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Killua wanted to assume that the night they… explored the bounds of their friendship, would be the last. He wanted to assume that he wouldn’t have to fight the feelings that (re)surfaced anymore because it was a one and done, and Gon would forget that it even happened the next day. That’s how Gon was and maybe that would have worked in Killua’s favor even though he did want something more than that stupid way they concluded their little “exploration”.
He slammed his head on a textbook while Gon was taking a shower that night, wondering why he said something as dumb as “best friends forever, right?”, because what the fuck. That’s obviously not best friend behavior.
With that assumption came the heartbreaking fact that Gon probably agreed with him; it was something best friends did and they wouldn’t be doing it again. It was fun, it was cool, a neat experience that he was glad they both got to share because they're so close and they're best fucking friends and that’s all there is to it!
That's what he wanted to assume, yeah.
But it’s not what happened.
There were times he wondered why Gon was still exploring the bounds of their friendship given that they dry-humped each other until they both came, but that’s exactly what the boy was doing.
At first it started out small— he would be sitting on a pillow on the floor, textbook open on their table and a plate of chocolate cake beside him (that was the first time it happened, actually. It still confuses him)— and then Gon sat down beside him. The boy threw a toned tan arm around his shoulder; nothing unusual, he’s always done this.
But then he leaned in and pressed a kiss to Killua’s cheek and then asked if it was okay for best friends to do that, as if he weren’t the one who pressed a kiss to Gon’s cheek the night they did that thing.
His cheek was hot and his eyes were wide from shock— how was he supposed to respond?
“Yeah, it’s okay,” he said, grateful his voice didn’t hitch. Gon just nodded and stayed close to him the entire time he studied his biology textbook, which proved especially hard when all he was focused on was why Gon kissed him and why he hasn’t left to do something else yet (sitting still was not his best friends forte).
No, he sat there for half an hour, an arm still around Killua’s shoulders as he scrolled through Instagram on his phone. Killua tried not to glance at him from the corner of his eye too much; he should be focused on cell membranes and whatnot, but God Gon was rubbing circles on his shoulder now.
He gave up his pursuit of studying that night and just rested his shoulder on Gon’s shoulder when the other boy suggested they watch a movie.
So they moved themselves to the bed and once again, found themselves in a compromising position, with Killua pinned underneath Gon and the latter kissing him fiercely, the only audible noises being Killua’s whimpers when his best friend would bite down on his bottom lip and Gon’s groans when Killua moaned softly.
He enjoyed that more than he should, he figured, especially when the make-out ended and he assumed Gon was doing this as just best friends.
Because best friends forever, right?
Screw his mouth— this could’ve been something else by now, entirely, done as two people of another status. Best friends but a couple, too. Or maybe it would have ruined everything and Gon would look at him like Killua, what are you talking about? We’re just besties who make out and dry-hump, we don’t have to be a couple.
And then Killua would realize, oh, they're just best friends with benefits at that point.
Yeah, so maybe it was a better idea to keep quiet about the whole thing and all its absurdity.
There were more times, of course, the frequency of it increasing every day, and there was one time he was flustered because Gon did it outside of the confines of their dorm.
He didn’t expect for the kiss on his cheek to happen in the cafe of all places, surrounded by other students, some of which were probably staring at them because it wasn’t every day that you saw Gon kissing his best friend, and now they were all probably even more convinced there was something not platonic going on between them.
And he didn’t even have a good excuse for it this time. Their previous behavior may have not been all that common for best friends, no, but they were just really close to each other. To say that they’ve been making out once in a while and more touchy-feely would just confirm the suspicions, and then rumors about them dating would go around, and then Gon would catch on and stop doing whatever it is he was doing.
So he told him to stop doing that in front of others, and to wait until they were alone to do that kind of stuff. Gon agreed and that was that— they continued doing that kind of stuff only at their dorm or when Gon insisted that there was no one around them and it was okay to kiss him in a secluded corner of the library.
He would just huff and give in, because he was kissing his best friend, and he couldn’t keep denying that he only saw Gon as just that. He wanted more, but that would destroy everything, he was sure. Even if Gon wouldn’t really leave his life; he wasn’t like that, he would still be Killua’s friend, but God things would probably be too awkward for the tanned boy to continue sharing a dorm with his best friend who is madly in love with him.
It all came to a head a week before prom, when Killua was certain that all the girls (and some guys) would flock to Gon to ask if he would be so inclined to go to prom with them. Last year they made it clear they were just best friends, but neither of them accepted any of the prom proposals they were given.
Killua’s reasoning was obvious; he just didn’t want to go with anybody and would be okay with staying at the dorm by himself or going with any of their friends. Leorio and Kurapika, their seniors, didn’t mind letting him tag along if Gon were to accept a proposal or find his own date (which elicited very negative emotions he tried to ignore. That’s his best friend, he should not be jealous about who he decides to bring with him to prom).
Gon’s reasoning was a little confusing to him— he assumed that since it was their first year at the boarding school, he would love to go to an event as big as prom with someone for the experience. He was extremely popular with a wide group of people already so it would have been easy to find his own date if he didn’t like any of the people who asked him.
Killua was left a blushing and confused mess when Gon rejected a girls proposal (she was very pretty; Killua was certain that Gon would have at least said yes to her), and when she asked why, he just looked at Killua and smiled, saying “because I’ll be going with Killua, of course.”
She then pursed her lips, nodded curtly, and left the two of them.
This year, however, Killua definitely thought that Gon would want to go to prom with someone. He already shared his first prom experience with him, so it would make sense for someone as energetic and outgoing as Gon to find a date for an entirely new experience. He could go with any guy or girl he wanted, and then he and that person could do something together afterward (Killua really didn’t want to think about them doing anything similar to what he and Gon have been doing while alone).
So that’s how he found himself a week before prom in their second year of boarding school; nervously playing with his fingers on his bed while Gon was out buying some groceries for them. He didn’t want to think about the possibility of his best friend, the guy he has a ginormous crush on, to bring someone back to their dorm the night of prom and do things that he’s been lucky enough to be the only one experiencing thus far.
He didn’t want to walk in on them making out, dry-humping, or maybe even going further because he and Gon have yet to put their hands down either of their waistbands, and they barely went underneath their shirts too. They would only touch above those pieces of clothing while moving their lower halves together, grunting and gasping all the while Gon would whisper come for me, I want to see you let go, Killua.
And he would let go. He would let go so fucking hard that he couldn’t refuse being held by Gon and have his hair combed back for a few minutes just to rest.
He let out a breath— he’d been so lost in his thoughts that the textbooks spread out in front of him remained untouched. The door to their dorm then unlocked, and he scrambled to get into a more casual position, sprawled on his bed with a random textbook in his hands. He skimmed over the page, seeing that it was math, and then mumbled some random equations in his head to really make it seem like he was just studying, and not internally freaking out about who his best friend would take to prom and then get freaky with.
“Hey Killua! Back with the groceries, and I got you a two-pack of chocolate robots since you’ve been feeling a bit out of it lately,” Gon told him, placing the pack of chocolate on the bed next to him. He blinked up at him in confusion.
“I…have?”
“You didn’t know?”
“No,” he slowly shook his head, “since when?”
“Uh, since yesterday, I think. I dunno,” he shrugged, “I thought it had something to do with not having any chocolate.”
“I didn’t know I was acting like that,” Killua admitted, moving himself up into a sitting position to make room for Gon to get on the bed. The tanned boy did so and once again, scooted himself close to Killua and gave him a wet kiss on his cheek. “Agh! Why do you keep doing that?!” He scowled.
“Oh, do you not like open-mouthed kisses?” Gon tilted his head, and Killua wondered if there was something wrong with him, or if it was the vagueness of his question.
“No, I mean, why do you keep kissing my cheek?”
As much as he didn’t want any of the unclear-reasoned affection to end, he was growing more and more confused the more he received it. Why was Gon still going on with this— and for such small things like pecks on the cheek? He would understand being horny and wanting to do that activity again, but stuff like this wasn’t what he thought would be on the attention-from-Gon menu.
“Would you prefer mouth kisses then? Oh, though I suppose those are just kisses,” he chuckled. “I don’t mind giving you those! I really like kissing you so that works out for me, too,” he smiled.
Killua was now convinced that there was something going on he was very unaware about.
Gon really liked kissing him, so he was doing the kissing just because he wanted to, not because he had romantic feelings for Killua. That should be simple, right? It was just classic Gon reasoning, and it was better to simplify instead of reading into it too much.
“Okay, so you’re kissing me because you like kissing me?” He repeated for clarification.
“Well I wouldn’t kiss you if I didn’t like doing it,” he blinked. “It would suck if I didn’t like kissing my best friend slash boyfriend.”
“Boy— what?” Killua choked on his own breath. “Since when are we boyfriends?!”
“Since…three weeks ago?” Gon tilted his head, concern etched on his features. “I thought you knew.”
“No, I didn’t! This is news to me. What the fuck?” He was sure his reaction to the bomb drop was comical, but cmon, it was a fucking bomb drop. Of course he was going to react like a mess.
“I asked if you would want to date me— did you not know why I had been kissing you and stuff for that long?” He snickered, causing Killua to glare and punch his shoulder. “Ow!”
“Of course I didn’t fucking know! When did you even ask me? Where?”
“Uh, well it was that day we were having a kickback with all our friends since practice finals were done, and then that night when we got back to our dorm and chilled for a bit I asked you if you would be cool with dating,” Gon recounted.
“You were drunk that night, so I didn’t really think you meant what you said,” Killua huffed. “So you did mean it?”
“I wasn’t that drunk; I knew what was going on enough to ask you an important question like that.”
“But we’ve been kissing and doing more of that…stuff,” he blushed at that portion, “for weeks before you even asked me.”
“I knew that I liked doing those things with you— making out, cuddling, even though we’ve done the latter long before I started doing it with a different intent.”
Killua made some more room for Gon to get even closer to him and he didn’t fight off being pulled closer to his chest, an arm wrapped around his torso and calloused hand resting on his waist. He furrowed his eyebrows while thinking about what Gon meant by different intent.
“What do you mean ‘different intent’?” He asked once he hit a dead end on that thought process.
“I guess you could say it got less platonic and more romantic. Since that first night you told me best friends could kiss, I wanted to test it out more with you to see if it was true, and I found out that they could kiss,” he punctuated with a small peck to Killua’s forehead, which caused the pale boy to flush red, “but it would obviously make them more than just best friends.”
“Oh, you put that together yourself?” Killua teased without looking up at him.
“I did indeed,” Gon nodded.
There was still one other thing bugging Killua.
“So then, why did you decide to ask me to be your boyfriend?”
“After I realized that I wanted you to be my boyfriend and do all of those boyfriend things, I was waiting for the right moment to ask you.”
“And that moment happened to be when you were presumably drunk after a kickback?”
“No, it was going to be more intricate than that, actually.”
“Huh?” Killua pulled back from Gon’s hold slightly to look at him curiously.
“I had a whole thing planned to take you on a nice date a few days later and to ask you then—“
“Is that why you took me to that expensive seafood place, with the really good chocolate desserts?”
That had been the best meal Killua’s had in ages; and to think it was a date that Gon took him on. He felt so fucking stupid for not realizing that sooner.
“Yeah, that’s why,” he smiled. “You enjoyed that dessert more than you enjoyed making out with me that night—“
“Not true,” Killua muttered, though immediately he hid his face in Gon’s chest from the embarrassment of admitting it. “Okay then, why did you decide to ask me earlier?” His words came out muffled.
“Because of Ikalgo.”
“Ikalgo?”
“Yeah. At the kickback,” Killua felt the hand on his waist move up and down; he shivered when it slipped under his shirt for just a second before coming out again. “Ikalgo was getting close to you, and you seemed oblivious to him trying to make a move on you—“
“He was?”
God, how was he so bad at keeping up with these things? He was supposed to be the smarter and more analytical of the two.
Gon hummed in confirmation.
“So I thought I should ask you before, y’know, he had the chance to do it himself. And you looked so adorable in your oversized t-shirt and shorts that day I couldn’t wait any longer,” he finished explaining with another kiss to Killua’s forehead.
“I looked…adorable?” He became flustered once again.
He’d always thought of himself as edgy or emo, but never did he think someone would use the word adorable to describe him.
“You looked so adorable,” Gon cooed, peppering more kisses all over his face.
“Hey, hey— hey! Q-quit it!” He meekly pushed Gon’s face away from him in a sad effort to escape the kiss barrage.
“Hmm, no,” the other boy hummed, the reverberations being felt on his cheek, “since you know you’re my boyfriend now, I’m going to keep kissing you.”
“You assumed that I knew I was your boyfriend for three weeks,” Killua groaned. “I am so embarrassed for not catching on sooner.”
“As if the several dates I’ve taken you on didn’t make that clear,” he chuckled.
“Wha— several?”
“Yeah; there was that movie date I took you on a walk through the gardens afterward, and then we had dinner—“
“I thought we were just hanging out,” Killua’s eyes widened.
“Then there was that date I took you on a picnic and then we stargazed, and I kind of reiterated I wanted to spend forever with you,” Gon continued to recall.
“We did that as kids,” Killua croaked, the embarrassment hitting him full force.
“Yeah, but this time I kissed you,” he reasoned.
“If you consider kissing to be leaving a large hickey on my neck, then sure, I guess,” Killua rolled his eyes.
“And it looked beautiful on you— I should do one right now!”
Pale hands frantically pushed on Gon’s chest to stop him from leaning in to leave a damn hickey on his neck; it was summertime and those things would be hard to cover when it's too hot to wear a turtle neck. But Gon’s eyes were determined and set on leaving some type of mark on his skin— he figured he might as well allow that to be on his lips.
“I’ll let you kiss me,” he said slowly.
“Hmm, but I want everyone to see,” Gon pouted.
“Do…do other people know about us?”
If the hickeys and kiss-bruised lips Killua sported didn’t make it obvious to others (which he was heavily flustered about and always chewed out Gon when they got back to the dorm), then did the other boy tell all of their friends already?
“Well I told all of the people that mattered,” Gon answered.
“So that would be…?”
“Kurapika, Leorio, Zushi, Alluka, Nanika, Knuckle, Bisky—“
“You told fucking Bisky?” He gaped. “Our PE teacher?!”
“She was wondering why you insisted wearing that turtleneck in seventy-degree weather one time while we were playing dodgeball.”
“So you told her we were dating?!”
“I answered honestly, Killua,” he looked at him pointedly, making the pale boy huff and look away from those deep honey-brown eyes. Gon had a point; it was better to answer honestly to Bisky as she could often catch when someone was lying.
“That's basically our whole friend group,” he mumbled. “So they all knew before I did?”
“Basically!”
The cheerfulness in Gon’s voice made Killua pull back to punch him again, though this time there wasn’t any reaction from him except for the affectionate smile decorating his beautiful face.
“This is so…” he trailed off, not knowing how to describe being in the dark about his own relationship.
“It’s okay Killua, better late than never, right? I would hate to get down on one knee one day and have you standing there wondering why I’m proposing.”
“It is way too early to be saying sentences like that, you dumbass!” He hissed, but the warning tone didn’t deter Gon from continuing to say something along the lines of proposing to him in a few years of time.
“I wonder what kind of ring Killua would like—“
“I said it’s too early!” He growled, this time jumping on top of his stupid, shameless, grinning boyfriend and pinning both of his arms down on each side of his head, eyes narrowed into a glare.
They had a stare off; five seconds bleeding into ten and ten to fifteen, and Killua’s eyes were starting to get dry from keeping them open for so long but he couldn’t give in and let Gon win. It was stupid, yes, having an impromptu staring contest, but he was holding his ground.
But Gon was something else entirely, and of course, he won because Killua was unable to keep his eyes open for another ten seconds, making melodic laughter echo across their room.
“I guess I win that staring contest, then?” He teased.
“That was not a staring contest,” Killua humphed.
“So then was Killua just staring at me for the sake of staring at me?”
“That’s also not it,” he tried to assert, but nothing was working out for him at the moment to reduce the redness from his cheeks, so he had to let go of Gon’s arms to fist at the material of his shirt and rub his face into a vibrating chest from all of Gon’s laughter.
“It’s okay, Killua,” the other boy hushed him, stroking a hand along his spine slowly.
“I didn’t know you were my boyfriend, and we’ve been dating for three weeks,” he repeated to himself, “this is the most embarrassing thing in my entire life.”
“I thought the most embarrassing thing in your entire life was thinking you lost me at a pool and then going under the water to find me trying to put my trunks back on because they slipped off.”
“I still don’t get how that happened,” Killua sighed.
“Things just happen in the Freecss-Zoldyck household,” Gon shrugged; his hands still continued the motions of rubbing Killua’s back, and with the distractions of the new conversation and soothing gesture, the heat on his face mellowed out and he allowed the tenseness in his shoulders to loosen.
“The Freecss-Zoldyck household?” He snorted. “That sounds lame.”
“I’m not sure whose last name you would want to take,” Gon reasoned.
Killua let himself think about that for a moment— whose last name would he like to take? The thought of having Gon’s last name sounded lovely to him; being introduced as Killua Freecss to their friends and to new people, while Gon could whisper those dumb things at night about how Killua is his and his alone.
“Freecss,” he mumbled. “I would like to take your last name.”
Gon responded by grinning widely, more than pleased with the answer, and placed yet another wet kiss on his adorable boyfriend’s reddening cheeks.