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The next town they find sits on the brink of a perennial sunset and has skies taken right out of a picture book, rose-tinted with splotches of orange prickling defiantly at the seams, and Alluka has never fallen in love so fast. The people they meet are brown-skinned and barefoot, the corners of their eyes soft from happiness and something else, something Killua can barely recount but halts him in his tracks like cloth on brambles, a reminder: he allows it to resurface for one last breath before sliding the blinds back over it, tells himself the day is bright and beautiful and it is no time for shadows.
By the time they reach the heart of the town the festival is already in full swing. A young girl runs up to them with the sun in her hair and pushes the most exquisite slice of fruit Killua has ever seen into their hands, motions towards the line of tables decked infinitely with food and wine behind her. “Thanks,” he says through a mouthful of pink decadence, and she smiles coyly up at him, says something undecipherable but lilting and musical all the same as she turns, disappears into a throng of thundering percussion and sprightly feet, the burr of it in Killua’s chest.
Alluka weaves him through the crowd, past tumbling children and seaside merchants, and Killua buys Nanika everything she stops to point at: candied pearls, a glowsquid balloon, the anklet Alluka wanted strung with the shards of a strange luminous shell – “Only find ‘em in these parts, washes up on shore only twice a month,” says the merchant with the pockmarked chin, and Killua bends down into the grass to fix it around Alluka’s pale ankle.
“—they’re finally coming home,” the merchant goes on when Alluka brings it up, resting her knobby hands over the vacant space of her stall’s tabletop, “their husbands, their sons, friends - that’s why they’re celebrating. Seafarers,” and ah, Killua notices, swallowing the last of his fruit: she too has grown fond of his sister. It’s an inborn talent, he knows, getting people to like you just by talking – unremarkable, but convenient. “They don’t want them to think they’ve been mourning while they were away, so they dance, they feast. When their loved ones come back, they come back to – well, this.”
Alluka hums thoughtfully at that, fingering the labyrinthine pattern on the shards, turning it this way and that to catch the sunset, her eyes bright with wonder. Killua’s face breaks into a smile as she springs to land a kiss on his cheek, her small face dimpled with delight.
The merchant’s gaze settles on him, finally. “Your brother?”
“Yes!” she chirps, loops her hand around the arm half-entrenched in his pocket and rests her fingers against the inside of his elbow. “He’s the best brother in the whole wide world!”
“Wha— oi—“
“You are.” Sudden, near-painful – the fingers that sink into his skin. Alluka’s eyes are hard when she holds him in his gaze, her mouth set in a stubborn line and Killua’s tongue stills. “Okay?” she continues, grip loosening, her mouth melting slowly back into a familiar curve of a smile as she slides her hand into his and Killua’s heart swells, lodges itself behind his throat.
(This will be good for you, Palm had told him once, and Killua is starting to understand. For the past few months Alluka has been and always has been this: a home, a healing, a space by the fire and Killua sits to warm winter-worn hands. Look, she says, like this: Alluka, younger in years but far wiser than Killua can ever hope to be, teaches him how to grow new bones, how to map out the chinks and faulty joints built by the wrong kind of love.
—and he’s learning, Killua thinks. Learning how to throw out the old water in his lungs every morning, relearning the shape of a smile and how to find himself in mirrors. Some days he wakes up to realize there have been no ghosts to rouse him from sleep, and lately there have been less and less of those and more of Alluka’s hand in his, the sound of his own laughter. It rings in his ear like tinnitus, sometimes, but he’s learning to greet it like an old friend just as he’s learning the word “forgiveness” and what it means, how it fits on his tongue, how many fledgling-falls it’d take to get there.)
Like this: he gathers himself into a smile, dusts the grass stains from his clothes. Alluka blinks when Killua sweeps into a low bow beside her, offers his hand, but she takes it anyway, blinking, rising to her feet, anklet swaying. Her smooth palm slides easily into his, fingers folding at the junctions.
“Sorry,” he says in explanation, grins, sheds his shoes, and takes her dancing.
You did this to me, Killua says.
Gon laughs. He’s always laughing, the Gon that comes to see him in dreams. The sound of it scatters around him in pieces, like sunlight spiking through the leaves, finds him crouched at the heart of the forest floor, raking in breath after murky breath like a miasma of blood. Idly, he wonders if it’s his, winding himself up to stand, to run, but then again it doesn’t matter where he goes. The laughter always finds him, in the end: humming in his ears, tugging at his sleeves, following him down forgotten hallways like a deluge of daylight rushing in through half-opened windows, and Killua is never fast enough.
You did this, Killua says, as it finds him. To me. But his arms are outstretched.
Her name is Yna and she’s the heir to her family’s mining company somewhere in the South mainland, folded in a pretty, bejeweled city Gon cannot pronounce. Their journey reaches an interlude for the night at Whale Island before they set off once again in the morning to further the reaches of their Jenny-churning empire. He’d refused her money, a rather significant amount when asked for his services to give her a tour of the island, and he’d smiled, told her he didn’t care for money, no offense, that it was enough to have her company for the night, the first girl his age who has ever set foot on the island in possibly his entire lifetime.
Yna is well-bred, polite, holds herself as if to balance an invisible plate on the cusp of her pursed upper lip, but she’d seem to forget she even carried it in the first place every now and then, the plate sliding cleanly off its faultless equilibrium to shatter at her feet and she’d allow herself to laugh – big and bold and not at all delicate, and Gon thinks he likes laughter like this, has always liked the jagged beauty in things. Her name is Yna and she’s the heir to a multimillion company and Gon isn’t listening to her, like he’s supposed to, wants to; he nods when she speaks and smiles when he finds her eyes on him – laughs even, at the fleeting touches on his elbow, his knee, faint like brush strokes: look at those fireflies! and there’s the tug on the edge of his shirt, and there’s the rehearsed shell of a smile Gon offers when he turns to her voice, easy, and he thinks he’s doing a pretty good job until Yna goes quiet, frowns, and bursts into a braying laugh—
For the first time throughout their tour, Gon comes to a halt like reaching the end of the reel, blinks, looks at her. “Wha,” he starts, slow, like a waking.
“I said,” she sucks the laugh back in, seals a gloved hand over her lips like a stopper. “’Look at that cliff! What if I hurled myself over it?’ And you said, ‘yeah’”.
“Oh,” he says, but doesn’t really understand. Yna’s voice rings as if coming through glass, the words lost and loose like driftwood on glass-sheet of sea, and “oh,” he says again, shaping his mouth around the letters, and then, slowly, one by one, it sinks: Gon blinks, the world rights itself, and he jumps to his feet – “Oh! I’m, I’m sorry! I’m so sorry! That was rude, and—“
Yna releases a half-giggle to stop him. “Perhaps this is why you don’t accept money from tourists,” she continues, looking amused, and smooths down the length of her dress. “You’re not a very good tour guide if you don’t pay attention to your customers.”
Gon makes a sound that’s equal parts playful sheepishness and utter mortification. He sinks back down into the grass where Yna warms her hands over the bed of flames between them, the one he’d brewed minutes ago to warm their toes as if he were brushing teeth, a mechanical, menial task, his eyes starlit and faraway; she had been recounting the marsh then, he recalls, its maze of roots and tea-murky water – he cringes bashfully at the thought and begins to turn his hands over in his lap, tells her, “Today is not a good day, I think. I’m usually really good at this stuff, you know, but,” he throws her a careless little laugh that loses itself in the cold air. “just, uh. I’ve been thinking too much about things, I guess.”
She rests her cheek on the flat of her palm, says, “What were you thinking about?”
The question catches him off guard. “What was I—?” and his hands still. What a strange question, he thinks – feels strange at least, like asking someone why they had five toes or why the sea had blue in it, and no one ever asked those kinds of questions. His head feels like a heavy block of nothing, a bundled up sheaf of blank paper and Yna’s question tugs persistently at the bindings until it comes loose, disperses at his feet; he’s trying, trying to find the lines and letters Yna wants but all he has are scribbles and one wilting picture – a picture of a boy, or a sliver of it: of quiet lips and quieter hands, a moon-phase waning into the clouds, and,
Come to think of it, Killua had sat with him at this exact spot too, once, when he’d come back home with him at the island because Gon asked him to, asked even though he knew Killua would come either way, if only for a while, and they’d talked too, just like this, under a map of stars and a fire dancing between them and Killua had looked different: the edges of him a little softer as if he hadn’t been made of something – something else – the pieces of him picked out and rearranged and put together again and he had gleamed and Gon wishes he’d looked at little closer then. He had never been good at paying attention to the right things, Mito had said, years ago after Kite had dragged him back home like a soiled washrag sullying Mito’s wildflowers, bleeding over the steps, into her carpet, and she had given him a look that felt like ice water poured into his shirt.
But Mito’s glares are just echoes of what they used to be and Gon wonders about that, wonders why Mito glances at him with something that’s laced with what looks a little like sadness, tells him, welcome home, instead of how was today’s catch? when he comes walking through the door at night with his rod and empty bucket, did you catch any of the big ones? The striped yellow ones?
And he’ll smile, of course, tell her, not today, no, and disappear into the reclusion of his room, and wonder—
About: the secret grace in Killua’s hands, the pulse fluttering in his wrist, and what he did, what he did, what if, just maybe, what he did was
Yna’s still waiting for him in the dark, a patch of firelight climbing up the domes of her cheeks, the smooth plane of her forehead. She’s waiting for him to speak but he has nothing for her. Not now, anyway. Not yet.
The smile that comes is easy, unbidden. “You know...” he says, sits on his hands, motions with a vague playful shake of his head. “Things.”
Alluka wanted flowers – carnations, to be precise – yellow as lemons and yolk and she wanted them the moment she saw their paper-like whorls turned to her as if in greeting, so he forks over the last of the day’s expenditures from the dregs of his pockets and watches as the vendor pulls three stems from their pots, lays out the silk ribbons, multicolored sheets of tissue paper.
Alluka’s humming a fragment of a cloying little love song as they wait by the nasturtiums, a spill of leftover sunlight pooling into their toes, slanting from the roof tent hanging low above their heads. It’s a sleepy town, the one they stumble into by mid-August, with its barely-six-in-the-morning haze and murky cobblestones and slow syrupy music; Alluka sways to its song, enthralled and radiant and flower-bright, brighter. Killua doesn’t understand why Alluka wants them, but she’s glowing as he takes the embellished cone from the vendor’s hand, turns to find her small moon-face pinched in delight as she holds to the brim of her hat when the breeze tries to snatch it away, and
“Onii-chan?” comes Alluka’s voice, small, smaller—
It’s a pattering at first, that crests into a distant roar and waterfalls into his ears until it drowns out Alluka’s voice, her face and her flowers, sweeps through this town’s dreamy cat-stretch languor and into his throat, flooding his mouth, and:
there he is again, after all these years – sitting by the fountain behind Alluka’s ear and again Killua forgets how to breathe.
“G—“ The paper cone slips through his fingers, maybe, probably, with the way feeling withers from the tips of his fingers, and, dazedly he thinks: this is so fucking unfair, unfair because he’d finally figured it out, finally shook out the debris from his clothes, built himself up from the ground, from scratch, but again Gon’s name comes crawling right back up his throat like bile, like muscle memory as it pulls at his tongue as if to say, look, you haven’t really forgotten, have you,
His mouth goes paper-dry as Gon stands, the image suspended as if time had yawned and left him hovering there, left him rising slowly under rinsed-out daylight as Gon turns, disappears and reappears through the fountain and its sparkling water and is
“Onii-chan,” comes Alluka’s voice, again, rippling through the roar,
Killua stills. The boy is smiling when he slants into full view, but it is not Gon’s smile: too uneven, too dull. Gradually, the noise recedes from his head, his mouth, and Killua – breathes. Retrieves the yolk-yellow flowers by his feet with fumbling hands, slides a watery smile into place, quick, before Alluka notices.
“S’nothing,” he assures her, leaves the carnations in her hands, smooths a hand down her hair. “Nothing,” he says, again. The boy is gone when he chances one last look, like an optical illusion. Like he was never even there.
“I’m meeting someone today,” Gon says; one of Ging’s friends, he carefully leaves out. “I think they can help me with my Nen problem.”
Leorio breaks into surprised delight on the other end and Gon grins, slides the weathered strap of his traveling bag over one shoulder and nods at the desk clerk who relays him with a trained smile to another one of their personnel, another smiling face in an immaculate pencil skirt and intimidating black heels, her smile so startlingly bright Gon thinks she probably had to file them repeatedly with bleach to achieve that level of blinding.
“That’s good, good!” Leorio barks, then – there’s a sharp rustle of paper scattering, a thud like bone on wood, a clink – that was porcelain, definitely, so that sloshing sound had to be— “hot goddamn, fucking shit my suit—“
“Are you okay?”
“No— yes, yeah, just,” a shuffle, and Leorio’s voice fades for a few seconds before returning to it’s usual rumbling volume. “Busy – ah shit, ow – you know. Same old.”
Gon laughs. The elevator announces its arrival with a glockenspiel number and the hotel attendant holds it open for him with one slender, perfectly manicured hand. “Then, you sure it’s okay if—“
“Yeah, of course! Why wouldn’t it be?” Leorio booms. Then, softer: “It’s been a while, I get lonely too, you know? Look, you’re all grown up now, I can’t even recognize your voice anymore! How much have you grown anyway, huh? Aw man, this is making me feel really old.”
“Leorio,” Gon sing-songs.
“Sorry,” he says, sheepish. “You’re at Avida, right? That’s just a one-day drive to Yorknew. We can get lunch at this new lobster place – they’re huge I swear, you have to fish ‘em out the aquarium yourself else you’re dinner – you’d love it!”
“Sounds great!” Gon lets himself sink into the warm familiarity of the scratches in Leorio’s voice, watches the numbers on the display climb – 42, 43, 44, a stop at 45, doors sliding open to an empty floor, then, 46, 47 – gets a whiff of the attendant’s perfume and thinks of the wildflowers back home, all ten rows of it, loses himself in wistful nostalgia and lets the unsaid fester into an easy kind of silence he doesn’t quite have to think about anymore, until Leorio lets out a weary exhale, says,
“You should call him,” and just like that the stillness breaks. Gon’s fingers grow tight around the strap of his bag and he knows what he’s talking about.
“Yeah,” he agrees. But not now. Not yet.
The elevator chimes at level 120 and Gon follows the clack of the attendant’s heels against white tiles, rounding the corner, stop by a door of sleek burnished wood. “Here we are, sir,” she says, stepping back. “Room 2201, for two.”
“For—?” and Gon goes stone-still: “Oi,” Leorio demands, “you there? Gon?”
Then: ah, comes the realization, fits itself into the pulse in his ear. Right.
“Is there a problem, sir?”
“No, it’s,” he starts, blinks. Realigns his mouth. “Nothing, I guess. I was – Haha! I can’t believe I...” He rubs the back of his neck, waves her off, “It’s. It’s nothing, thanks, thank you.”
The message is from Alluka, like most of them are these days ever since Killua crumbled and bought her a phone of her own after much prodding and pleading and then some. He knows it’s from her because his phone bleeps to the sound of wind chimes and wind chimes are for Alluka; he’d set one for everyone, Palm, Wing-san, Bisky, Kite—
(Killua’s is an island lullaby, but this is not Killua’s message, and Killua hasn’t emailed him for a while or does he have much time for this anymore, Gon reasons, now that he’s seeing the world with Alluka – his dream as much as it is Killua’s and so he learns to wait, learns to get by with pictures and fleeting conversations that always end too soon.)
Gon’s lips twitch into a smile as thirty or so attachments flit onto screen, load one by one; they’re all pictures of countless quaint things: blue sand, a predawn sunset, a milky translucent crab – but mostly they’re of Killua: taller, leaner, hair fanning a little longer along his nape, but the same eyes, same artful smile. There’s a shot of him eating, stretched out on a whittled chair, sand on his lashes, a shirked shot of a secret smile turned away at the last second; Killua’s face crumpled in unbridled laughter, eyes scrunched with it, left cheek streaked with what looks like mud or chocolate and Gon’s breath catches inexplicably, hovers for a few seconds more before he clicks on the next picture, and
—oh, Gon thinks, the white glare of the screen growing heady on his skin – the last picture on the file is dark and low-lit, but Killua rises from the backdrop like a ghost, soft and sleep-still. The Killua he remembers is lightning-sharp, kinetic, the glint in his teeth, the strength of his hands; but this Killua is: stillness, of the deep, of the inching dusk, three shades softer; mouth parted and untaut and strange, and oh, Gon echoes, again, doesn’t know why he’s drawn to the practiced calm of Killua’s fingers curled against his stomach, over the sheets, doesn’t know why this Killua throbs in his head like an unfamiliar ache when he has seen all of Killua, all there is too see,
But have you, really? comes a voice, and Gon realizes, staring mutely into the ceiling as his phone sears blisters into his skin: he hasn’t.
He learns to discern danger like wolves discern blood in air, like birds discern a half-brewed fulminating storm, turning his nose away from its dizzying spell and disappearing into alleyways; learns to look both ways, learns to wait, learns it the day he hobbles back into an empty hotel room after walking blindly into a fight, seventeen and brazen and none the wiser, with nothing but four broken fingers, a broken clavicle, and a split lip to prove it.
He doesn’t even know how to fix himself, how to make a splint or how it works, and the fact leaves him sliding down the bathroom wall, chuckling softly; Killua would laugh at him if he saw him now, definitely. If only Killua was— and he burns the thought, because Killua is not here, hasn’t been here for a long time. Vulnerability is an odd thing, weightless like naked skin in winter and the shape of small Nen-less hands, smaller than ever before, and the realization seeps in like a slow, bone-rattling contagion that leaves him cold and losing consciousness, bleeding alone on the tiles, and huh, comes the final reconciling thought: so this is what it’s like.
Kite chides him furiously over the phone, but the harsh edge in his voice feels a little like home, and Gon sits in a kind of melancholy silence, lets the lecture drag and stab at him in each open wound, already resigned with defeat.
“It’s going to be different now,” he tells Kite once he stops for breath.
There’s a sigh that barbs the line. “Look. I know where he is, alright, I could tell you—“
“No,” Gon presses, with a finality that makes Kite go silent, and Gon hastily appends, “I – I can’t do that. It has to different this time. I’m making it different.”
(—this time, he thinks, he wants Killua to want it too.)
Their messages are light and sparse and riddled with obnoxious little emoticons that saturate most of their conversations. It’s an easy sort of getting-by, tiptoeing around the unsaid until the silence resembles a forgetting, almost, but not quite. Killua’s phone comes to life in his pocket while sifting through the menu with Alluka and there’s a message from Gon, two of them. The first is a photo of him – all wild hair and wilder eyes against a stretch of golden harbor glimmering behind him. The message:
guess whos still alive! sorry, i’ve been figuring stuff out haha leorio says hi!
And the second picture: a lobster the size of a full-grown man on their table, even larger maybe, its glossy shell coral-bright and gleaming and there’s Leorio, armed with what looks like a three-foot butter knife braced before him, and there’s Gon himself, beside him, straddling the thing, holding its pincers down, his hair finally losing its valiant fight to gravity and the aftereffects of brine as it droops forlornly to the side. His smile makes up for it though, Killua thinks, the smile he recalls, the kind that eclipses the room, all teeth and boyish charm and even brighter than Leorio’s horrendous peach coat, and its amazing, he thinks, the old man hasn’t aged a day, probably already reached his prime a long long time ago and isn’t that amazing, the stubble on his chin looks just as it did a few years ago and oh, Gon—
“Onii-chan, what’s a gelato?” Alluka asks, yanking him back to the real world and its caffeine-deprived waiters and monobloc chairs, its orchestra of pancakes frying on a stovetop.
Killua looks up to her squinting at the menu, and he smiles at that, pockets his phone. “Something amazing,” he replies, and orders a Very Berry Delight for them both, sends Gon a picture of two twin bowls, full past the brim, Alluka daintily plucking the cherries from each peak.
Another message:
i’m forgetting how your laugh sounds like and that scares me a lot, Killua types, before he catches himself, frowns, jams the backspace button and watches the words unravel in reverse, blink out from blank white space.
On the two hundredth fifty-fifth week, Killua looks out at the mountains receding into blankets and blankets of snow and thinks he isn’t the same boy he was when he was twelve and found the world cradled in the sweep of Gon’s shoulders, thought there was something boundless about the way he was, too faultless and bright to touch, too unfit for hands as sullied as his.
After all, Gon, has always been just that: a boy – a boy of birdsong and open seas and promise but always still just, a boy.
Still thought he’d save you though, says a voice, and lately it sounds more and more like his own.
Yeah, Killua admits. I did.
He dials in the number.
He has known it for quite a while now: scribbled in small, blocked letters on the ripped out corner of a speedboat advertisement. He scrapes it out from the bottom of his bag, reaches with another hand to stroke Alluka’s disheveled mane as he walks with steady steps past the couch, into the cold tiled kitchen floor. He smooths out the creased yellowed paper, turns it under the misty shaft of daylight falling in through the window.
This will be good for you, Palm had told him once, and Killua understands that now; on the two hundredth fifty-fifth week, he rests his elbows against the windowsill, back turned against a framed view of the city and its avalanche of white and waits as the line clicks into register and rings and rings and rings and – breaks off – heart tripping as one sleep-silted hello? clouds the other end of the line, and he swallows, mirrors the smile Alluka offers him as she rises from the sheets, a proud wordless line – finally, it seems to say – and he gathers himself, gathers in one last shuddering breath,
“Hey—“