Work Text:
Mito made a valiant effort not to drop the laundry basket when she saw the clown standing in the doorway, and mostly succeeded.
“Can I help—” she began, but before she could finish, the clown flowed forward with an entirely unclownish grace and wedged a hand under the slipping basket. He was close enough that he must have been able to see the sheen of sweat breaking out on her forehead.
“Oh, no.” He spoke like a man who had sustained a damaging throat injury, or a man who was only halfway trying not to giggle. “Let me help you.”
Mito took a careful step backward. She put no particular stock in her powers of intuition, had no desire to throw over calm consideration for the vagaries of animal instinct. Someone in the family had to be rational, after all. Still, she knew—as she knew to blink in the face of bright light—that she wanted to run away right now, more than she'd wanted anything else in her life. She also knew that doing so would be a fatal error.
Her hands were trembling. She tightened her grip on the basket handles and summoned up her iciest smile. “I'm sorry. Do I know you?”
“Not exactly.” The man in the clown suit—who, Mito was sure, had never made a single small child happy in his life—smiled back with the lower half of his face. The tattoos on his cheeks did not so much as twitch. “But I know your nephew. Gon.”
Mito disliked the way he lingered over Gon's name—the way he savored it, as if it were some sticky-sweet substance smeared on the inside of his lips. She disliked it so very much that her palms itched with the urge to hit this man—not in the way that she'd occasionally had the urge to smack some sense or seriousness or something into Ging, but hard. Bone-breaking hard. With a hammer.
“I can tell that Gon's not in right now—” a pause, as one long manicured finger traced the curve of an exaggerated frown— “but would you mind terribly if I wait here until he gets back?”
Mito drew a deep breath, and performed the single most courageous act of her entire life. “I think you must have the wrong address. I don't know anybody named 'Gon,'” she said, pushing a pair of small green shorts a little deeper into the laundry basket.