika both, but she looks even more disheveled than him and that’s saying something. 

He tries to fix his own hair. He’d need whatever it is that Knuckle uses to grow that abysmal pompadour; he smacks both hands on his cheeks and just fucking forces his body to move at a normal speed instead. He’s going soft and it's ridiculous. 

“We’re going to lose the flight and then we’re going to lose the ship and then…” Killua turns on his heels and smacks his hands on Alluka’s face too. She was already more than soft, so he pinches her cheeks and looks her in the eyes. 

“Stop stressing,” he says.

“I’m not stressing,” she rebuts, like it’s some untoward accusation. “I’m just… How do you even function with so little sleep every day, I’m dying. Nanika’s snoring! Yeah, sure, you’re not… She is, I can hear a snore inside my head, I’m not deaf. I would probably hear her even if I was!”

They don’t lose the flight, but then there’s a technical problem and they end up wasting two hours in Saherta to fix the damage. 

Killua is sure he’s going to vibrate out of his own body, but he keeps on drinking coffee and looking suspiciously at every single person who sports piercings a bit too similar to Illumi’s needles. 

“Technically, he’s a hunter too. He would know about this gathering and if he knows about that video, there’s exactly where he’s going to catch us,” he says, while his En proceeds into cataloging every single passenger and scaring off a hysterical little dog. 

“Good thing we’re not going directly to Swardani, then,” Alluka says. She shuffles the cards, face openly unpleased with her hand.

If he were Illumi, he would already been on Whale Island, he would have taken Gon’s hostage there, away from any potential allies, and waited for them to arrive. 

Alluka sighs. 

“If he’s there,” she says, and at this point Killua doesn’t really know if that’s Nanika’s empathy or hers, and if those have ever been two different things from the start, “Nanika will just send him home again. Illumi can’t hurt you anymore, brother. We won’t let him… Oh, I’ll take that!” 

She snatches the jack Killua has just discarded and adds it to her hand.

“Look, I won!” she says, displaying all of her cards with a grin.

Killua doesn’t really want to be the one who always talks about the worstest worst-case scenario, but his worstest worst-case scenarios usually play out exactly how he’d imagined them. 

Alluka is extremely magnanimous, though: instead of getting her beauty sleep, she starts shuffling the cards for a rematch. 

*

It’s not the smallest town, but it’s still small. It looks like a shellfish, open on the ocean and still secluded, all gathered in a crispy envelope of sand and old, soft buildings grown from the seashore back inside. It’s the furthest civilized point before the ocean and the smallest island Killua knows. The next and only ferry departs in two and a half hours.

Nanika comes outside behind a pair of extremely large sunglasses and Killua takes her barefoot on the sand, so that she can fill her and his pockets with new relics of mollusks and smothered glasses and points at the seagulls. They poop like bombers and it isn’t even the most embarrassing stuff Killua’s ever endured, after that one day when a chimera ant farted on him. 

The ferry is small and full, but there are more containers than people. Killua lets his hair dry on the bridge, throwing side glances at the seagulls that insist on tailing them.

Alluka has fallen asleep, sunglasses still on and head rested on her own backpack, legs propped on Killua’s own. 

The sea is trying to lull him too, but Killua already feels like he ingested a fair share of swarming fishes – specifically salmons. They’re all trying to swim over his throat way before Whale Island appears like a speck of grey over the horizon, static and soft. 

It’s a bit like coming home and a bit like waiting to walk through the door of Knov’s Nen mansion out to unknown dangers, only this time Killua doesn’t even have a plan.

He thought he would have come up with something during the trip, and then during the sail and then the ferry is approaching the docks and Killua is still there, Alluka stretching arms above her head. The tingling comes from the beads around her wrists, now. 

They take their backpacks, say goodbye to the captain, help an old lady with her luggage and Killua’s brain is still empty, not even the shadow of a plan in mind. 

That too is flashed away when he catches the presence before anything else. Something known and yet so different, it enters the perimeter of his En without faltering – without sensing it. It’s like a candle, blown out, instead of the old burning dynamite. But it’s still green, and spiky, and so familiar.

“Killua!” he yells, at the top of the hill and at the top of his lungs. 

Alluka yells back at him, hands wavering. 

Killua raises one of his, and smiles. 

*

“So,” he starts. 

“Yeah,” Gon says. His eyes are smiling and Killua’s knees are jelly. 

“It’s good to see you. You’re taller,” Killua says. You’re taller, like he’s some kind of old uncle. They haven’t seen each other in one year and everything he can muster up is ‘you’re taller’. This is Gon, and everything he can say is ‘you’re taller’. 

Gon’s eyes blur or maybe those are Killua’s. He doesn’t know, really. He doesn’t know what he should do – feel. 

“You’ve always been tall,” Gon says instead and he giggles. He’s studying him, like Killua is some kind of new species; it’s a lot like the first time they saw each other, two weird outliers both in age and potential meddled in a mass of adults. Until he stops and turns to face Alluka. “You’re taller too, Alluka! And your hair looks awesome!”

“Thanks, Gon,” she says, perfectly polite smile. “Miss Biscuit cut them for me. I really like her, she’s super cool!”

“She said you stayed with her for a bit, but she didn’t tell me why… I guess everything is alright, though,” says Gon and Killua gapes, years of training and natural ability at deceiving blatantly forgotten. 

God bless, Killua has the most well-adjusted sister in the known universe. She cuts the weird atmosphere in half, a hand on Killua’s shoulder and the other flailing about in the middle as she describes the hardship of coming there despite continental distances and delaying airships. 

“Yeah, it can definitely be an adventure, since we’re just that much out of… well, pretty much everything.” 

They are. The house is still on top of the hill, facing the ocean with the same untamed attitude Gon has into facing everything. Or had, maybe, because right now he looks determined to face everything but Killua’s. There’s Alluka in between the two of them even when he’s already yelling for Mito to open the door and Killua feels a lot like his sister is the one who’s dragging him by his hand instead of the other way around. 

“Gon, I heard you the first five times!”

Mito is exactly like Killua remembers, and he took great care in doing so. She appears on the doormat, skirt flowing in the rush, on her face that annoyed expression that is not annoyed at all. 

“I’m so happy you came,” she says, when Gon has introduced Alluka while they were still twenty meters on their way, so that now every single townsperson knows her name. 

Alluka doesn’t mind, she’s still giggling when it’s Killua’s turn to get a hug, so tight it somehow melts the tension in his shoulders. He basks in Mito’s relief like he isn’t him the one that came to bring comfort, to solve problems. He’s really not sure he is. 

“We’re overflowing with squids, I hope you two are hungry… Do you like squids, dear? Alluka, is it?”

“Love ‘em,” she says. “And I’d really like to help, if that’s okay with you, miss Mito.”

They’re already chatting all the way through the hall, back into the kitchen. 

“Abe?” Killua asks.

“She’s climbing down the stairs. She likes to take her time, says she love to look at the veining in the wood,” says Gon. 

They turn simultaneously and Killua can’t really do anything about the wide pulse that’s blazing through his ribs, inside his cheeks until he grins at Gon’s grin. 

“Ehy, you two!” Mito yells, head popping out in the hall. “Don’t stand there like a pair of cucumber! Killua, feel free to put your dirty clothes in the bathroom. Gon, I hope your room is my kind of tidy and not your kind of tidy, you understand that there’s a girl in the house!”

“Don’t worry, Alluka is the actual proof that even the girliest girl can be un-girl-like,” Killua says.

“Do you have something to say, brother?” rebuts Alluka’s voice, high pitched.

“Yeah, something about your dirty underwear inside my backpack!”

Mito blinks and shakes her head, but Gon’s smile is less humorous, more subdued and wary, like Killua said something weird.

“You get along,” he comments, while he carries Alluka’s bag on the stairs. Abe is still climbing down, taking really long pauses in between steps. She pinches Killua’s cheek and says that salt air and good company are going to nurse him back to health in no time.

“He isn’t sick, Abe, he’s just pale,” Gon says. She hums, wisely, and looks at her great-grandson through squinted eyes. 

“Of course he is and you aren’t too. Good company is just about what you both need, no doubt,” she says, sweet tone unfazed. “I have to go now, someone must sneak some more salt in that batter, Mito is always too conscious about people’s blood pressure to be trusted alone with fried calamari.”

Killua gapes but Gon mouths ‘high blood pressure’ while pointing at the crown of her head like that’s the actual subject. As if Killua’s brain wasn't overflowing with nonsensical anxiety.

That too spikes up when they got to Gon’s room. 

Gon’s room the first time Killua visited it was the very tidy room of someone who hadn’t been there in months, air fresh and dry from routine house cleanings and not a human print around. 

It changed or maybe it was like that to begin with, just like Gon, that moves around way less naturally than when he’s in the forest and he can jump and stomp his feet. Less naturally than when his life is on the line and he has to think fast and act faster.

Here he traces a crooked path between the carpet and piles of books, small and big boxes full of rocks and plants. There’s an order, there, a pattern, but Killua definitely hasn’t enough data to even start trying to understand that kind of accumulative mania. He isn’t even sure where he should leave his backpack. 

Gon puts Alluka’s down and then goes to open the window, like there’s some kind of possibility for the cramped mess to become less messy if touched by fresh air. 

The world has been shoved inside that room, it pops out on the shelves and in between unmarred schoolbooks and scrambled piece of papers. Killua picks up a raisin from a plate and he isn’t sure if it’s always been like that of it was supposed to be an actual grape at the start of the week. There’s math homework under the plate, muffled by overflowing doodles of animals.

“How’s Kon,” Killua asks, because there’s something resembling a foxbear and so that he doesn’t have to look too much at the photos. The one from the world tree is pinned at the bottom. 

Killua waited for Gon’s own pose before raising his arm and they look disgustingly happy. He hates it a bit, maybe that’s why Gon has almost censored it with his table lamp and a postcard of ancient ruins from none other than mister Satotz. 

“He’s good! The new pups are growing really big… Let’s gather the laundry or aunt Mito will have our heads,” says Gon. “I really don’t want to touch it if there’s your sister underwear there, though,” he adds, a tad bit too serious.

“Since you’re now fifteen I guess someone has to tell you: girls really don’t have cooties,” Killua says, and drops his bag on the floor, careful enough to not smash some precious, cryptic botanical findings.

“It’s not like that! It’s because it wouldn’t be polite!”

“Jeez, Gon, you’re such a bumpkin.”

They’re still smiling at each other like their lips are somewhat glued, but at the same time it feels odd, forced. Has it always been that difficult? Killua retrieves his dirty socks from the bottom of the backpack and throws it on Gon’s face while he makes some space inside his drawers, like they have ever needed drawers in the first place when they were on the road. 

Killua almost – almost – says it out loud. But then, that’s Gon’s life: having a drawer and a lot of normal, daily used stuff all around his room, in which he lives. 

The multi-purpose pocket knife Killua sent for his birthday is open in a weird configuration on the nightstand, it looks like a three-legged beast with the corkscrew as its head. Alluka and Nanika’s bracelets hung from the headboard, red and orange like an eyesore in the light blue tones of the room.

They move around each other with practiced ease coming from having shared so many rooms and spaces in the past, but now Killua shares a way too literal telepathic link with Nanika and a way less literal but just as effective bond with Alluka. It has never been like that with Gon, mostly because their minds work in different ways – Gon’s mind is just something else, honestly. 

But it had never been actively difficult. Staying beside Gon, that has been the most natural, most desirable thing that’s ever happened to Killua. 

It has been fun and challenging, sometimes even painful, but it has never been awkward.

They’ve never stopped in their track while throwing away dirty clothes before a bath.

“You’re not going to take a bath?” Killua asks, arms already strangled inside his own shirt. 

Gon blinks and stops fumbling with the knobs. The water is steaming already.

“I had a shower this morning, I’m fine. I’m going to search for the futon, now… Take your time!”

Killua takes it, his time and maybe Alluka’s time too and a lot of very hot water and half a bottle of shampoo until there’s a wig of bubble over his head. He drowns himself underwater for three and a half minutes of apnea and it’s probably his worst time since he was five and trained in water torture. 

He started to remember all of that in upsetting details since that darn needle was removed. It was really convenient in a way, having all that stuff blocked away, contained and reasonable, carved in his mind like photograms from a boring clip show, no emotions attached. 

Now he remembers, the sheer discomfort and the slight, subtle fear that maybe – maybe – Illumi would have killed him for good or – way, way worse – that it would have never stopped. And that was true because no matter how much he tried to do it right, something else – painful and frustrating and sick – would have appeared on the list of things he just had to do, unless he wanted to be the biggest disappointment.

He blows suds away and looks at the ceiling. 

He’s a mess. 

It’s kind of freeing, as a concept. Killua Zoldyck, ex-assassin, hunter on vacation and professional mess. Best friend of the one and only Gon Freecs, too, and that’s the only title he’s not ready to throw away. 

“Just keep it together, you weirdo,” he decides, and gets up inside the bathtub, water splashing around. 

“Hurry, brother! Dinner’s almost ready and I’m filthy,” Alluka says, behind the door. “Happy you finally accepted you’re a weirdo, though,” she adds, when Killua steps out of the bathroom to sprinkle her with his wet hair. 

*

Killua is full of calamari and regrets, but Alluka clicked with Mito so much he is actually scared they’re going to, like, adopt each other and then adopt Nanika.

Nanika, though. 

“I don’t think aunt Mito would freak out,” Gon says, when they’re back in his room to retrieve Alluka’s backpack, now way lighter without dirty laundry squashed at the bottom. 

Nanika is looking at Killua, though, obedient. 

He pets her on the head as she munches on the piece of jam tart Alluka snatched from her own plate when she asked for a second helper. 

“Maybe, but we kinda had an accident and… Nothing bad,” he says, because Gon’s eyes flashed with worry and Killua is so, so dumb and weak – he’s almost happy, because Gon cares and he knows that, he should have known it, but it’s so simple to just forget how much and concentrate on the worst stuff when he’s in another continent instead of being there, knees one meter from his own. 

“But there’s a video on Eyetube in which Nanika does her thing. It’s pretty low-key and I’m trying to find a solution.”

“Wish!” Nanika says, and Killua sighs.

“Not a good idea. If the video or, worse, the guy who uploaded it suddenly disappeared, the whole story would gather even more attention. This kind of stuff tends to just blow off through time.”

“I’d like to see it,” Gon says. Killua looks him in the eyes and shrugs.

His laptop is a mess of post-it now, and there are already six open tabs. One is his Facebox account and the last is literally a Uoogre-how page titled ‘how to solve geometry problems’.

“The magical ghost girl?” Gon says, goggling in front of the screen.

Killua nods and Nanika tilt’s her head with a smile. 

“Magical ghost girl, magical… Oh, here! Wait, how many videos you said there would be?”

Killua’s lungs collapse. He doesn’t really fall from the bed, but it sure feels like he was falling when he lands on Gon’s shoulder and almost crushes his face on the screen. 

“What the… What the fuck. What the actual fuck?”

“Bad?” Nanika asks, with the same uncertain tone that’s in Gon’s own eyes. He scrolls with the mousepad under Killua’s armpit.

“There are three, no, four video. They aren’t from the same account, though,” says Gon, right before Killua shoves him on the side, because what the… 

“They’re not videos…” Gon blinks at him and Killua growls. “I mean, yeah, they’re videos, but they’re not video of the thing…” He clicks on the first one, that’s titled ‘Magical Ghost Girl is FAKE’, with glaring caps lock and an angry caption. 

Nanika’s head pops up in between theirs as they watch nine fucking minutes of an off-screen voice, slightly altered, explaining in painstakingly accurate details why that less than fifty seconds video of the truck accident is evidently fake and also dumb, just like the guy who uploaded it in the first place. 

The comments section is short, sweet and full of rage and accusation. The other videos have the exact same style, just this guy deconstructing every single thing the fibber posted on his channel since its creation three years ago. Aliens? Big foot? The Dark Continent? Mind control through nano-technologies? Chemtrails? Everything is acknowledged and destroyed. 

“Well,” says Gon in the end. “Looks like the Internet took care of it itself… Isn’t this good news?” he adds, because he’s looking at Killua and he perfectly knows what kind of face he must be showing right now.

Killua looks at the both of them, him and Nanika smiling. He breathes, up through the nose, out through the mouth, and swallow.

“Shit,” he says. “It’s… shit. This is really, really bad.”

“Why,” Gon says. “I can’t use Gyo, was there something…”

“My Hatsu is barely visible in the end, but that’s not the problem,” Killua says. “It’s… Click on his profile… Not his, I mean the guy who uploaded all the other videos.”

He snatches the mouse away and clicks on it himself, because he knows – he knows it already, he doesn’t even need to look to know that he’s going to find a pretty scarce but convincing numbers of private videos who are there just to make the account look less fake; just like he knows that all the upload must have been backdated, even if he doesn’t know how. 

The little icon is the harmless pixels of Wonder Mario’s Princess Apricot, the only vintage game Killua was allowed to touch when he was little because online games weren’t a thing at the time and sometimes even Milluki needed a friend.

“Alluka,” he says, and her blue eyes pop out, under eyebrows that are frowning already.

“It’s him, isn’t it?”

They’re fucking doomed. 

*

Killua’s ongoing existential crisis is spilling everywhere. 

The air is thick and salty, hot like the inside of a balloon. He breathes in and out and then holds it until he’s mapped all the other breaths in the house, En sipping through walls and doors. 

Alluka is sleeping like the dead in Mito’s room, limbs sprawled on the futon; Mito’s breath is light and steady, but her feet rustle under the sheet. Abe’s room is down on the ground floor, she’s as still as the plants that grow on her windowsill. 

And then there’s Gon. 

Killua exhales, because it’s been at least ten minutes and he’s not even remotely as trained as he used to be for this kind of stuff. He should be, though. He should be prepared, ready to fight. He can’t even hold his breath for ten minutes, he’s a shapeless ball of anxiety at this point – he should be training right now. 

“Killua?”

“Sorry,” he says, because Gon isn’t Alluka: of course he was going to wake him up, rustling around like that. “Woke you?”

“I can’t sleep,” he says, a spiky shadow in a dark that’s somewhat deep like the one in the forest. All the lights are gathered over the coast while the house is here, on the cliff over a sea as black as the sky. “Did you have a bad dream? I mean, I know you said you don’t dream, but…”

Killua finds himself gaping like a total idiot. 

“You remembered that?”

“Of course,” says Gon, voice so violently decisive, like no other option is allowed. “Of course I remember, Killua.”

“I do, though,” Killua says. “I dream a lot now.”

“Do you? I do too,” says Gon and his voice sounds a bit more muffled. Inside Killua’s En, he shifts until he’s again lying on his side, and looking at him from above. For a second Killua is sure he can see in the dark, like the wild animal he is. “Sometimes I don’t like it.”

“Yeah,” Killua says, useless. He too shifts until he’s facing him from below. Gon can’t sense his En and Killua retreats, because it feels like he’s invading his privacy. 

It’s such a weird thought, there shouldn’t be that much privacy in the first place between them, they never needed it. 

“I’m sorry you had to come all this way just to fetch me,” says Gon.

“Don’t be stupid, it’s not a problem. And, really, it’s not like I would have gone there without you, you know?”

“Yeah, I figured. Bisky said that too.”

“You talked to her? That old hag,” Killua blurts, because, well of course this was Biscuit's plan. “Is Kite going to be there too?”

“Nope. I… Said he didn’t feel like it and I can’t blame him. I’m not sure I feel like it too, really.”

Killua finally scoffs.

“Then why on earth are we going! I’m sure that even Morel is pissed off, let’s just call it a day and ditch the whole thing. I’m sure old man Netero wouldn’t have minded, he really wasn’t one to care about this kind of stuff.”

“I’m sure you’re right,” says Gon. “And I know I’m selfish, but the real reason why I wanted to go is… I just missed you a lot.”

Killua nods.

“Yeah, that’s my reason too I guess. I’d like to catch up with everyone, Ikalgo has sent me this super heartfelt message and I think it would kill him if I don’t at least try to be there. They’re going to make him and Meleoron honorary hunter or some made-up title and he’s pretty hyped, so…”

“Ah, yes. I’d like to be there to see it!” Gon says, a little too high pitched for the witching hour. “I’m really sorry I missed Leorio’s graduation too. I just wasn’t…”

“You don’t have to explain. You have your stuff to sort out, Oreo understood… Did you see that video? The one where he’s got the hat on?”

“Of course. I was also kind of emotional about it, I have to admit.”

“Emotional? Are you kidding me?”

“Yeah! I mean, you can tell he’s so embarrassed and also super happy and… I was just really happy for him, I guess. He’s first of his course, it’s an awesome thing, isn’t it? He’s going to become such a good doctor!”

“Jeez, Gon, how can you always be so…” He doesn’t even know, how one’s supposed to verbalize Gon? Conceptualize him enough to explain how his marvelous head function, how he can be so genuine and just plain lovable? So bright and so deeply affecting of everything he touches? “So you.”

Gon breathes and then laughs, soft in his pillow and inside Killua’s chest.

“What does that even mean, Killua?”

He doesn’t know, really, and at that point aunt Mito comes banging on the door and whispering about how you’re supposed to sleep at night – or at least letting other people sleep.

They giggle stupidly like a pair of toddlers until she’s again back in her room, where Alluka has started snoring, oblivious, and that’s when Killua gets it, right before he too drifts into something that looks like sleep. 

Oblivious, he sure is. 

When Gon said ‘I missed you’, he didn’t mean the whole gang. 

Chapter Text

Mito blinks, twice, and looks at him with an open frown.

“I know it’s stupid and I know that everyone should know this kind of stuff, but…”

“It isn’t stupid. It isn’t stupid at all!” she says instead, and drops the whole basket full of laundry. Killua catches it before it touches the ground, with one hand. 

“Take it down, it’s fine… It isn’t stupid. This is the best day of my life!”

“What?” Killua says, and looks around just to be sure he hasn’t fallen in the middle of a ceremony he wasn’t aware of. He’s slept a grand total of ten minutes, it could easily be. 

“When Gon wrote to me that he found a friend during the hunter exam, I was terrified it would have been some kind of… I don’t know, wild criminal with a bad case of wanderlust, you know?” 

Killua doesn’t say ‘you weren’t wrong about the criminal part’ and opts for helping her to spread out the sheet, blinding white just like the clouds casting puffy shadows over the hill. 

“Then he brought you home, and not only you were his age, but so polite…”

Killua is sure no one has ever called him polite once in his life, but Mito is serious, because she usually is and… He feels his cheeks boiling when she lets go of the sheet to press both her palms on them. 

“And now you come and start talking about school of all things! This is the best day of my life!" 

Killua doesn’t faint because training and also dignity, but he chokes on his spit and Mito has to pat his back until his lungs are again in working order.

“It’s not… Sorry, ah. It’s not for me!” he says, still red because being pale sucks. “I don’t think. I’m not cut out for… My sister. She wants to go to school. And I tried to, like, understand how the whole thing should work but I’ve been homeschooled, kind of, and Gon’s being homeschooled too and… I should have asked Leorio but I forgot and, anyway, I thought maybe you would know something about...”

“Of course,” Mito says. She nods and fetches a couple of mismatched, colorful socks from the basket. 

Killua seals his lips shut and waits for her to peg them on the clothesline like a pair of parakeets.

“Well, there’s a lot of bureaucracy involved, and that can be a struggle. I can definitely help, though,” she says nodding again. “I guess there’s no way you’d get your parents to at least sign some papers?”

Killua scoffs and shakes his head.

“No way. But I talked with some schools, actually, via e-mail. And when I said that I was a pro hunter and Alluka lived with me… I mean, they just took for granted that I was of age and sent me programs and stuff. So maybe it would be alright if I’m the one who signs the papers?”

“The problem is custody, you don’t have Alluka’s custody, Killua. You don’t even have your own.”

They spread another sheet and Killua’s mind turns out to be just as blank. 

“I’ve never thought about that,” he says, baffled. “Being a minor sucks.”

Mito nods again, but then Gon and Alluka explode out of the door laughing like a couple maniacs.

“Killua, aunt Mito! The washing machine!” Gon yells, running.

“The washing machine what now?” Mito asks, looking at his arms. They're full of suds, it's flying everywhere like snow.

Gon grins and picks some up with both hands. 

"I think it's broken," he says, right before placing a big, fat hat of suds right above Killua’s head while he still has his hands busy with the laundry.

“Well, at least it has its perks,” Mito says, when Killua has already launched himself headfirst on Gon’s stomach – and he’s pretty sure she wasn’t talking about the washing machine. 

*

“We’re going to take a ship to Padokia and then three airships…”

“Why on earth three,” Alluka says. “Three is too much, brother, we’re going to be late.” 

Cookie dough flies directly on the screen and Killua growls.

“It’s not too much. We can’t simply fly to Swardani, it’s too obvious.”

Alluka looks at him, intently; Killua looks back and they stay like that until Mito yells at Gon for eating the dough. 

“It’s too obvious,” Killua repeats, because he isn’t going to give up about this. Time to become a despotic tyrant – he’s a natural, actually. His days of being complacent have to end, if taking care of his people means that he has to act like the stubborn dumbass that Gon always is, so be it. 

“To who,” Gon asks and the cookie dough is inside his mouth again. At this pace, they really aren’t going to need two trays to bake them. 

“To whom,” Killua answers and Alluka shoves a spoonful of dough into his mouth too. It's buttery and sweet – considering it’s her first attempt at baking, it tastes promising.

“To his paranoia-fueled imaginary Illumi.”

“He isn’t going to show up,” Gon says. Then frowns. “He isn’t, is he?”

“Who’s Illumi,” Mito asks.

“No one,” says Killua, while Alluka chants “our psychopathic oldest brother.”

Abe hums like that’s a perfectly reasonable answer, then she proceeds into adding some more flour on the pantry. 

“Is that dangerous?” Mito asks, like she’s talking about the huge amount of chocolate that Killua has chopped and left as a mountain in the middle of the table.

Gon says “he’s awful,” Alluka says “he’s not gonna come,” and Killua says “everything is perfectly under control, I just need to outsmart him,” which somehow ends up sounding like the less comforting answer. 

“Listen, you two,” he says, head heavy. “I know I tend to go overdrive when Illumi is concerned, but this time the worst-case scenario is already here. There’s the video…”

“Which Milluki took care of,” says Alluka.

Mito frowns.

“Who’s Milluki, now!”

“The slightly less psychopathic older brother,” Alluka answers, smiling. Abe sighs.

“My, my, Ging sounds almost boring today, for a change,” she says, and Mito coughs inside her elbow.

“How many are there?”

“You mean how many psychopaths or how many brothers? Because it’s quite a difficult answer,” Alluka answers, unfazed, when Killua has already growled and hidden his face between his arms. 

Gon pats him on the back, affectionately, and Killua basks in the contact, feeling so fucking stupid and doomed. 

He sneaks a finger on the mousepad and tries another solution for the travel. Then he panics, closes the tab and deletes the browser history. 

Alluka is watching over his shoulder, hands still glued to the dough.

“Paranoia,” she repeats, like it’s an actual diagnosis. 

“It’s not paranoia if they’re really out to get you,” Killua rebuts, as gloomy as he can. 

The only person who doesn’t partake in the worried exchange of looks is good old Abe, who’s taking her chances with raw dough and salmonellosis. 

“It will be literally overflowing with hunters,” says Gon, bright and sure. “Even if Illumi really does come, he won’t touch you. I’ll break his other arm if he tries,” he adds, as an afterthought. 

Killua’s brain, already overloaded, starts fuming. 

“Which arm,” he asks, baffled. 

Apparently, Gon is capable of doing such things as evil grins. 

“I think it would be the left one this time,” he says, noncommittal. 

“You know what? I don’t even want to know,” Killua says and covers his ears with both hands while unsurprisingly Alluka freaks out and asks for more details. 

*

“You two can come whenever you want,” Mito says, deadly serious. It’s the same seriousness Gon has, that intensity that sparks inside his eyes and makes everything super intense. Killua is bound to choke on it one of these days. 

“We will be back here to bring him home in less than a week, you know. You won’t even have the time to miss his mess,” he says, and knows full well that she didn’t mean it like that. Nonetheless, Mito hugs him a bit tighter. 

She remains on the dock until the island is swallowed whole by the blue. Then they’re off and traveling is again the normalcy as it has been now for a third of Killua’s own life.

They try to get in their old routine, but it’s like dealing with rusty gears and Alluka, shining brightly in the middle, it’s an incessant reminder of how things changed.

Maybe it’s just Killua, his stupid, faulty brain that makes stuff up because it can’t settle even if he tries.

That’s what Killua tells himself during the whole trip back to the cost, and then on the bumping, sweating bus ride until the next big city, which is still nothing more than a town. 

He insists on selling himself that lie while they wait for the second bus until, evidently, it stops making sense.

“We should just run there,” Gon says, and Alluka blinks at the map she spread on the bench. She looks at the green, dark mass of forest-y obstacle that’s located exactly between them and there, as Gon eloquently put it. 

“No way,” Killua says, perplexed at first, because Gon knows how to read a map. Actually, Gon knows how to read a map way better than him, given that Killua used to rely more heavily on technology before paranoia made him retrieve to the safety of analogical devices. He still sucks at reading maps, that’s exactly why it’s Alluka the one who’s still holding onto it like Gon has openly threatened to shred it to pieces. 

He looks like he wants to, to be honest. To shred the map and the bench and the whole damn road. His foot is drumming softly but steadily on the concrete and he looks ready to bolt. 

“Why not. You can carry Alluka and we can…”

“But, Gon, you can’t keep up with brother,” she says, truthful and absolutely destructive. Killua looks at the time condensing in a dense ball of stillness that planes Gon’s expression like a blow of compressed air. 

“Of course I can,” he says, quiet. Quiet is the sound of Gon’s rage – quiet and blank, a mask of dry, coarse concrete to keep his fury in check. “I can run.”

And for a second, it does make sense because of course Gon can run. Gon can do everything. 

“But no one can keep up with brother,” Alluka insists, and looks at the both of them like they’re the odd ones. “I mean, Godspeed.”

“Oh, right,” Killua says, and finally blinks. 

“A gospel?” Gon asks, and Killua – they laugh, Alluka and him, impromptu and full force, from the belly to the mouth. 

“What’s so funny?” 

“It’s… Yeah, no,” Killua says, still snickering. He smacks Alluka’s back. “Stop it, you dummy. It’s not funny at all!” Alluka just curls up on herself more at his really weak punch and laughs even louder. 

“It’s just my Hatsu thing,” Killua explains. “It’s just… I can be really fast. But I should probably recharge at this point, I thought it would have been really ungrateful if I left your aunt with some billionaire electric bill.”

“Your Hatsu… But I know your Hatsu!” Gon says and he still sounds like he’d got to make a point of what he knows – probably a lot of stuff given that he was the one who spent this year studying, really. “I’ve never seen you fight with it,” he then adds, like a sudden realization. Just as fast as his stubbornness was growing, his face falls off. He lifts his chin and blinks at him. “I’ve never seen it.”

“Tough luck, then. It’s pretty fucking awesome,” Killua says and he’s just joking, stupidly, because that’s the only way he knows how to, really.

Gon doesn’t laugh. He looks at his knees for an intense, painful moment until Alluka yelps and stands up, arms flailing.

“The bus!”

 It comes, blue and waving under the sun like a flag. It growls and sputters until it stops, collapsing on its dusty wheels. 

They hop on board and it’s like leaving an oven just to step inside a furnace. The driver is shirtless but still wearing his necktie.

“AC’s busted,” he says, as a greeting. 

Alluka runs to open a window and when Killua and Gon join her, tickets in hand, she’s already plopped her backpack on a seat. Killua throws his own on the rack and sits beside Gon, who looks almost surprised for whatever reason. 

“What?” Killua asks, but he shakes his head so fast it’s like he’s fanning him, hair flapping around. 

Killua shrugs and tries to get at least a bit comfortable on those seats – his legs are too long or the space is too small while the air is definitely too hot. He shifts, uncomfortable, until his elbow is elbowing Gon’s own.

“Sorry,” he says, and tries to scrunch himself back in place. His palms are sweating but at this point he’s not so sure it’s because of the heat. 

“I used to hug you a lot when we slept together, remember?” Gon says. The granny from three rows away snorts in her sleep and Killua chokes on his own saliva. 

“How cute,” says Alluka, and she’s already digging in her backpack for long threads and the small box filled with beads and other tingling scrapped material. 

“Not really, I think your brother hated it. One time he flipped me over the nightstand,” says Gon.

“That was because you just fucking materialized yourself on the mattress while I was already sleeping!”

“My mattress smelled funny! And you always smell good, so…”

“That’s true,” Alluka says, unfazed. She picks a little shell and sticks a green thread inside the smallest hole with surgical precision. “I really like brother’s smell.”

Killua can’t. He just can’t. He quits, forehead pressed on the backrest before him and something loud drumming inside his skull. It might be the engine, but it’s probably his self-awareness instead, something that both Alluka and Gon evidently lack. 

They start chatting about Nen, then, and Killua spies Gon’s face under the curtain of his hair, head still glued to the the folding table in front of him. The plastic is hard and scalding on his forehead. 

He looks pretty much the same old Gon, really, the white blank rage of before already forgotten – maybe it wasn’t even there. Maybe Killua is projecting, as he did with Nanika. 

“So cool, you already know a lot of stuff, Alluka!”

“Brother is a good teacher,” she says and isn’t that the most blatant lie Killua’s ever heard.

“You just have good genes,” he says. “I mean, for the fighting stuff at least.”

Gon hums like Killua said some kind of universal truth and he decides to look at the ceiling like it’s suddenly very interesting. 

This bus is a tired, squeaking creature. It climbs over the hills, lulling Alluka back to sleep in less than ten minutes, bracelet abandoned in her lap. Killua stretches himself to put that and the rest of her stuff back inside the box and push her head a bit so she won’t get some painful crick in her neck when she wakes up. 

Gon watches him until he’s again seated down, pretty desperate to find some kind of comfortable position, a leg stretching in the corridor and the other folded so that he can rest his chin on it. 

“What?” he asks, awkward. Gon startles and Killua hates himself because they’re both awkward and it’s getting on his nerves – the same nerves that are already way too stressed to deal with something different than Illumi’s incredibly likely ambush, really. 

“Nothing!” Gon says. “It’s just… You’re really taking care of her.”

“She’s my sister,” says Killua and it sounds unfair, because maybe that was the reason at first. Now, she’s really that one person that showed him what all this family gig should be about and Killua loves her because she’s her. The fact that they’re also related by blood is almost collateral, a starting point. 

“Yeah, you were always taking care of me too when we traveled, really.”

His chin falls, a life of training forgotten when Killua simply ends up smacking his forehead on the plastic of the folding table. 

“What are… I wasn’t. What the hell, you didn’t need me to…”

“Of course I needed you,” Gon says, with his Gon-face and Gon-voice, all honesty and candor. “You were always cleaning up my messes, remember?”

Of course he does, that’s still the whole point, really. The reason why Killua is here, now, on a stupid bus in the middle of nowhere with is Nen-less best friend; to keep him safe, because that’s what his life looks like at this point. That’s what everyone expects him to do, Biscuit is just the first one on the list and Killua himself is on that too. 

This bus would have been incredibly small even if it wasn’t trying to melt himself under the burning sun. Every breath is a battle against the thick, bulging air.

“Yeah,” he says, and isn’t it like squeezing out the last inch of dry toothpaste. 

“I’m trying, though,” says Gon. He’s following some kind of reasoning and Killua knows him, you can’t stop him when he decides he has to say something. He looks serious, like he usually does, and if Killua didn’t know him well – he still did, he still knows him well – he would have sworn he looks somewhat desperate too.

“I didn’t try enough before, I know I didn’t,” he says, eyes big and duller in the backlight from the window. He twists his fingers and it’s like he’s praying, but Killua isn’t the right person to be the recipient of something like that, really. “I wanted to find Ging and… I think we are a bit too much alike, you know? Only I’m not sure I like it.”

“Oh. I’m sorry,” Killua says, because, what? What do you answer to something like that?

Gon shakes his head and his smile is subdued but serene, like this is something he had already investigate from every angle, cracking his big head on it instead of concentrating on algebra homework. 

“It’s alright. I like him, you know? He’s a cool guy, he really is all the things they say he is, only everyone is always saying how much I look like him and act like him and, I mean, I used to think it was cool because one should be happy to be like his dad if his dad is someone so cool.”

Killua frowns and thinks about long, wavy locks and sharp eyes. He’s still pretty much conflicted about the idea of ending up being two meters tall and spending his time sitting on coaches inside creepy dungeons despite having a perfectly functioning home at a normal ground level. On the other hand, he’s just as much sure that, if he had to choose role models in that family, father and grandpa Zeno are still his first choices. 

“No one should decide what makes you happy,” he says instead, which sounds overwhelmingly idiotic the same moment the air leaves his lips. Gon’s eyes light up anyway.

“I guess,” he says. “And I’m really happy I got to know him, I am. It’s just… I’m not sure I want to be that much like him, that’s all. I’d like to be like myself more.”

If Killua wasn’t emotionally stunted from infancy, he would say something like ‘I like you being yourself too’. 

“Okay,” he says instead. His shirt is clinging to his back like wet paper and there’s a soft layer of sweat between Gon’s brows too. Killua shakes his head. “Why are you telling me this now?”

“Because I’m… I had a lot of time to think about stuff. I wrote it down and then I read it and… My grammar isn’t stellar, but that isn’t the point at all. Shit, uh. I shouldn’t swear, Mito hates it when I do,” he adds, looking so pensively at Killua’s knees that they almost sting. 

Killua panics and then copes with panic by hitting Gon right in the middle of the head with a sharp nail. 

“Why!” Gon yelps, like a puppy. Killua growls.

“You aren’t making any sense. Your grammar isn’t that bad, I think you’re talking about spelling and I’m not sure that’s grammar but sure as hell it isn’t the point, what’s the point Gon.”

His mouth is wide, Killua can see his uvula. Gon breathes and locks his big, wide eyes into Killua’s own. 

“I’m trying to understand what I did wrong, is what I’m saying,” he says. “So that I can’t be that wrong ever again.”

“Are we talking about Kite?” Killua asks. He tries to treat the name with care, the whole big, fat elephant with care, but he’s still ready to bet he’s going to be the first one to slice himself over sharp edges. 

“No,” Gon says, and then frowns. “Yes. But not only Kite. I didn’t know your Hatsu. I still don’t,” he says, like it’s perfectly linear thinking instead of one of the biggest non sequitur Killua’s ever experimented. 

“I developed it while we were already fighting with the ants,” Killua says, weirded out. “You couldn’t know. I didn’t know it myself.”

“I should have asked,” Gon says instead. “I never asked, I never ask. I just do things and I… I’m not good at it. Asking and all that. And I think you’re not good at answering, so…”

“You really suck at apologies,” says Killua’s mouth, way before it connected with his brain. “Because if this is some kind of weird-ass apology for, I don’t know, forgetting to check with people while you tunnel-visioned your way toward your vendetta or whatever, you’re doing a pretty half-assed job.”

“I… This is not going how I think it would go,” says Gon, weirdly cautious, like he’s expecting some kind of violence from Killua. That, more than anything else, puts him on edge.

“Yeah, sure,” he says. “You did some kind of wholesome rehearsal in your head? And what did you expected me to say? That, of course, it’s all my fault because I just plain suck at friendship and general humanness or whatever it is that evidently everybody got engraved in their system when they were infants while Illumi taught me how to efficiently eviscerate an adult man!”

The old lady, she’s awake now. She looks at the both of them behind her thick glasses and gulps. Then she retrieves her bag and scampers to take a seat way farther. 

Killua blinks, mouth agape. Then he too stands up and throws himself on the seat she left free.

“Killua!” Gon calls, but he doesn’t really yell. Alluka is still snoring softly. 

“I’m tired, wake me up when it’s time to leave,” says Killua and he doesn’t turn around. He crosses his arms and lays back on two seats, legs hanging over the armrest. The ceiling is a boring grey, the AC vent useless and still. 

“See? You’re really bad too!” 

Honestly, what the actual fucking hell. 

“It’s not a fucking contest, Gon. Stop talking or I’ll shut you up for good.” He says it to the ceiling, but he can see spiky hair flailing in the periphery of his vision. 

A soft weight moves on the seat right before his. Gon’s head pops in between the backrests, watching him from above with a pout. Killua closes his eyes.

“I knew it,” Gon says, voice quiet and gloom.

“Eyes closed, I’m sleeping,” says Killua, irritation growing like a clawed creature inside his stomach, to diffuse the mounting anxiety that still fills him up from toes to head.

“I knew you hadn’t forgiven me,” says Gon. “Even if you said you did, I knew you couldn’t have forgiven me so easily.”

Killua’s head bolts up. It’s so fast and they’re so dumb, the both of them. The impact makes a loud smack sound and Alluka grumbles in her sleep over the ringing inside Killua’s ears.

“Shit, Gon, are you…”

He squints and spies over the backrest. Gon’s is still grabbing at it like a monkey, but he curled upon himself to clutch at his nose.

“That hurt,” he says, eyes watery. 

The groans come out, but Killua is already choking it inside his palms. It leaves him exhausted. 

How did they end up like this? Killua doesn’t even really know if he should hate himself or Gon or whom? Maybe Illumi, that’s always a safe bet. 

“I forgave you,” he says, to the crack between the seats. Gon’s eyes are again locked on his. “I’m not mad at you, I just…”

“You forgave me but you can’t forget,” Gon says, voice even, a straight line from his mouth to Killua’s ears. “Mito says that about Ging sometimes.”

Killua isn’t sure what that should mean. He isn’t even sure it’s accurate – it is, maybe, to some extent. 

“I’ll sleep now,” he repeats, hoping to sound more matter-of-factly than rude. Maybe rude is just his default setting, though, because Gon is already pouting again. 

This time, though, Killua lies down and makes a point of keeping his eyes shut.

Chapter Text

Alluka thinks that he should relax, which is such a wild concept at the moment that Killua just laughs at her face and then feels really bad when it’s clear she wasn’t kidding. 

She spends the rest of the trip talking amicably with Gon while the both of them throw worried glances at Killua’s back. 

Maybe he’s just made of paranoia at this point, but Gon being able to smell it is still pretty fucking extreme, even as far as Gon’s usual preternatural powers go. 

“Do you really think something is going to happen?” he finally asks, while they try to squeeze themselves in between the crowd without losing backpacks or limbs inside some revolving door. 

It’s like he knows, which is pretty impressive considering that not even Killua is sure he understood the true extent of his idea. That too is evidently the effect of a deadly cocktail made of insomnia, jet leg and some kind of really weird panic-hormones his brain has started producing in the span of the last week, when the possibility of meeting Illumi has become so realistic that he had to adapt or simply die of stress. If he was lucid, he wouldn’t probably find the courage to contemplate the worst-case scenario not even as a joke.

“Better be ready for anything,” he says, vague and not even sure if he’s still mad at Gon or just mad in the broader sense of the word. 

Luckily Alluka is the kindest person alive and she’s mercifully trying to make the conversation flow instead of throwing worried side-glances at Killua.

“You did all these things?” Gon asks, and who knows if he’s really as easily distracted or just equally merciful. 

Alluka nods. She’s in Zetsu and at this point she’s so practiced she can literally do anything at the same time, even recalling detailed stories of Killua’s fucked up ideas. 

“We literally went full vigilante, it was pretty funny and we ended up helping a lot of people… Even if brother chopped a lot of them unconscious to be sure no one would recognize us.”

“I didn’t and it wasn’t,” Killua says, squinting to scan the people in the airport and then out on the street.

Alluka may be good at Zetsu, but it’s simply not enough to put his mind at ease: he takes her hand and envelops her whole inside his own In. He’d like to see Illumi try to catch them like this, they might as well didn’t have a corporeal form at this point, Meleoron would be proud.

Swardani is still as crowded as ever, people move like a compact mass that sweats and breathes in unison.

Alluka sighs and throws a meaningful glance at Gon like they’ve always been best friends. 

They spent the last flight trying to meditate Gon’s aura nods open and Killua could only watch from the sidelines while his sister encouraged his supposedly best friend and keep him company in his efforts. She’s still looking at him with a fondness that Killua honestly doesn’t get, because they literally interacted for a grand total of six days and three were last year. 

It’s fine. No need to crack his head up about it while he’s trying to crack his head up about keeping his shit together.

He lets them be and he’s actually so fucking grateful to Alluka for being Alluka, because she’s just so well-meaning and soft, like every single mistreating during her life has made her flexible instead of hardening her. 

She’s still chatting with Gon, when they’re finally in the square closest to the Association HQ and Killua spots the pompadour. It’s quite ridiculous, then, when the massive hat appears and Palms blinks underneath, way more eye-catching than both Knuckle and Shoot together. 

“Killua!”

He doesn’t kill him, Ikalgo. Too good of an octopus, too good of a friend. But maybe – maybe – when he tries to strangle him in a tentacle hug, Killua presses enough to at least shut him up before the whole city knows his name and surname and fiscal number, which he’s not even sure of having in the first place.

“Yeah, hey, I’m happy too,” he says, though, because he is. 

“I can’t believe you’re here… Actually, are you here?” says Ikalgo, and squints at him, not only because he may have spilled some heartfelt tears. “He’s here,” he adds, looking at Gon, “but are you…”

“Nice In,” Knuckle says, and whistles too, arm still draped on Gon’s shoulder in a deadly bear hug. Palm ad her massive sun hat loom over their heads like an eclipse. 

“Hi Palm, how are you!” Gon blurts out, with one of those smiles that are so blinding Killua loses actual diopters every time he fails to divert his eyes. 

“Can we, like, move this whole theatre somewhere less open?” he finally asks, before his sister starts to make acquaintance with everybody and their friends, which is actually Killua’s friend most probably. 

“What is the threat? I feel threatened,” says Meleoron, popping out of nowhere and removing another couple decades from Killua’s life span.

“You should!” he yells in his ear, and the whole fucking crowd turns towards them, whispering about very strange people. 

“Here, brother, everything is fine,” Alluka says, petting him with a soft, cool hand. 

“Ehy, you dumbasses,” says Morel’s big voice, when they’re already walking in the direction of his towering body. “Whatever you think you’re doing, you’re definitely doing it wrong.”

Killua’s nerves aren’t going to survive.

*

Killua contemplates one of the chopstick, weighing it between thumb and middle finger. Maybe he should use it to fill the intergalactic void full of idiotic thoughts that evidently the stupid needle left inside his brain. 

The restaurant is pretty crowded. Killua has pushed Alluka on the bench behind a vase of money plant with leaves as big as her own head, so that she’s basically invisible from any point of view.

He’s feeling a bit more at ease now that they’re effectively surrounded by hunters inside a restaurant that stands in front of a building full of other hunters.

Relaxed means also suddenly hungry, so Killua steals the japchae that was probably meant to be for everybody as a side dish, Alluka orders bibimbap because she likes how the name sounds and Knov gets octopus and the reproach of every single person, Palm included.

“What about it,” Knov asks, a finely chopped tentacle lifted between his chopsticks. Morel just opens his palms, baffled. 

“We have fish people at this table,” Knuckle says and Shoot looks on the verge of fainting for the sheer rudeness of the statement. 

“Octopuses aren’t fish,” Gon says, encyclopedic and completely serious while he’s already digging inside his own bowl. “They’re mollusk.”

“I’m a mollusk,” Ikalgo repeats, looking at the table with a blank expression. “He called me a mollusk.”

“You technically are. Or an insect, didn’t you used to shoot fleas?” Palm says, pensive. “What am I,” she asks then, like Gon is some kind of expert zoologist. He is, that’s the worst. 

“It’s a bit difficult to say. But I like your scales, they’ve got a beautiful color.”

She literally melts and Killua feels compelled to tap her on the elbow to stop the bubbling rant about how she absolutely doesn’t fall for this kind of compliments at all. 

They are catching up, that was the plan. Such an adult thing to do somehow, going to sit around a table so that they can catch up, about Gon’s homework and Shoot’s leg; how many puppy did Knuckle adopted in one year? 

Killua looks at the entire bunch and feels like his brain is twirling around just like Meleoron’s pupils. These people, he’s genuinely interested in what they have to say and when Gon’s talks about mollusks again he’s the one who cut him off, because Ikalgo isn’t happy – he’s the one who knows what makes Ikalgo happy, just like he’s the one who ends up sharing a cup of gochujang sauce to dip dumplings in with Palm. 

“Soy sauce, please?” Shoot asks with the smallest voice, like Killua is the most reliable one at the table. Maybe he’s just overwhelmed because Knuckle is entertaining everybody with a theatrical rendition of how few dogs he has actually adopted during the last twelve months. It’s a double-digit number and Morel manages to visibly roll his eyes even behind the dark lenses of his sunglasses.

Food was vanishing from Killua’s plate since the start of this lunch, but when Ikalgo notices Meleoron’s movements he accuses him of being the worst individual ever and tries to hand his own food to Killua instead.

“I’m not going to starve, it’s a restaurant. I can just order other food, you know?”

“It’s the principle!” Ikalgo squeaks. “He should order his own food!”

“It’s just a prank!” Meleoron says. “Killua and I are buddies, aren’t we? We shared bodily fluids!”

Killua snorts and Alluka chokes on a mouthful of noodles. 

“That’s disgusting and also wrong?” he says, while patting his sister on her back.

Meleoron looks distraught. 

“Of course we did, I was sweating like a madman on your back while we run around that darn palace!”

“Oh, sure, so it isn’t wrong. Still disgusting, though.”

“That’s not the point!” Ikalgo squeals. “The point is, you shouldn’t prank friends, you moron!” 

“Actually, I beg to differ. It’s half of the fun,” Morel starts, one finger raised, and Shoot’s sweats so hard Knuckle starts fanning him with a menu. 

“Don’t say such controversial stuff, boss, you know Shoot gets anxious.”

“You’re all extremely weird,” Palm says, while she proceeds into handing one of her dumplings to Killua without any prompt from him. “And I’m a magical beast with a massive glass orb on my forehead.”

“Your orb is quite awesome,” he feels like saying then, since the gochujang is also pretty spiced he can’t be sure if that burning on his cheeks is actually some kind of perfectly reasonable physiological reaction. Alluka pokes him on the cheek and smiles at Palm. 

“It is! How did it end up there!”

“It was a very painful process of quite literal resurrection,” she answers, deadly serious.

“Are we zombies, then? Sometimes I think about it,” Ikalgo says, eyes wide.

Gon frowns.

“Of course you’re not. Are you?”

Meleoron throws both hands up.

“Don’t look at me. I can’t even really remember my name, but sure as hell it wasn’t Meleoron.”

“That would have been incredibly ironic,” Knov says, composed and slightly disturbed like he wasn’t the one who decided to order octopus for lunch. 

“Maybe it is,” Knuckle says. “The universe is vast and mysterious.”

“It sure is! Have you heard about the Dark Continent?” Alluka says, pretty involved. 

“Isn’t that a creepy pasta thing? I love that kind of stories,” Knuckle says, chuckling around a mouthful of noodles. “I recently I stumbled upon one about this magical healing ghost that sure as hell was just Nen or something as…” he blinks in front of Alluka’s face and Killua smashes both chopsticks between his fingers. “Oh. Oh,” Knuckles says, and looks at Gon, who smiles. “Now I get it.”

Killua puts the broken chopsticks down and accepts the new pair Ikalgo has already snatched from the nearest table, because tentacles and suckers are awesome tools.

“Yeah, but it’s really better if you don’t because I’d have to kill you all and I kinda like you, so let’s just drop the whole matter.”

“Duly noted,” Morel says, with quite the admirable seriousness.

They’ve all got second helpers and passed the plates around at least a couple times while Knov sulked over his unshared octopus dish, and they’re already arguing about the bill when Killua realizes that he talked way too much with anyone but Gon.

Who’s looking at him. Killua would have been thrilled and stupidly flustered at the concept just a handful of months ago. “What is it," he asks. Hiss, probably.

Gon doesn't back down, eyes clear and chin up.

“Are you still mad?”

Killua looks at the people in the restaurant and suppresses an internal wince when a tall girl with the longest silky black hair turns to look at someone over Alluka. She doesn’t look like Illumi in the slightest, but Killua’s brain can be the most difficult client.

“I told you I’m not mad at you, Gon,” he says, watching Alluka instead. She’s talking to Palm near the bathroom door, they look pretty engrossed in each other. “Just drop it, okay?”

Gon’s still looking at him, intently. 

“You’re still mad. Okay, I was just checking.”

Killua is going to relapse in his old assassination habits, here, right now, one year after he almost made himself sick over saving this knucklehead’s life. 

“Listen,” he starts, as they step out of the restaurant, but then he gets interrupted because they have to wait for Knov to use the toilet and for Meleoron to follow him – apparently, he has a really quick bladder, which is such superfluous and personal information that Shoot sheds actual tears out of sheer embarrassment. 

“He didn’t need to… The hotel is right here,” he tries, and the only possible answer is for Knuckle to pat on his shoulder. 

The hotel is in fact right there, and it’s the same one Killua half remembers to have slept in like a rock after the whole healing Gon ordeal. It stuck in his mind because it must have been the last time he really slept an actual sleep before starting a year made of nightmare fueled naps and long stretched insomnia. It has to be some kind of pavlovian response, the way his feet feel heavier by every step he take toward their room. 

“Brother, I want to show my bracelets to Palm!” Alluka says, trotting forward him with a perplexed and quite touched Palm in her trail. 

Killua nods at the boring plainness of the beige wallpaper until Gon’s face pops up, still looking at him with intent. He opens his mouth and Killua growls.

 “I’m not mad,” he says, frustration growing. “I’m just…” He looks at Alluka, short hair that bounces inside the room, with her belly full of noodles and one hand clutching onto Palm’s scaled wrist. “Kind of nervous, that’s all. For the whole Illumi thing, you know.”

“I want to help!” Gon says, and of course he fucking does, because he can get involved headfirst in everything he likes but the same luxury isn’t allowed to Killua and anybody else – which puts Killua exactly on everybody else’s plane, and isn't that the pettiest thing? Such a petty thing, it stings and burns inside his throat.

“You can’t. You just… There’s nothing you can do and it’s fine,” he says, and it’s just the honest truth. “Not everything has to be about you, Gon, and that’s fine too. We’re friends, but right now you can’t help me and I’m sorry if that hurts you or whatever, but…”

“I know I am weak. I… I can live with being weak,” he says and that’s just dumb.

“It isn’t what I meant.”

“But it is,” Gon says, eyes intent and voice one step from quivering. “I can’t fight, I can’t protect you or Alluka. I’m useless.” He cried over it, last time. Maybe he’s actually grown up a bit, maybe Killua too has. “But I still want to help you!” 

Or maybe they’re just the same amount of dumb as ever and that’s enough for Killua’s brain – and his voice – to explode. 

“You don’t!” he yells, like the toddler he is. Like the wrecked bulging of nerves he seems to be. “I know what this is, okay?” he says and Gon’s eyebrows jump up. “You’re bored, that’s all. And I get it, okay? You’re bored and this is your first adventure since forever, but this isn’t an adventure for me, okay? It’s just… I just want to get this whole thing over with so that I can be with Alluka again and she can be safe, because right now she’s not and it’s kinda driving me crazy so…”

“It’s not like that. Why you… It’s not like that!” Gon says and he looks ready to blow up, just like Killua feels.

“So what is it, then!”

“You’re always doing reckless stuff to keep people safe!” He starts yelling too and Killua isn’t sure he registered the words correctly – he isn’t sure that wasn’t Biscuit voice. “But then you go alone and... You said ‘I work better alone’ and you went and I let you and then you didn’t pick up your phone for days and then you were in a hospital? And I didn’t… We should have stayed together! I am supposed to watch your back, but it’s so darn difficult if you’re always behind watching mine, you know?”

The air sneezes and Meleoron’s body pops up, Ikalgo latched on his face with all eight tentacles. Killua has never seen a chameleon and an octopus express embarrassment, but there’s a first time for everything.

Ikalgo punches Meleoron right in the ear. 

“We’re sorry.”

“We didn’t want to interrupt,” Meleoron adds, sniffing. “Hell, there’s a lot of dust in this place, isn’t it?”

“You didn’t interrupt anything,” Killua says, and he’s already grasping at the straps of his backpack, looking at Gon’s shoes. “We were just…”

“It’s something the matter?” Ikalgo asks then, with his serious octopus expression. He’s such a solemn guy, really, Killua’s dearest friends tend to be like that, so it must be just another character’s fault of his, getting involved with this kind of people.

“It’s nothing,” he answers, right when Gon digs his heels in quite literally and growls.

“Killua thinks that his homicidal brother is going to show up and be an asshole!”

The elevator dlings, and the doors slide open over Morel’s massive form.

“Are we talking about that brother of yours? The one who killed more than twenty people just waltzing around?” he asks, with such a neutral voice that all Killua can do is nod as he steps on the floor, Knov right behind him.

“Well, I don’t like this at all. I hate bullies, we should definitely do something about it.”

“You… It’s not your problem,” Killua says, and throws a side glance towards Gon. “I can deal with him. I want to deal with him, or I’ll end up wasting my whole life running from him.”

“So, what’s your plan,” Ikalgo asks, sure, like the hypothesis of Killua not having a plan in the first place is just ludicrous. “What?” he blurts out, when Killua goggles at him and realizes that, actually, he does have one. Kind of.

Morel smiles, confident like that’s exactly what he was expecting from him and Killua experiences a dumb, warm burning between his cheek.

“It’s a bit reckless. And I’ll need to keep Alluka safe meanwhile,” he adds, tentatively.

Gon is still looking at him with eyes that burn. 

Morel’s eyebrow flips up over his glasses, as he throws a glance towards Knov.

He sighs, both ridiculous hat and business demeanor in place.

“So, what do you want me to do?”

*

Gon is still in the room, bouncing slowly on the balls of his feet, eyebrows tilted.

“I’ll wait for you,” he says, stubborn. 

Killua rolls his eyes.

“No you don’t. Just go already, and remember to take one more seat.”

He almost – almost – forgot, Gon’s eyes are so intense when he looks at you with all his almighty stubbornness. Killua is divided: his brain is urging him to deck him in straight in the face while every other internal organs seem willing to just, like, chop him unconscious and carry him onto one of the three beds in the room so that he could sleep using him as a pillow. He’s done it sometimes – the pillow part, not the chopping him unconscious part: best snoozes of his whole life.

He shakes his head and growls instead, hands on his hips.

“I need you to go and do this thing for me. You said you wanted to help, didn’t you?” he adds, a tad bit too angry. “I’m right behind you, I just need to recharge a bit.”

“Hey, are you guys ready to go?” asks Knuckles pompadour, bulging from the hall through the door with a question mark on his face and Shoot at his heels. 

Killua stares at Gon who stares back until a very muscular armpit simply descends on him from above. 

“Let’s go, that Biscuit gal seemed pretty ready to chop our heads off if we arrive late to the party,” says Knuckle and Gon, virtually powerless as he is, somehow manages to keep looking at Killua until they’re both out of the room, Shoot and his cane ready behind. 

Pins and needles bloom behind Killua’s own eyes. He presses the bridge of his nose between index and thumb and breathes. 

 “He’s really lovable,” Alluka says. She’s bouncing on the bed, shoes already discarded. 

“Who?” Killua asks, but only to earn some time. He closes the door with one last glance at the desert hall and its ugly striped wallpaper. 

“Who do you think, Brother? Gon, of course,” she says and her smile is little and a bit too full of concern toward Killua’s dumb head. 

“Yeah. He’s also fucking stubborn…” he says, almost distracted while he searches for the closest electrical outlet to shred it open. No one’s going to miss that wallpaper, really, beige shouldn’t even be considered a color. “What about Gon now,” he adds, when he’s already punched the socket to grasp at the cables. 

Alluka sits diligently with her feet raised. The power goes down and then up again as Killua steadies his breath and sets his jaw, so that he doesn’t stutter while electricity flows, frizzling and burning. 

“He loves you a lot,” says Alluka, like it’s the most natural thing. Like it’s obvious and there aren’t any other words, truer words, to define their relationship – to define them. 

Killua feels upside down and scorched, like his skin is made of some crunchy crust. His feet are still pressed into the floor but gravity fails him and it’s more like he’s floating, while spiky, hard edges are pressing inside him to make him stand upright. He grasps at the ripped cables like they’re his only lifeline, but Alluka is tilting her head, so direction must still be a thing in this universe.

“We love you, so we love him too,” she says, simple and sweet, finger curling a strand of hair, already fizzy with static, just like Killua’s own. “The people Nanika touches when she heals, she needs to touch them really deep you know? The worse their damage, the deeper she has to touch to know how to rebuild them like they were, so…”

So. She didn’t think of mention that before, because of course she didn’t.

Killua leaves the cables, there’s a spark but he can’t really say if it came from the wall or from his own hands.

 “Yeah,” Alluka insists. “And we know you too, brother. I know you don’t like it, to feel this way, but you can’t control everything and sometimes you have to let people do their thing, especially if they’re your friends. You told me that, remember?”

What the… Killua doesn’t even know where he should start.

“Jeez, little sister. When did you become so stupidly wise?” he asks, fixing the wall. Kind of. Not his problem, really.

“Oh, learned from the best. I think your alignment is chaotic wise, really.”

“My what?”

She beams and he sighs, claws grasping at the plastic socket before pressing it back in his casing.

“Listen. You should be safe, but Palm’s still going to watch you all the time just to be sure, okay? You can do weird stuff because she’s weird herself, she wouldn’t mind. Nanika,” he then says, and she comes out smiling. “You have your orders. You’ll be a good girl, right?”

“Aye, aye!”

Killua pets her on the head and she purrs even if the sparks must at least startle her.

“Thank you. I’ll see you guys after this dumb thing, spend this time wisely and choose what you’d like to eat for dinner.”

She nods again, Killua is covered. He closes the door and exhales a shaky breath, buzzing with energy, and fear, and a little bit of hope.

*

The place is overflowing with hunters. Netero’s photo is the most ridiculous thing, silly smile and two victory signs to frame his own beard. What a legend. 

“People loved the old man, really,” says Killua, looking both sides. He’s seated between Gon and the empty chair. Meleoron is right beside it looking more nervous than Killua himself while people continue to come inside. 

“He was pretty special. It was really fun, that time with the ball, wasn’t it?” says Gon.

“Maybe the funniest part of the whole exam,” he agrees, even if he can distinctly remember he felt way more frustrated than entertained at that time. And maybe it was the first time he got a foretaste of Gon’s self-destructing attitude. He also killed at least two people and he can’t remember why – what a fucking mess, really.

Biscuit side-eyes them because she hates being cut out of conversation, but honestly at this point Killua couldn’t care less.

They’re just sitting stupidly in chairs while they wait for Beans to stop fussing with the microphone and thanking everyone for coming all the way there. 

Morel is up on the stage then. He raises a hand to salute people and put them at ease. 

“Well. Good afternoon everyone,” he says, voice clear and sunglasses in place even under gassy lamplights. He picks up the microphone like it’s an earthworm of some kind and Beans blinks two times because he spent the last five minutes trying to set it at the right height, which obviously didn’t exist in the first place. “Like everybody else, I’d much prefer to be somewhere else right now, so let’s get this over with real fast.”

Gon laughs, nervously, and Killua has to literally suppress the need to climb over the stage and kiss the man. He probably wouldn’t appreciate. 

Knuckle and Meleoron, though, make it up by cheering really loudly. Shoot is trying to evaporate in plain sight and Ikalgo looks baffled at the mere idea of being there in the first place. 

One row forward, Palm sighs and scoots a bit closer to Knov. She’s still faithfully covering her right eye, though.

“Thank you, thank you,” Morel says, until everyone has stopped throwing up their fists. “So, we’re here to commemorate the old chairman death and that’s pretty lame if you ask me, since he would probably prefer for us to, like, party really hard in our own places or something.”

“He sure would,” comes the yell, and it’s definitely Menchi, even if she’s completely covered by Buhara massive form. 

“Or maybe he would have loved that he managed to piss off every single one of us even while he’s already dead, both sounds pretty reasonable to me.” Pregnant pause, to scratch at his neck. “Anyway, I understand we’re here to get this important recognition or whatever because we fought in that chimera ant invasion. I’m not sure about the whole thing, but we will accept it graciously because apparently that’s what the chairwoman wants us to do and we don’t really want to put her in the position to coerce us during her first year of this ungrateful job.”

“Should I laugh, because I feel like it but it also seems like a bad thing to do,” Knuckle asks, to Gon, who’s laughing already. Palm yawns and she’s using her free arm to practically wrap herself around Knov’s own, so maybe he really is asleep under that big hat of his.

Morel sniffs, an index under his nose.

“Anyway, I just feel like pointing out that we were paid to do the job, an obscenely amount of money too. No one wanted it in the end, so Knov and I bought a very expensive bottle and drink up with the old man for one last time.” 

Killua blinks and looks at Gon, who smiles. He knows that he had declined too, for reasons that maybe aren’t that much different from Killua’s own, maybe even clearer than that sense of instinctual repulsion he experienced in that regard – being paid for an extermination mission, that extermination mission, sounded a lot like being paid for assassination, really. He just had so much in his head already, and Alluka, and taking money was the last of his concerns. 

The others, he’s not sure. Looking at Knuckle, he probably felt like a fraud because of how things turned out. Palm killed herself over it and changed so much she probably felt deadly insulted.

“It was called an extermination mission.” It sounds quite solemn, Morel’s big snarky voice distorted inside that little microphone. “It was a shitty job and someone had to do it. We weren’t the best, just the first to be reached and to respond to the call. Some of us were there for reasons that didn’t have anything to do neither with duty nor with saving anyone.”

Gon grimaces and Killua finds himself scratching his head with a bit too many claws. 

“An innocent kid was caught up in that mess. Somehow, I’m still pretty sure that, if we didn’t do anything at all, she would have somehow singlehandedly saved the world. Maybe it’s just a fantasy, because I’m a bitter old pirate, but a man is allowed to dream.” He shrugs. “Anyway. It was a mess, we kinda made it out alive and even acquired some friends along the way, so we did at least one thing right. Thank you very much for listening.”

The silence is deafening until Knuckle stands up to break it. 

“Clap those hands, you fuckers!” he yells, already crying. Shoot has raised the collar of his shirt so much that he looks a lot like he’s trying to play dead with Alluka. 

Killua claps his hands, obedient.

“He really did it in, like, three minutes? I’ll have to buy him dinner,” he says, blinking at the clock. Then he takes advantage of the commotion to tap Palm on the shoulder. 

“She’s making a pillow-fort,” she says, and it doesn’t make any sense only it does, because of course Alluka would find a way to invent her time in some crafty pursuit.

The new chairwoman would have been the greenest person Killua had ever seen if he wasn’t also acquainted with Gon. She says something about license and stars and Killua is absolutely ready to go to bed this instant, only he pretty literally traveled for almost three days to get there and see Ikalgo bouncing on a stage to graciously receive his honorary hunter license which apparently is an actual thing and also makes him cry. Meleoron does the same, but looking like he’s expecting to be ambushed instead. 

Killua can definitely sympathize with him. When his turn comes, he jumps down from his seat and then run, snatching his stupid one star license from Cheshire Yordle’s hand or whatever is the new chairwoman name. He’s already seated back the moment Gon stands up. Then the general public explodes in cheers and very loud statements about one Ging Freecss and parenthood. 

Gon smiles and flail his hand around both to salute and sedate people. His grin is unfaltering up until he sees something. 

Killua can feel it in his own bones: he turns around in the same direction, up on the bleachers, and he’s there. Of fucking course he is. 

“What’s happening,” Biscuit’s face pops up on the row just behind him.

“Hisoka,” he says, slow. 

It’s Palm’s turn to stand up now, Killua catches her hair moving at the side of his vision, like an afterthought.

“Yeah, this is a hunters gathering and he’s a hunter,” Biscuits argues, in a whisper. “I understand he doesn’t seem the type to care for this kind of things, but…”

“He’s friends with Illumi,” Killua adds, and then feels almost dirty, because those are not words that should be used when talking about those two. “I’m not sure that’s the exact word. More like partner in crime? Murder soulmate?” 

Gon’s returned on his seat. He nods like the definition does indeed sound oddly reasonable. 

“Don’t you think…” he starts and then it’s when Killua knows it. 

Hisoka was watching them and that isn’t weird – well, it is, but still a common occurrence. He’s not exactly watching, though; he’s looking: at Killua, in the eyes. He smiles and Palm is on the stage to get his one star license; it’s the only moment she can’t cover her eye to watch over Alluka. 

“They know she’s not here,” Killua says, and he’s already bolted, Godspeed crinkling in his wake.

He hears Gon – his voice, yelling at him and maybe even trying to go after him, but Killua is already up on the bleachers, passing at arm length with Hisoka. He manages to catch another self-satisfied crazy-clown smile before he’s out, running so fast he isn’t even touching the floor.

Chapter Text

There, ink-black hair and ink-black stare – eyes glued to his, hypnotic and dark. 

Killua breathes and he’s surprised he can and then empowered by the thought. He can breathe, he can speak, he must. He’ll be fine.

The room is empty, plain-looking. Killua feels wild, Illumi has always been such. 

Just standing there, in front of him, means to unlearn all the things that are his skin and bones, the core of his being. Intra-family mission as a thing that doesn’t really exist if not inside some stupid set of abstract rules that maybe grandpa Zeno made up while drunk and bickering with his late wife. 

Bullshit, like most of the Zoldycks overly complicated stuff – like Killua’s whole life. 

“Fancy seeing you here,” he says. “Didn’t know you would be interested in this kind of Hunter stuff.”

“They were giving an award to my dearest little brother, of course I’m here,” Illumi says, and his voice is just like it was – still is inside Killua’s mind. Slick and dark, viscous against his ears. 

The door is open and the wallpaper is such a boring shade of beige, as blank as Illumi’s face.

“Here inside an empty hotel room? Happy that you’ve finally admitted being completely irrational.”

“This was the last one,” says Illumi, unfazed. He’s quiet, always have been, looking around like he’s inspecting the state of the furniture. “How many did you book? The ones with your friend’s name, I searched them too,” he adds, confused.

“Which one of my friends,” Killua then asks, and gleams when Illumi eyebrows tilt to a pale resemblance of an actual human expression. “You really believed I had, like, one.”

“My bad,” he says. “Still, I don’t think it’s here and I don’t think it was with you… You wouldn’t be here if that was the case, you’d already flown, so the empty seat must have been a decoy.”

“She has a name, you jerk,” Killua says and he has to remember to not cave in his own bloodlust, the idea of frying him exactly where he is, this ruthless Slenderman from his own infancy, always lurking at the sidelines of his life even when he’s doing pretty fine. When is so desperately trying to do at least a bit fine on his own. “Just cut the crap, Illumi. Why are you here.”

Illumi sighs, feeble and patient. He looks a lot like a floor lamp, perfectly unassuming inside a perfectly unassuming hotel room.

“You know why I’m here, Kill.”

“I don’t,” he rebuts, ready. He charged up for this, so much he’s already buzzing with energy and his hair is going to be a mess for quite some time. If he survives, that is. “I don’t know if you’re here on your own accord or…”

“I talked with father, if that’s what’s bothering you… Or, father talked to me. As a hunter, I was the most suited to contact you in this context.”

“Contact me,” he repeats. Yeah, contact, sure. Lovely. Apparently now that’s what ambushes are called in Padokia, good to know. “You could have contacted me in front of everyone, instead you decided to send your creepy clown friend…”

“Magician.”

“What?”

“Hisoka is a magician, not a clown.” He’s using the same didactic voice he used when he explained how to decapitate a man with a clean cut, so that the client could still use his head to perpetrate intimidation. “And he isn’t my friend. We have a give-and-take kind of relationship,” he adds, as if Killua has ever expressed any kind of interest in his relationship status ever. 

“Yeah, continue to tell yourself that.”

“Anyway, I didn’t really expect you to come… What is your intention, Kill? We both know you won’t confront me even if it wasn’t against family rules.”

“Bold of you to assume I give a shit about those,” he says. “Say, is it according to some family rules that you implanted a fucking needle inside your own brother’s head or I’m just that special?”

“You are pretty special, that’s what we tried to explain to you all along, really.”

“Did father know?” he asks because he’s dumb, that’s why. He needs to ask even if he already knows the answer, even if he already knows he isn’t going to like it.

“It was part of the training,” it’s enough of an answer. “No need to feel grumpy about it. You’ve always been stubborn, and you still don’t seem to know what’s good for you.”

“Killing you,” says Killua, and it’s like his mind is clear – even more than when he removed the needle. This is the solution: he tried to avoid it for so long, because he was stupidly scared of Illumi and of all those complex, ridiculous rules that somehow always put him at a disadvantage. He tried to avoid confrontation because brother has always been a word with weight, just like family and love, and they all got mixed up inside his head. “That or you’re leaving Alluka the fuck alone, and since I don’t trust you to do so, I’m going to kill you.”

Illumi doesn’t blink, it isn’t something he’s accustomed to. But for a brief moment his resemblance with mother is striking and Killua seriously fears that he’s going to cry of happiness at his threat. 

Instead, he turns his head and inspects the room.

“You came to this specific room first. Why is that?”

“Because I sensed you with my En,” Killua says, and it’s true but not exactly true. Still, there is no way Illumi can really find the entrance to Knov’s manor after Alluka closed the door. 

“So it’s okay if I destroy it?”

“Suit yourself, I don’t care,” Killua says. 

“She really isn’t here, then. Hisoka ruled out invisibility. Some kind of dislocation, maybe? In that case…”

Killua dodges, Godspeed crackling in his wake as fast as Illumi’s hand rises. The needle pinches the wall right behind him, its aura a livid clomp, tiny and compressed. 

The second one is already on its way and the last thing Killua sees before sensing the prick between his eyes is Illumi’s smile, his enthusiastic bloodlust spilling everywhere and engulfing him. 

“Well, I thought you would have put up a bit more of a fight, Kill,” he says. 

Killua blinks and breathes, forehead still prickling. He can see Illumi’s pretty ugly moccasins covering the distance between them, soles soft on the carpentry. 

“I guess you got weaker during these last years, but don’t you worry,” he says. Killua swallows as his hand lowers on his hair, petting him the same way Nanika likes. His lips come closer – so fucking close to his ear. “Once we’re home, we can start your training right from where we got interrupted. Doesn’t it sound good? You and me, just like old times, what do you say?”

“Fuck you,” Killua says, the exact same moment his knuckles impact with his brother’s chin. Godspeed is sparkling like the universe is made of static, buzzing with energy as the second punch collides with ribs, and then a third and a kick. The door smashes under Illumi’s twirling mannequin of a body as Killua crushes him out of the room. 

He’s punched Illumi. He’s punched… Multiple times. What the actual fuck, he did it for real. 

“What did you do.” His voice, it’s like dripping blood, it sinks inside Killua’s head, but it’s still out – something that’s there but can’t really affect him. “You used it?”

“She has a name,” Killua insists and now – now it comes the difficult part, because he’s not really sure that the order will cover him another time, make the needle disappear the exact moment it touches his head. He tried to be as specific as possible, but he’s still isn’t sure an order can have such lasting effects. Hell, he wasn’t even sure it would have been effective the first time. 

“So, what did you ask? For my needles to vanish every time I attack you?”

“I’m not stupid enough to tell you,” he says. 

He knows Illumi’s furious way before he spills his bloodlust – Killua’s got his violent outbursts tattooed inside ribs and skull, he can feel his rage as he rises over the wrecked pieces of the door like he’s some giant marionette, hair covering his face. 

And Killua is scared, that isn’t changed and it isn’t going to change anywhere in the near or distant future if he’s understanding the matter correctly – and he is, because he usually does, because Illumi taught him well. 

The thing is, though, as Illumi’s eyes become two big poles of swirling misery, he’s come to realize that there’s something that scares him way more than Illumi ever could. 

Living like this – constantly frightened, always on edge, fighting both old memories and very recent worries, that’s not what he wants and sure as hell isn’t what he wants for Alluka. 

“So, tell me, Kill,” Illumi says, voice flat even if his aura would be enough to kill a man on the spot just by giving him a stroke. “Is this your grand plan? The oh so astute strategy you forged to beat me?”

“He doesn’t need a strategy, you walking pincushion, he’s got back up.”

Does he? Apparently, he does. The hall is crowded, Biscuit looks like she owns the place and Morel’s should think about charging up the owners because he doesn’t look like he and his pipe together could really fit between the walls. He looks every bit like he will try, though, and if he can’t, that will be at the expense of the walls themselves. 

Killua blinks, mouth agape. Those dumbasses must have used Knov’s manor to appear, because Alluka too is there, with her short hair and her short everything, pupils more dilated than Illumi’s own. 

“Back up,” Illumi repeats, ominous aura swirling away in a breeze. His hair flops back in place like wet spaghetti. “So anticlimactic,” he adds, and Killua almost chokes on the spot, because his eyes don’t really have pupils, but he knows he’s watching Alluka.

She’s looking at him too, still and breathing, like she isn’t really sure he’s real, and Killua realizes for the first time that, to her, he isn’t exactly. Illumi, their whole family, to her are most of the time some kind of entity – a specter that shadows them around, nothing more than a bad bedtime story, scary but surreal, so that all that it’s really needed to scare it away are her big brother willing to turn on the light and a couple of friends to laugh with. 

“Ops,” Hisoka says, popping out from the other side of the corridor with an unassuming hotel maid and her cart full of cleaning products. She looks at them all, at the disrupted door, and then sighs and retire beside Hisoka’s back like these kinds of events are a common occurrence in a hotel frequented by hunters.

“I think I’ll go too,” Hisoka says, with a shrug. “Sadly, there’s nothing here that interests me,” he adds, with a very sad sigh towards Gon’s general direction. 

Killua should maybe opt to punch him too, just to stir up a bit more chaos. 

“Well,” says Morel instead, and it’s impossible to decide who’s talking to given that he’s still wearing sunglasses. “You understand, young man, that if you try to attack this kid or his sister, you’ll have at least half a dozen pro hunters ready to crush your head, don’t you?”

His bloodlust is perfectly in check, he doesn’t look malicious one bit. And still, he’s just that much intimidating just by standing there, shoulders too big to fit inside the corridor.

Ikalgo – small, round Ikalgo – is on the frontline, tentacles folded and eyebrows furrowed like he’s ready, and he is. Ready, just because Killua is there and Illumi is there and he doesn’t even know what’s going on, but sure as hell he’s going to put up one hell of a fight.

Illumi’s gaze shifts to him and then upon Palm and Knov; to Knuckle and Shoot, whose aura doesn’t feel any bit less dangerous even if he’s leaning on his cane. Meleoron eyes are twirling around in anxiety, but he doesn’t bail and Biscuit looks impossibly powerful just standing there in the middle, eyes blazing and skirt painfully pink. 

“Just go away, Illumi,” Gon says, crazy as usual, still as blinding as he’s always been. “Back off.”

Maybe it’s just Killua’s brain that’s wobbling, but he’s vibrating, so hard he looks almost as frozen as Alluka, like that time when Morel provoked him and Gon was going to kill him – just like that, just because he was full with a rage impossible to contain and the only way for him to avoid explosion was to direct it towards one specific objective. 

Illumi tilts an eyebrow at him, because the pressure of Gon’s presence must at least elicit some kind of reaction. 

“You don’t have your Nen anymore,” he says, vicious and so matter-of-factly, like it’s common knowledge. That, more than anything else, manages to scare Killua’s brain like it’s been electrocuted. He looks at Gon but he’s still there, standing unmovable like he’s the center of the universe itself, unstoppable and surreal. It’s just an act or it should be, only it’s Gon, so it isn’t, and Killua freaks out for the first actual time since he thought the thoughts that lead him there, inside this stupid corridor in this hotel with Illumi at punch’s length.

“I can still break your other arm, Nen or not,” Gon says and then Killua has to refrain from facepalming, because Illumi almost laughs. That means that they’re definitely entered in some kind of alternate universe in which his eldest brother didn’t inherit their mother's abysmal lack of humor like the rest of the family.

“I see how it is…” he says, and pulls out a big wooden splinter from his hair. “Don’t do anything stupid anymore. This was dad’s message,” he adds, voice plain. For an entire, extremely long second, Killua isn’t sure who’s talking to. 

“I’m actually sincerely sorry about that,” he says then, honest enough for Illumi to blink. “Say that to him. We’re going to be more careful from now on. And thank Milluki too,” he adds, as an afterthought. “Even if he did it because he actually loves trolling people online.”

Illumi’s gaze skims over at them all again, like they’re some kind of abstract painting he doesn’t get – like he’s looking at them from upside down. 

He’s out with a theatrical swish of hair, then, right before Biscuit starts to hiss like an enraged cat. 

*

People screaming at him, that isn’t exactly how Killua figured his stunt would have ended up. Not that he really planned that far away, to be honest. 

“So that’s it? You just went and punched him? What were you thinking, you deranged psychopath!” That’s Biscuit, she’s still screaming in his ear. “I can’t believe you, why on earth do I even spend time talking to you if everything I say get flushed inside the giant toilet that is your brain!”

Morel has gathered the others away at some point, to get a drink or something, so Killua’s public humiliation is limited to his sister, Gon, and Knovs tilted eyebrows.

“Please, one of you go back to the mansion and clean up,” he says, only for Biscuit to freeze him on the spot with a glare. 

“When you feel like it,” he adds then, and Palm and Ikalgo pop out from the corridor, clutch at both his arms and drag him out of the room. They’re gone for real, then, jumping through the pieces of the broken door. 

No one moves, and Killua starts to consider the possibility of having actually broken his friends. It’s a scary thought, one that fueled a kind of anxiety that’s different but just as gut-wrenching as trying to punch Illumi’s face.

“Bisky,” he starts, because she’s the least scary person in the room despite being the most openly willing to scream his head off. “I had things covered, we planned stuff with Knov beforehand.”

“We planned to hide Alluka, not for you to go search for Illumi,” Gon says, face blank. “We said we would have helped you if he attacked us, not…”

“Sure, but Illumi wouldn’t have killed me, he’s weird like that,” Killua rebuts, reasonable. “And I set Nanika with the order to get rid of the needle as fast as it touched my head, so that I could punch him taking him by surprise.”

“So your plan was to punch him?” Biscuit says. “I taught you how to fight so that you can come up with an entire plan just to punch someone?”

“Listen,” Killua says, patient. “You taught me Nen stuff, but that guy taught me how to fight and he is as resistant as me to electricity. I don’t know if I could ever win against him, so it wasn’t about that. It was about letting him know that I’m willing to try and that it could end up being more inconvenient than not to him. That’s how he thinks, if he decides that bugging me and Alluka is seriously less worthy than not, he’s going to need a stronger reason to try again next time.”

Biscuit is massaging her temples now, Killua almost gets a pang of guilt because she looks suddenly very adult – almost old. 

“It’s fine, really. Illumi would never kill me. I wasn’t in danger so there’s nothing to worry about.”

“He wouldn’t kill you, yes,” Alluka says, voice so soft and pondering, nodding to her own crossed arms. “He would just stick a needle inside your brain so…”

“And Nanika took care of that, so it was fine.”

“But you weren’t sure,” she says, eyes blurring and blue. “You said that it was a precaution, not that you were going to… You lied to us!”

He did, so he doesn’t answer as her eyes narrow with repressed tears.

It’s just… Killua was just positive that nothing too bad would have happened. There was a consistent possibility that Illumi would have found a way to coerce him into using Nanika anyway, but Illumi is loyal to their family in a way that is pathological at best and that’s not even what Killua’s brain was thinking, really. Somehow Killua’s brain, that brain that always takes for granted that the worst-case scenario is going to happen and thinking otherwise would mean death, this time… The place is overflowing with hunters. Gon is there. And Gon is nen-less and unpredictable, but he wouldn’t have let someone touch his sister, not even Killua himself. That, somehow, was what he thought and pretended not to have thought so that he didn’t have to face his own senseless irrationality. 

Alluka’s whole face squints, it’s seriously painful to watch until it’s painful for real when she slaps him, open palm on his forehead. She then takes off, fuming, and leaves him there, both dumbstruck and plain dumb. 

“I love her, she’s a menace,” Biscuit says. “I’ll go fetch her.” 

Killua doesn’t even know how he should start thanking her. 

He doesn’t and blinks when he realizes that it’s just him and Gon, now, standing in front of each other in that clean, impersonal room. The same dizzy awkwardness that leaked in every single one of their latest interactions is there once again and Killua can’t deal with it now – maybe he’ll never be able to and he should just give up on having a normal conversation with Gon again.

“I’ll go clean up Knov’s mansion, it’s just fair,” Killua says then, but when he steps inside the portal and the colors melt in white, he knows Gon’s already on his trail. 

He has yet to say a word and Killua is almost… wary. And anxious. He’s going to pass out, really, you’re not supposed to remain in that state of hypervigilance for so long and the fact that he’s accustomed to it makes it look effortless but it’s not. 

“For real?” he says, at the blank space inside. 

“Oh,” Gon adds, stumbling on his feet just behind him. “Is that a pillow-fort?”

It is indeed. He told her to stay inside the room, and she obeyed, but then she had to do what she wanted, because Alluka is just as much stubborn as every single person Killua meddles himself with.

“It’s pretty rad,” Gon says, and walks around it, looking at the pinched sheets and the duvet that extend from the table to the actual leather coach that must be somehow reflective of Knov’s taste.

Killua looks at it for a couple of very long seconds. He doesn’t really know what he should do. He’s tired, he realizes. Again, his body is screaming for him to stop moving, doing, being, while his mind insists on racing like Illumi is still there, breathing prickles on his forehead, whispering stinging words in his ear. 

“What are you doing?” he asks, because Gon is kneeling to spy the pillow-fort from beside, eyebrows scrunched. 

 “You didn’t tell me,” he says, still looking at the striped patterned blanket that’s hung as a door from the backseat of the couch to the angled lines of what must be the table.

It isn’t an accusation, it doesn’t sound like one. It’s just a sentence, matter-of-fact, report of the day: Killua didn’t tell him, that’s just how things are.

“You’re all making a big fuss out of it, but I’m really sure Illumi wouldn’t have killed me,” he insists, trying to broaden the topic even if he perfectly knows that the point isn’t that he didn’t tell in general, it’s that he didn’t tell Gon. “I know it’s difficult to understand, but he loves me in his own fucked up way.”

“He tried to kill Alluka, though, when you brought her here to heal me. That’s what Ikalgo said,” he adds, serious, and maybe Killua will have to kill that lovely octopus for good this time around. “You didn’t tell me that too.” He touches the blanket for a moment, before pulling it aside with the same consideration he usually applies for petting animals, and then he sticks his whole head inside. 

Killua’s brain is going to quit on existence altogether and just vanish from his skull.

“What the hell are you doing now?” 

But Gon’s body is already halfway inside. He shifts the blanket to look at Killua over his shoulder. 

“It’s really big,” he says, like that’s the only needed reason to crawl inside a pillow-fort on all fours. 

It’s an invitation, Gon’s asking him to follow and Killua is already weak in the knees. Doesn’t he know, after all this time, that he doesn’t even need to ask? Nothing changed in that regard: Killua’s whole body still wants to keep Gon at arm’s length, it’s just his brain that’s still trying to desperately train itself to govern the sentiment into something that should be more manageable, more rational, more safe. 

And it’s no use. He can try, on the phone, with kilometers and time zones to cushion the fall, but right here, right now, he’s already crawling behind on the pile of pillows set on the ground like tiles. 

“It’s such a good pillow-fort,” Gon says, with satisfaction. Like an old man watching construction sites.

“Yeah, Alluka can be pretty crafty,” Killua says, and he too is an old man – he sure feels like one. 

Gon sits down with his back to the couch, nose looking at the shapes on the sheets from upside down. They’re little cartoonish puppy heads. Killua’s going to make fun of Knov with Morel, at least until Palm kills them both. 

“We used to make pillow-forts back at Heaven’s arena,” he says instead, tongue acting on its own. “Zushi was stupidly enthusiastic about those.”

“They were lots of fun. We used to have a lot of fun,” Gon says, and breathes. “I know I ruined everything.” His nose is still up, face serene just like his voice, and so, so sad. “I know it’s my fault.”

Killua chokes with that little warm air that’s compressed in between blankets and pillowcases. 

“You didn’t ruin anything. It’s… It’s not your fault and I’m not mad at you,” says Killua. “I’ve never been mad at you, I’ve been mad at me.”

That makes Gon’s face suddenly crumple. 

“At yourself? But you didn’t do anything wrong! If it’s about Kite…”

“You’re always meddling in other people’s business,” he says, his voice cuts Gon’s sentence in half and it makes a lot of sense, because it’s like a bunch of knives inside his own throat. “You were always there, saying embarrassing stuff about how I’m your best friend and all that, but when it counted, when it was about you, you never let me do anything. You didn’t let me…”

“Of course I didn’t,” Gon says, eyes big and scary – scared. Like an animal. “I know what you wanted to do, I know you would have… You’re always trying to sacrifice yourself when something bad happens, but I couldn’t let you, it was my fault!”

“Fault doesn’t have anything to do about it! I would have died with you because you’re my best friend not because of guilt!”

“And I couldn’t let you die with me because you’re my best friend, Killua!”

He stops, mouth open midway and voice falling like a marble made of lead, deep and dark and heavy to the pit of Killua’s stomach. 

“That’s why you didn’t tell me today, isn’t it? I think I get it now,” says Gon and isn’t that the saddest littlest smile Killua has ever seen in the entirety of his dumb life. 

He closes his mouth and gives into the pillows, ready to catch him with a soft plop.

“Maybe Biscuit is onto something about us being just a couple idiots.”

Gon’s giggle looks exactly like twinkles in the corner of Killua’s eyes. It’s again, as it’s always has been, like being showered in pure light. Or maybe he’s experiencing low sugar blood as an aftermath of adrenaline rush. Something medical, something solid and real that has nothing to do with Gon, who’s the realest and solidest and still studying the tilted angles of the draping over their heads. Gon who’s older now, and looks way more lost than he’s ever been when Killua was the one looking for a direction and decided to use him as a compass. 

“I should have said something,” he says, and Gon turns towards him, surprised. “You were upset. You were hurting and I could see that- fuck, everyone could see that, but it was convenient. You were convenient for that war and I didn’t say shit. I didn’t do shit because I was too fucking scared you would have…” Jeez. Is it still that fresh? Does it still hurt this much, after a whole fucking year? “I was scared you’d tell me to mind my own business and… I was scared you’d said what you said in the end and shove me away because you didn’t need me.”

Gon eyes become so big they almost swallow his face whole before he squints and shakes his head so fast his hair rustles under that ridiculous sheet.

“Of course I needed you, Killua. What I said, I’m not going to say I didn’t think that back then. But I wasn’t thinking at all and I- I was scared too, you know?”

“You looked way more scary than scared,” Killua says, mouth dry, looking at him from below, head so heavy he doesn’t even try to lift it from the pillow. “You looked homicidal, and I would know, I’ve been eating bloodlust at breakfast since I was born, and…”

“I was scared you would have ended up like Kite,” Gon says, so simple and so infinitely complicated like everything about him always is. “If I didn’t shove you off, you would have come with me and do something really, really reckless with me because even you stop thinking when stuff gets real like that. And it isn’t even true,” he adds, sadder. “You just stop thinking when you’re with me and I ask you to do something, and if I had asked you to come with me and kill Pitou with me, you would have, because you’re just awesome like that, Killua. But I was ready to sacrifice everything and… I really thought I was, that it was the right thing to do… Only it was a lie, because sacrificing everything would have meant to sacrifice you too. And that was the one thing I couldn’t do.” His smile is such a small, painful thing and Killua is frozen on the spot, lying down on bumpy pillows under a soft cocoon of blankets, his thoughts a soggy mush. “I think that’s what saved my life… You saved my life, Killua, and I’m really happy you did, so… Thank you. And sorry.”

Here he is, there, looking at him with that stupid, serious intensity that got the best of Killua from the first instant their eyes met inside that freakishly long tunnel, when Leorio of all people pointed at him because he had that weird idea of running from home bringing the skateboard with him. Coincidences, small dumb decisions popped out from his lack of control over his life, leading him there – here, now, Gon’s always at touch length. 

“This is really dumb,” says Killua and he’s never felt more at peace. Gon’s hair is ticklish on his temple. He hopes he doesn’t smell funny, but now Gon is smiling on his cheek so maybe it doesn’t matter.

“Yeah, super dumb,” he says and his breath is ticklish too. “Is this what growing up looks like?”

“I don’t know. I mean, we’re still inside a pillow-fort that we were supposed to take down… That’s pretty childish.”

Gon is grinning. 

“We are still kids,” he says, his surest voice back in place. “We changed, sure, and maybe we’ve even grown up a bit, but I think we’re still kids enough to enjoy a pillow-fort.”

“You sure are short enough to enjoy a pillow-fort,” Killua says and takes the punch without moving an inch. He grins too when Gon mumbles something about just waiting until he turns eighteen or something.

“I think we are,” Killua carries on, pensive. “Still kids, I mean. And we will be for some more years.” 

They look at each other. Killua is sure he’s now spent at least a third of his wake time contemplating Gon’s face or Gon’s back or Gon as a concept. The worst thing is, it doesn’t feel like wasted time at all. 

Gon’s mouth opens up again.

“I really do like you, Killua. You know that, right?” he says.

Killua’s head is going to explode, that’s it. That’s how his life is going to end. He can’t even bring himself to cough properly – he just wheezes around the prickly tangled mold that’s suddenly grown inside his throat.

“What does that even mean, Gon?” 

But Gon is totally serious, of course he is. It’s not like he has ever been unserious one day in his damn life of pure, unadulterated, dumb determination. 

“It’s just… What I said about Ging, I meant it. I don’t want to be like him.” He swallows, but he’s still looking at him dead in the eyes. “I want to be like me and I like myself a lot more when I’m with you, because I like you a lot. And it’s not because of the adventure thing, I swear. I miss going on adventures, but I miss you way more than that. I miss you like I forgot how to do stuff and… I know you have Alluka now and I’m really happy you do, and I know I’m selfish…”

This moron. Killua is… What he feels is the need to bang his head onto some abrasive surface, only everything is soft and cushiony here, just like the insides of Killua’s own skull.

“Stop it,” he says, so darn weak. “You can’t… You don’t know what you’re talking about, so stop it.”

“I do!” Gon says then, the pillow wobbling as he props up on his elbows. 

“No, you don’t. You can’t know because I never told you,” Killua says, because the pressure is too much, like he’s been stuffed with cotton all this time and he needs to get it out. He just needs to. 

“About what?” Gon asks, open and non-judgmental. He’s never been, from the very first moment, when Killua told him that he came from a family of professional assassins.

“I don’t think you… I don’t think you know how much you mean to me.” He’s going to die of embarrassment. He’s going to spontaneously combust. This is the most difficult thing Killua has ever done, training be damned. “You aren’t my best friend- listen, you dumbass!” They have choked simultaneously. Gon coughs and nods, serious and attentive and a bit on edge. That’s fair, Killua feels on edge too.

“What I mean is… You aren’t just my best friend. You are… You were the most important person I ever had,” Killua says and it’s that simple, it really is. “You still are, because I don’t need to make classification apparently, so you still are and… I don’t even know how to- fuck.” It isn’t simple at all. It’s difficult, it’s strenuous and messy. It’s painful, more than a lot of things that Killua has experienced in his life and he’s sure he can say to have a firm grasp on lots of different kinds of pain now. It’s impossible, that’s it: he can’t do it.

“But that’s what I was saying, Killua. I think I get it,” Gon says then, because impossible doesn’t even exist in his vocabulary, he just can’t conceive the event of something not going his way. Because, as sad as it is, Gon is a moron. 

“No, I don’t think you do,” Killua says, just as serious. “You can’t, how could you? But it’s okay, I don’t need you to… I don’t need anything from you? Just you existing is enough, you are- I was serious, you made me save Alluka, but that’s only because you saved me and, gosh, this is so dumb.”

“Killua.”

“What.”

The pillows wobble again. Gon is settling on his four, head looming over Killua’s own.

“I’m really super, super selfish, you know that right?”

It’s difficult to shrug while you’re a sleepy deadweight, but Killua has always made difficult look like a breeze. It’s his one true talent.

“I guess. Yeah, you are,” Killua says, to the dog-patterned ceiling and to Gon’s too solemn eyes, watching from above – falling until he isn’t falling anymore, because it’s Killua the one who’s falling and it isn’t even the first day. It started way, way back – way before Gon’s lips were on his own for the briefest of moments, to apply pressure and then release, less space between them and no air at all. Not inside Killua’s lungs, where it should be. 

“Killua?” Gon’s voice sounds as wobbling as the pillows. The entire pillow-fort – or maybe it’s just Killua’s brain.

“Yes,” he says. Wheezes. His voice isn’t his own – his mouth, it can’t be his, otherwise he should accept that— “Was that a kiss?”

“Guess so,” Gon says, earnest and grave. He swallows and frowns, hard. “Isn’t this the thing you thought I didn’t get? Did I get the wrong thing?” he adds, positively aghast. 

Plot twist, Biscuit was right all along. They’re both idiots. 

Killua swallows for Gon too and then launches himself forward. He has never kissed anyone before today – it looks a lot like he was trying to knock Gon’s out with a headbutt. A lipsbutt. It’s even shorter than the first kiss and it still manages to leave him completely, utterly breathless. 

“So I did guess right,” Gon says, blinking and beaming, like the realization has blinded him. 

Killua pinches him hard on the cheek and he falls, howling. 

“Ouch, why!” he says, rolling on his side. “Killua, you’re mean!”

Gon gives the pinch back with vengeance.

“Ouch, stop it! You dumbass.”

The air is thick and the white, surreal light that comes from Knov’s room is softened over the sheet, more yellow-ish and warm.

“Yeah, I’m a dumbass,” Gon whispers, way too serious, as he too spreads onto the pillows; and isn’t that just like sharing a bed, something they did so many times before.

 Gon is warm, he’s always been, like his body is perpetually radiating the same heat from Whale Island’s midday sun. He curls up beside Killua, and he turns his head to look at him properly. 

“I guessed right. I did something right,” Gon says, still whispering. There’s a desperate edge there, where it shouldn’t be – like he’s talking to himself. He breathes out a heavy cloud of dread and ends up deflated against Killua’s side. 

“Would you still be my best friend, Killua?” 

“I never stopped,” Killua says, dumbstruck. “I don’t think I ever could.”

Gon stutters, which is a first, but it doesn’t matter, because now Killua’s learned a couple things. In the last year, he’s learned a couple things about himself and his sisters and what he really needs to live – and live good, live happy.

“Alluka wants to go to school,” he says. “I can’t fathom why, but it’s what she wants and… We were thinking about finding someplace to stay. To… live, you know. Like a house.” He doesn’t dare to say the word home. “And I’ll have to talk with her, obviously. If she’ll ever want to talk to me again after today,” he adds, as an afterthought.

“Everyone should want to talk to you,” Gon says, fucking Killua’s life in every direction like he only knows how to. “I think she loves you a lot.”

“She wants to go to school,” Killua tries again, he doesn’t say ‘I want to give her everything’ because somehow he knows that Gon must know as well. “But it should be somewhere pretty quiet, where we could lay low. Somewhere where having Nen or not wouldn’t be a problem.”

That, too, is an invitation. Quieter and warier than leading the way inside a pillow-fort; heavier too, but not reckless. 

Reckless was that time on the cliff, under a sky open wide, heavy with stars and ready to swallow them whole, when Gon would ask everything and Killua would gladly comply because every other thing he had known since then had been hell and everything different would have been a blessing. 

“You know, that ferry boat you took to come to Whale Island, it ships two times a week from that little town called Shelter bay. It’s just before the island, you can almost see the coast when the sky is really really clear.”

“Yeah, we stayed there for a bit,” Killua says. “I took Nanika on the beach, she liked it.”

Gon’s breathe is too even. He hums like Killua is now used to hear him doing on the phone while he’s thinking very hard about something, so he waits until he starts talking again.

“I go there now and then, to go buy supplies or to find some quick job or just for a change of scenery.” He sounds strained and a lot of other things, a cluster of all the things that made him call at night, scared and frustrated at himself for being scared in the first place. “What I mean is… It’s a pretty quiet town, but not dead quiet like Whale Island. They have a cinema and even a bowling place and the shore is a bit too touristic in the summer, but pretty overall. It’s kind of a good place, I think, one where you don’t really need Nen to live.”

Killua looks at his face, his pointy nose and the nervous line on his forehead. He raises a hand, even if everything is soft and he’s really thinking about settling there instead, inside that stupid pillow-fort with the dog-sheets that his sisters built from scratch. 

He settles his thumb between Gon’s eyebrows and presses to flat the crease.

“Do they have a school?” he asks, serious.

“From elementary to high school,” Gon says, with the smallest, hopeful smile. Killua knows he’s got the same on his face.

“Sounds about perfect.”