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Kalluto hides in the corner, knees drawn all the way to his chin, and waits for Machi to be finished.
He shivers through Franklin’s ragged t-shirt--it’s old, stretched-thin and miles too big for him. Tries, instead, to focus on the cracked linoleum, or the Gungi board before him, but it’s no good.
He’s only playing against himself, anyway. Bonolenov is out on a job, and Kortopi’s in the next room counterfeiting money.
Even Machi is too busy for him, pinned down as she is to her work. Kalluto sighs, curls into himself so tightly he’d swear he could just divide by zero, wink out of existence.
It seems preferable, because...
Because, and he wonders why he cares so little to think of it, but--
--Machi is letting out the shoulders of his clothes again.
It’s the second time since last year. He’s turning into some kind of pupal thing, some morass of metamorphing grime. Knobby knees, pockmarked face, waifishness on a collision course with gangling.
Kalluto has not been trained on this specific type of torture.
They take him aside, the Troupe, each of them awkward in some new and wretched way, and reassure him. Happens to everyone. Going to be fine. I thought I’d die, but I didn’t.
Kalluto knows. You don’t spend a lifetime learning to shipwreck human bodies without knowing how they’re made.
And it’s fine. Obnoxious, unfashionable, but fine.
Except for the shoulders.
He looks like Illumi does, when he insists on wearing those puffed sleeves. At least, that’s the joke he makes about it to Kortopi, giggling snide under his breath.
Really, he looks like his father.
Or, at least, he’s going to. Or he thinks he’s going to.
He isn’t certain why that puts him so on edge.
There’s a gleam in Machi’s eye when she comes back with his clothes.
“Seams won’t go out any more,” she says, and Kalluto suppresses a wince. “You know what that means?”
Kalluto shakes his head, does not say that I’m becoming a monster?
Machi smiles at him, and the mischief, the absolute sisterliness in it very nearly makes him feel better.
“It means we’re going shopping, kiddo.”
So they go shopping. Boss comes too, and Shizuku and Phinks, because Kalluto’s humiliation must be made complete.
He has never shopped for clothes, everything he’s ever worn tailor-made to Kikyou’s exacting spec. He isn’t sure he knows how.
That children’s clothes designers seem to think that everyone under fifteen is a disgusting, simpering little tyke doesn’t help, either.
The boy’s clothes are loud and screenprinted with robots, dinosaurs, all sorts of things that Killua would like. The girls’ clothes, though he scarcely looks, are worse. Whoever designed them had never met Alluka or Mother and as such did not know that girls were dangerous.
Did not know that he was dangerous, and would have liked to look it.
They’re just getting ready to leave, having scoured every luxury and clearance rack, having slipped a trove of trinkets into pockets, handbags, boots. Kalluto’s fatigue is almost allayed by the slick septum ring stashed in his sash, just the thing for Machi’s new piercing.
Almost.
Though Phinks admires a new track jacket, though Shizuku happily sips her smoothie, though Boss and Machi croon over a red-soled pair of heels, Kalluto makes for the van with clenching, empty fists.
And then he sees it.
The mannequin is stylized, sharp-slender, made all of precision-cut angles. It is sheathed in the sleekest black jumpsuit, sleeveless and serpentine, with a high collar gathered in a glittering cameo.
The mannequin’s shoulders are nothing but slender-sliced plastic.
Kalluto’s mouth drops open, unbefittingly, while he looks at it. While he thinks, I wish I could be so deadly.
While he realizes, with the arrival of a conquista of grinning girls, that the store, the jumpsuit, the cold elegance is for women.
It tires him like a shotglass of strychnine, draining all at once. In the van, he slumps asleep on Boss’ shoulder, then wakes under a blanket back at base.
He thinks of Alluka, and grinds his teeth.
He isn’t like Alluka. He can’t be.
Not because she’s bad. Not because she’s a thing or not his family.
Quietly, he’d never thought that was true. He’d never feared Nanika the way he’d never feared a knife: only dangerous because of what it’s made to do.
Not that she’s a weapon, not that she’s an it.
She’s not. She’s his sister, and she used to kiss his scrapes, his blade-thin scars. Used to speak up for him, when they were small. Kallu doesn’t want to go to training, she would say, despite never having been told. Kallu wants to stay and play!
She was always right.
So. It’s not bad to be like Alluka because she is Alluka, or even because she is Nanika.
He can’t be like Alluka because--
--Because Mother and Father and Illumi used to be so proud of her. They’d croon over her round cheeks, her sparkling eyes, her limitless potential. The best and brightest, a true-blue Zoldyck son.
And then she wasn’t anymore.
Kalluto doesn’t want to be a black sheep, doesn’t want to be a girl. Not even viscerally, in that space below admission where something is wrong.
It just makes him feel a little ill, to think of growing up to look like, to be like Father. Like Illumi, even. Like any man he knows. Not Franklin, not Phinks, not even Shalnark or Boss or Feitan. No square shoulders, no broad hands.
He must convince himself that it is not like that. That it makes sense.
Of course he wants the elegance he has always seen in his mother, in Illumi. Of course he wants to be sharp, stiletto-slim. Kalluto lives in the dark and quiet, hidden in plain sight and shadowed corners. Kalluto is tiny and quick, and this makes him dangerous, makes him unassuming.
And this--this makes him deadly.
So, of course. Of course he can’t grow up like his father, commanding and cocksure. Can’t learn a whole new way of fighting, of killing, of being.
This, Kalluto must convince himself, is all that it is.
It doesn’t work.
Kalluto sits cross-legged in front of hotel mirrors, scowling purse-lipped. He drums his filed fingernails, even falls so far as to chew the ends of his hair.
Mother would have his head. He’d have his own, if he had the presence of mind to deal with it at all.
It stings, when they notice him slipping. Phinks just claps him on the back, chalks it up to the inexorable misery of being thirteen. Others ask after him, soft in quiet moments.
He says he’s fine, and resolves each time to smarten up, and does not.
They must know he’s lying--dodging the question, at least. Machi does, certainly, with the way she chews her cheek, sizes him up with new-heightened frequency. Kortopi, too. They watch him, while they’re playing Gungi or making cut-paper snowflakes or even just. Existing. Eating, meditating, shuffling back and forth.
Their little hand comes to rest on his shoulder, one afternoon when everyone else is away. They ask if he’s okay.
“No,” says Kalluto, and surprises even himself.
“But you don’t want to talk about it,” Kortopi responds, in that way that suggests it’s ninety-five percent a foregone conclusion. That they don’t necessarily want it to be.
It is, though, and Kalluto nods, and they carry on with their jigsaw puzzle, silent.
It’s one of Kalluto’s earliest memories, curling fetal in the sandbox while Alluka insisted she was a girl.
He didn’t say anything, just laid his soft cheek in the sand and watched.
“Not a boy!” she squalled, over and over, little arms crossed steadfast. She couldn’t have been more than four years old.
How did she know? Kalluto had always wondered. Had always wanted to ask.
Now, though, he really would. If it was possible.
It wasn’t.
One evening, after the Troupe finishes its raucous takeaway dinner, Machi gives Kalluto a little wink.
This is not unusual. He smiles, winks back. Years ago, she’d had to teach him how.
It was one of the most embarrassing episodes of his life, being taught to wink. By a colleague.
Now, though, it is one of the only embarrassments he manages to think on fondly. So he winks back.
She gets up, nips over to the other room.
Machi comes back grinning, holding out a dinged-up cardboard box.
Briefly, Kalluto panics, but it is not his birthday. He hasn’t gotten any older, any closer to being a man.
At least, not by that much.
She hands him the box, telling him in a voice that suggests she’s far more excited than she’s letting on to open it.
He does, quickly and cleanly, and inside--
--Kalluto stops.
It’s a neatly-folded square of sleek black ponte, and even before he’s seen the entire thing it makes him want to cry.
He unfolds it anyway, hopes in vain that Machi, that the Troupe won’t notice the tremor in his hands.
It’s that same jumpsuit, with the glinting zipper and the peplum waist and the cameo, dark-sparkling as a crow’s eye.
Kalluto knows as certainly as he’s ever known anything that it will fit exactly.
When he looks up, Machi is smiling as wide as he’s ever seen her.
“Saw you looking at the mall,” she says, clearly quite pleased with herself. “I’d’ve bought it for you then, but then I thought, nah. It’d be more fun to make it, and then I’d be sure it’d fit.”
Kalluto is generally silent, but there is a near-audible difference between choosing not to speak and being struck dumb.
Machi notices, because of course she does, and her eyes scrunch up with affection.
“It was more fun than patching up the rest of these wads’ ugly clothes.”
Kalluto isn’t sure if he laughs at her joke, or at the little chorus of dissent, or just at… the situation. At his life, broadly.
“Go try it on,” she urges, and he does.
From his training, Kalluto has become an old hand at being unable to breathe.
He’s never felt it quite like this before. Standing stiff before the bathroom mirror, fists balled like knotted cable at his sides--there’s no room for air in him.
There’s no room for anything but the way it fits--the way the hems drape, the glint of the cameo at his throat. The convex curve of barely-there sleeves, bowing out just enough to cover a precious centimeter of shoulder-bulk.
Kalluto looks like someone who belongs in the smoky afterparties he was always stealthing into, like someone self-possessed enough to be a full-fledged member of the Troupe. Someone sharp and cool as a honed, sheathed blade, and just as certain as the wrist that flicks it.
Kalluto looks older, sophisticated--he looks, for all the world, like someone who knows who he is and what he wants.
The brooch shifts against his hitching throat as he gathers himself, turns the handle, slips back through the bathroom door.
For all the fuss they make of him, he could have been a genuine supermodel. He braces for it, but--
--it doesn’t feel the way it had, under Mother’s smothering thumb.
He catches himself smiling, as the Troupe turns away, and it doesn’t leave him by the time he starts tugging soft at Machi’s sleeve.
“Thank you,” he murmurs, without his usual grace.
“Even though it is a women’s outfit.”
Machi only shakes her head, that soft sisterly exasperation breaking over her face like a sunshower.
“Nah,” she says. “I wear women’s clothes. Phinks wears men’s clothes, even if he doesn’t have a damn clue how to dress. Kortopi wears Kortopi’s clothes, you get me?”
She smiles.
“They’re your clothes. I made them for you.” Her voice has that perennial sweet sturdiness to it, like her thick motorcycle jacket, bubblegum pink. “‘Sides, kiddo, what have I told you about the rules?”
Yes ma’am, he wants to say. There are none<./i>
But the words curdle and curl within him, dying just behind his cameo.
Kalluto thinks on it more than it really makes sense to.
He thinks he understands--it’s nothing to do with combat. With performance.
With his family, even, though it’ll sour the milk there for good.
For good--as in permanently, as in beneficially. As in going the way of Killua, of Alluka, of the Troupe and their no rules.
None of that, though, is really the crux of it. What is, is--
There are more than two bodies in the sky. Kalluto knows he is not suited to the bright, boisterous sun, the soft and watchful wax-wane of the moon.
Somewhere, though, far off and deep in the black, there is a star, a slivered little pinpoint of light. Or a lonely exoplanet; a dim nebula; an icy, quick-arcing comet. And more, beyond even the scope of those wide eyes.
So perhaps no. Perhaps Kalluto does not understand.
But someday, as certain as the breadthlessness of space, they will.