Chapter Text
The approach of the hottest part of summer is marked by many things: a decrease in the amount of bikes left on the pavement outside Leorio’s apartment, a spike in the price of the watermelon popsicles he likes so much that’s just inconvenient enough for them to not be worth the money anymore, and perhaps most importantly, the time his AC unit decides to break down. For one moment he’s giving himself a break from both his summer classes and from cursing himself for taking summer classes, and in the next, he’s wrenched out of a half-dozing state by the sound of a machine working very hard but eventually sputtering itself out.
Leorio sits up immediately. “Shit,” he says, first to his startled reflection on the TV screen, and then to his poor, useless air conditioning. He considers briefly the benefits of getting it fixed before remembering that his professor had been hinting strongly at the possibility of a pop quiz tomorrow, and packs up his notes instead. He goes to the closest coffee shop, where he buys the cheapest thing on the menu and squirrels out a table for himself. The stools aren’t as comfortable as his couch, but at the very least Leorio doesn’t feel like he’s being cooked and the wifi is marginally more consistent. When his own handwriting is swimming in front of his eyes and his notes are beginning to make even less sense than before, Leorio goes back home, microwaves dinner, and falls asleep on top of his covers.
He lives like this for two weeks. On week three Killua catches wind of it, probably from Gon. He mails him a handheld electronic fan and tells Leorio to stop being so cheap for once in his life, oh my god, please get your AC fixed, and while it does improve Leorio’s circumstances, a handheld fan is not enough to soothe a man to sleep when it’s hot enough outside to start baking cookies on the pavement. Which is fine, really, but even aspiring doctors reach some sort of limit of sleep deprivation, and eventually Leorio starts to see faces in the smudges on his fridge.
“Not like actual faces,” he reassures. “Just like uh, cloud animals, you know? When you look up and find dinosaurs in the clouds? Like it’s not the actual thing, but it could be.”
There’s a long, judgemental silence. “You need help,” Killua says finally, and hangs up before Gon or Alluka can get a hold of the phone to defend him.
In any case, given everything, by the time week four rolls around it is both acceptable and reasonable that Leorio is far too preoccupied to notice the extra pair of shoes outside of his front door when he gets home one blistering afternoon. He shuffles in miserably, leaves his door cracked in the hopes of filtering in some cold air from the hallway, and toes his shoes off. His couch makes a sound like a cough, which Leorio optimistically attributes to his AC breathing back to life. He’s already stripped down to his undershirt when the couch coughs again, a bit strangled this time, and Leorio finally gets a good look at his living room.
And then he yells and tries to stabilize his breathing, because he’s pretty sure the shock will end up taking years off of his life.
Kurapika, for his part, has the decency to look a little sheepish from where he’s sat himself on the couch, suit jacket folded neatly and draped behind him. There’s a tiny black suitcase next to him. “Sorry,” he says, tugging the sleeves of his shirt into place. “Your door was unlocked.”
It takes Leorio a while to slow his heart down back to something reasonable. When he manages to get past the lump in his throat — he didn’t know how worried he was until he had Kurapika back in front of him, safe and mostly whole — he moves them to the kitchen table and pours Kurapika some iced tea to drink, so they don’t add ‘heat-stroke’ onto his already extensive list of health problems. He wrangles the necessary information out of Kurapika, which mostly means that he asks a lot of questions and gets responses like No Leorio, I’m not dying and Yes, I’m positive and Please don’t worry so much, that can’t be good for you. For all the time that’s passed and the different places that they’ve found themselves in now, it’s surprisingly easy to fall back into old routines.
After establishing that Kurapika is indeed alright and in no immediate danger, Leorio is free to move on to the lecture he’s had prepared for months about the importance of answering phones and not letting your friends think you’ve died, etc, etc, etc. Kurapika must be feeling guilty because he doesn’t say a single thing about ‘family’ or ‘duty,’ even when his mouth takes on an irritated, stubborn slant and his right eye begins to twitch.
“And you’ve gotten so thin!” Leorio rages, reaching across the table to prod at the ribs beneath Kurapika’s fancy white shirt. His clothing is cut very nicely, likely a consequence of his career, but it’s painfully obvious that it was tailored previously for someone who probably ate three meals a day and actually cared for their physical health. The excess cloth hanging all around Kurapika’s tiny frame makes Leorio want to hit him in the head more than he already does. “Who’s gonna take care of you? How am I supposed to remind you to eat and sleep if you won’t pick up the phone, huh?”
An exasperated sigh. “I can take care of myself,” Kurapika says, with a patience Leorio knows is fake. He looks like he’s barely resisting the urge to roll his eyes. “Those kinds of reminders are unnecessary.”
Leorio doesn’t scream, but it’s a near thing. “Evidently not,” he hisses, resisting the urge to poke at Kurapika’s dark circles next. “When was the last time you had an actual break? That Melody didn’t force you to go on, and that you didn’t end up spending all of it working anyway?” When Kurapika flushes, a blush that creeps down all the expanse of skin revealed by the shirt he’s had to half-unbutton because Leorio’s AC is a trainwreck, he knows he’s got him red-handed.
“Does it matter?”
“Of course it does!” He pinches the bridge of his nose. Fully aware that he’s moving onto even thinner ice and also that he’s incapable of not pushing at things best left alone, Leorio doesn’t quite manage to look Kurapika in the eyes when he opens his mouth next. “I get what you’re doing, you know,” he sighs. “I understand that you have to do this. But,” Leorio says, very carefully, eyes trained on his own cup of tea like it’s the most interesting thing in the world, “your clan wouldn’t want you to kill yourself in the process of putting them to rest. It’s okay to just — stop and relax for a bit sometimes.”
When Kurapika doesn’t immediately snap back, Leorio gets the courage to look at him properly again. There’s a threatening line of tension in his jaw, but he exhales deeply in a visible attempt to relax, and most of the anger leaves with his breath. One of his hands is clenched in a fist on the table, knuckles white, but the other is gentle around his glass. “Yes,” Kurapika says stiffly. “I know.”
“We don’t have to talk about it right now,” Leorio says quickly, partly because he’s not entirely stupid and largely because he doesn’t quite know what to do with a Kurapika that he doesn’t have to strong-arm into compromise.
Kurapika shakes his head. “It’s fine,” he says wryly, voice still a bit strained but honest. “It’s just — hard.” Realizing that he’s going to run himself into the ground if he doesn’t learn to slow down, Leorio assumes, and that he can’t do a thing about the Eyes if he’s dead. “But I’m learning, at least. Between you and Melody, I’ll end up with an excess of forced vacation time. I thought I’d start it off by visiting you.”
Leorio takes this in, trying to contain the odd warmth in his chest before it floods into more visible places where it can be perceived, like his face. It feels good to know that Kurapika thought of him first. “Not the worst thing in the world, I hope,” he says lamely, doing a terrible job of skirting around the line between a normal amount of emotion and forced composure.
Kurapika laughs unexpectedly, and his eyes are almost fond. It’s been a while since Leorio’s seen him smile like that. “No,” he says, “I suppose it’s not.”
Kurapika stays for four days, a span of time that isn’t long in the scheme of many things, like how long Leorio’s known him for or even in the context of the length of the Exam, but it’s enough time for Leorio to get used to having company. Kurapika isn’t difficult to take care of by any means, except for maybe his aversion to being taken care of.
They argue over who should pay for dinner when Leorio gets on the phone to order takeout, and then whether or not Kurapika should get a hotel room instead of just staying over while they eat the pasta Kurapika pays for. Kurapika folds quicker than expected under the weight of practicality, and maybe because he’s missed him, which means the next obstacle doesn’t arrive until after Leorio’s finished some last minute studying and the two of them are standing in the doorway to his room, staring at the bed.
“Absolutely not. I’m not kicking you out of your own room,” Kurapika says decisively, correctly predicting Leorio’s intentions.
Leorio moves to turn on the bedside lamp and winces at the mess the light reveals. If Kurapika’s spontaneous visits keep happening — and isn’t that a thought — he needs to get better about cleaning regularly. “I’m not sentencing you to the couch, Kurapika,” he says, migrating a bundle of clothes off the floor and into the hamper. “That’ll ruin your back.”
“And not yours?”
“I’m used to it! I fall asleep there while working all the time — not anymore,” he amends hastily upon seeing Kurapika’s disapproving scowl. “But you know, it’s not that bad after a while.”
“Oh my god,” Kurapika says, and swipes a hand over his face.
So in the end, Leorio takes one half of the bed and Kurapika takes the other. It’s twin-sized so Leorio can fit his dresser and night table in an amalgamation of arrangement that’s mostly convenient and not too hideous in the space of his room. It’s not quite big enough to be optimal for sharing, but they’ve slept closer before on less in the past, and Leorio is too tired to overthink it. Kurapika borrows toothpaste and a nightshirt and says he doesn’t mind the sound of the fan that Leorio had caved and bought a few days ago, and they fall asleep with the covers kicked off.
The following days go more smoothly. Kurapika’s hair is long enough now that when he ties it back, only a few of the front strands escape to drape loosely around his face. He spends a lot of time curled up on the couch with his hair up and in more of Leorio’s shirts. Leorio’s collection of books is mostly composed of overpriced textbooks he was forced to buy, but Kurapika makes his way steadily through the more interesting novels he has. When he’s not reading, he’s taking a walk around the neighborhood or on his laptop, searching for more leads to the Scarlet Eyes; Leorio can forgive him this because at least he's learned moderation.
It’s a good, relaxing sort of existence, but because Leorio is Leorio he can’t help but worry about Kurapika getting bored with only doing those things. He understands, rationally, that Kurapika is not the type of person to keep quiet about things he dislikes, but even that isn’t much of a comfort.
“I have some pamphlets if you want to go do anything in the city,” he says, ten minutes before he’s going to be late if he doesn’t leave right now. He’d picked the apartment complex for the price and its walkable distance to his university, but it’s also a fairly short commute to the heart of the city, where there are more interesting things to do than waste away in Leorio’s apartment. “I don’t want you to feel like you just have to stay here all day.”
Kurapika exhales a bit of air through his nose, as if to convey that there’s no need to worry about how he’s occupying himself. He takes the offered stack of brochures, flipping through them idly and stopping for a brief moment at one for an art museum before continuing to browse. “Hmm,” he says non-committedly.
That afternoon, Leorio returns home to find that Kurapika hasn’t gone to any tourist attractions, but that he has fixed the AC and bought groceries. When he opens the freezer there’s a box of his favorite watermelon popsicles. Leorio has no idea how Kurapika found them.
“This is supposed to be your vacation,” he says helplessly, feeling very fond and exasperated all at once. It would be like Kurapika to spend his time off working, although maybe to a mafia leader household tasks would be fun.
Kurapika’s expression is smug, tiny smile impossibly expressive. “It is,” he agrees, moving past Leorio to get some of the fresh produce he’d bought. His shoulder brushes Leorio’s the slightest bit. Coming from Kurapika, the action is deliberate and not a consequence of the limits of the kitchen space. “And this is how I’m spending it.”
Leorio struggles to find a response. “Hmm,” he says, valiantly hoping his blush isn’t as visible as it feels, and then he moves to help him find the cutting board.
Kurapika leaves the next morning when it’s early enough that the sun wouldn’t be visible even if the sky wasn’t blanketed in grey clouds. Already he looks more tired and stressed out; there’s an extra pinch to his forehead and a worrisome strain at his mouth. Leorio chalks most of it up to the hell of managing a group of thieves and crooks, though admittedly part of it is his own fault.
The two of them are getting better at talking to each other about things like feelings and emotions, but apparently their capacities for deep, honest conversations don’t extend to Leorio admitting that he doesn’t want Kurapika to leave, or to Kurapika admitting that he doesn’t want to either.
Instead, ill-advisedly, the two had sat next to each other all night on the couch and filled the space with mudaneity so tomorrow would feel further away. There was a new episode of the shitty drama Leorio was quietly not-following on, and in between teenage heartbreaks and commercial breaks that were way too long, Kurapika told Leorio that he needed to stop studying so much and Leorio snarked back that Kurapika didn’t sleep nearly enough.
Leorio had woken up to a crook in his neck and the sound of Kurapika brushing his teeth, and a piercing headache that made it hard to focus. He’d taken the majority of the couch too, which meant Kurapika either slept half on top of him or on the floor. Kurapika must feel even more like shit then and — Leorio winces at the clothes spilling out of his suitcase — he still needs to pack.
When they make it out of the building at last, sleepy-eyed and tired, it’s near silent. Even the air seems oddly still this early in the morning, before most things have had the chance to wake up.
“You want a coffee to go?” Leorio asks quietly. It’s not too late to make it. He could probably even get it done before the car they called to take Kurapika to the airport arrives.
“It’s fine,” Kurapika says, blinking through a yawn. He straightens the collar of his shirt, already on his way back to his normal dress code. He’ll probably put the suit jacket on later, when there are more appearances to keep up. “I should try to sleep on the airship anyway. They’ve got a job for me.”
Leorio frowns. “Already?”
“I have been away for a while,” Kurapika points out, mouth twisted in a wry smile. Which is — true, but it didn’t necessarily feel like a while. Leorio would have liked it if Kurapika could have stayed longer, but he thinks perhaps he’s just gotten greedy.
There’s the sound of wheels on pavement as a black car rolls around the end of the street and slows to a stop in front of Leorio’s building. Leorio watches as Kurapika checks the license plate, and then feels a displacement in the air as he uses nen to scan the vehicle and surrounding area. Meticulous as always.
“Safe?”
Kurapika nods. “It’s good.” His face takes on an odd, pinched look as he reaches for his suitcase slowly, like he’s running through something in his mind. Before Leorio can ask what’s wrong, he finds his arms full of warmth and his nose tucked into a crown of blond hair. It smells like his shampoo, the one that smells like lavender, and oddly enough that realization gets Leorio the closest to crying he’s been all week. In a perfect universe Leorio’s world could be shrunken down just to this: the phantom burn of Kurapika’s hands against his back and the cool of the morning air.
Everything is very still. Leorio is hyper-aware of his heart, pulsing in his throat. “I’ll see you soon,” Kurapika murmurs finally, allowing himself to be held for a brief moment before stepping back.
Leorio scrubs at the side of his face, as if his hands will rub away the blush he’s certain is there. “Okay,” he says, tripping over himself again. His usual aversion to emotional discussions has left him unpracticed in goodbyes. Kurapika waits patiently for him to collect his thoughts, fingers outstretched just out of reach of the passenger door. “Just— I'll miss you. Call me sometime, yeah? And take care of yourself.”
He’d fixed his eyes on the breadth of Kurapika’s shoulders as he spoke out of embarrassment, but Leorio looks back at his face just in time to see Kurapika’s eyes widen just a touch, as if he hadn’t been expecting that response. When he smooths his expression down again, his smile is genuine. “Alright,” he says sincerely. “You too, Leorio.”
Leorio waves at the car until it’s out of sight, though the windows are tinted and he doesn’t actually know if he’s getting a response. He contemplates briefly the merits of studying more before his afternoon lab and goes inside to crawl back into bed instead. As he sets an alarm, a text notification flits down at the top of his screen. For a brief moment, he lets himself hope it’s Kurapika; he knows it won’t be.
Leorio squints at his phone once he’s arranged himself over the covers. “Old man,” he mumbles to himself, “you good?” Another text. “Look at this fish me and Gon saw the other day.” Typical Killua. Leorio swipes up to look at their earlier exchanges, feeling guilty when he realizes they haven’t spoken in a week. They’ve both been busy, but then again, they’re always busy.
He decides to respond to the messages when he’s more coherent and holds off on opening the attached image for now. Gon will probably want to call sometime, and he’s the type of person to want to hear the excitement in real time. That done with, it doesn’t take Leorio long at all to drift off to sleep. He wakes up five minutes before his alarm goes off, but whatever extra time that earned him is squandered when it takes him fifteen minutes of the walk to his university to realize that he forgot his books.
He still makes it on time though, even if it means he has to humiliate himself in front of the neighbors. And life goes on.
Kurapika visits twice more before the end of summer hits.
The first time doesn’t really count because Leorio doesn’t actually see him. Kurapika doesn’t contact him at all for one week after he leaves until one afternoon, in which Leorio gets a text telling him to check his pantry and finds that Kurapika has once again decided to restock his food, like some sort of grocery vigilante. At this point Leorio should just give him a key to the apartment and a shopping list.
“Have you considered saying hi like a normal person instead of breaking into people’s homes,” Leorio texts back, to combat the stupid smile he has while looking at his phone, and then because Kurapika isn’t privy to his internal conflict and he doesn’t want him to think he doesn’t appreciate it: “thank you so much.” A full day later, Kurapika sends a smiley face that radiates more malice than it would have coming from any other person and says “eat your vegetables Leorio.” He doesn’t explain why he was in the area or how come he couldn’t stay longer, and Leorio doesn’t ask.
The second time, Kurapika gives enough prior notice that Leorio is able to clear out his schedule for the weekend with the power of too much caffeine and ill-advised amounts of sleep. They go out to a nice place with specialty pasta for dinner and Leorio tells Kurapika all the fun facts he knows about the city when they go on a walk afterwards.
They go to the art museum Kurapika had been interested in the next morning, where Leorio pokes fun at the sculptures and Kurapika smacks him on the back of the head and tells him to be respectful. It’s the kind of thing that Leorio could never imagine doing with Kurapika, but at the same time, goes exactly as he thinks it would. They take a selfie with Kurapika’s favorite painting, a flowery impressionistic scene, in which Leorio pulls Kurapika in maybe a little too close and he leans into it instead of pulling away.
When Kurapika sees it, his face goes unreadable for just a moment before it filters into something more like his usual neutral expression. Leorio wonders if he should be worried until he notices that the tips of Kurapika’s ears, exposed by how he’d chosen to put his hair up for today, are faintly pink. “That’s a good picture,” Kurapika says, the colors reflected from the screen superimposed faintly over his skin.
“It is,” Leorio agrees. He sends it to Gon and Killua, because he’d never quite gotten around to explaining that Kurapika was in contact with him again, and Kurapika laughs hard enough at the texts he receives back that he has to cover his mouth with his hands to muffle the noise.
Kurapika’s next visit doesn’t occur until the middle of fall term rolls around, when the two of them have established a sort of routine. “Sort-of” because Kurapika is still unavailable more often than not, and “routine” because they’re slowly beginning to reach a new kind of normalcy despite that, fueled mostly by the wonders of technology. Kurapika sends sporadic texts, sometimes from burner phones and always at odd times that Leorio doesn’t think can be chalked up entirely to time zones. He gets used to picking up every call he receives regardless of if he recognizes the number, just in case.
When the knock on his door comes, sometime in late September, he isn’t expecting it. It jolts him out of the half-sleep he’d fallen into over the notes spread out on his coffee table. Leorio uses nen first to scan his hallway, not used to visitors and especially not used to getting visitors at midnight.
“It’s just me,” Kurapika says through the door, voice oddly strained. Leorio doesn’t get a chance to examine it too closely in his rush to let him in, surprise making him giddy.
“Miss me already?” he jokes. Kurapika huffs out a laugh that sounds more like an exhale, blinking up at him from under his lashes. There’s a glow around the edges of his irises that makes Leorio think his eyes are red underneath the contact lenses.
“Something like that,” he says, expression softened into something that could be a faint smile. It’s replaced abruptly by a wince as he crosses the threshold and it’s only then that Leorio notices that the hand he’s tucked under his jacket is actually pressed against his side. Several things hit him like a train all at once: the stains on Kurapika’s clothing, the oddness to his gait. There’s the smell of blood in the air. He doesn’t know why it took him so long to notice.
All the humor leaves Leorio’s body immediately. “Shit,” he says. “Shit, Kurapika. What— come here, oh god.”
Kurapika lets Leorio take on some of his weight, breath hitching when Leorio accidentally brushes against his injured side. “Not the couch,” Kurapika hisses, resisting his attempts to lead them to the living room. “Kitchen. I don’t want to get blood on the carpet.”
“You can’t be serious,” Leorio says, aghast, even as Kurapika’s silence indicates that he is indeed as stupidly stubborn as ever. “Oh my god.”
Kurapika is more pliant at least when Leorio sits him down at the kitchen table. He’s wise enough not to argue when Leorio pulls out the first-aid kit and lets Leorio strip him down without complaint. When Leorio’s fingers tremble just a bit as he unbuttons Kurapika’s shirt, fabric sliding uselessly against the pads of his thumbs, Kurapika settles a hand on his shoulder and keeps it there even after Leorio’s hands begin to steady.
“It’s worse than it looks,” Kurapika says, head dipped down as he watches Leorio put pressure on the flurry of cuts along his ribs with a clinical sort of interest. He had given minimal information about how he’d gotten injured, apparently unwilling to involve Leorio more than he already has in things that are potentially dangerous: He’d been hit by a nen ability. No, the attack wasn't poisoned. No, it hadn’t cut that deep. He was injured in other places, but it wasn't serious. This was his own mission and he’d already hidden the Scarlet Eyes away. He was sorry for coming to Leorio, but he’d gotten intel that the surrounding hospitals were being watched.
“Don’t be sorry,” Leorio says, taking care to keep his hands gentle even if he doesn’t quite manage to take the sharpness out of his voice. He isn’t entirely sure of who he’s mad at, only that he feels the same kind of uselessness he had felt all those years ago when Pietro died. “Just stop getting hurt.”
“It’s not that easy,” Kurapika says, frustration palpable, and it’s only the strangely helpless edge to his voice that keeps Leorio from snapping back. He’s not wrong; nothing about this is easy. It probably won't ever be. It’s one of the things Leorio is still working on coming to terms with.
He takes a deep breath, antiseptic stinging him from the inside out, and taps Kurapika’s leg, the one he’d been trying to keep weight off of. Kurapika obliges the wordless request, pulling up his pant leg and taking in a strangled breath as Leorio examines his ankle. Strands of blond hair fall into Kurapika’s eyes, obscuring his face, but he makes no effort to shake them away.
“I think I twisted it,” he offers quietly.
Leorio ghosts over the bruising on Kurapika’s pale skin gingerly as he checks for tenderness. There’s so much. Did Kurapika run after getting injured? How had he dealt with the pain? “We’ll ice it,” Leorio says, heart constricting. “And we’ll bandage it after I disinfect the rest of you.”
“Okay,” Kurapika says, more breath than sound. “Alright.” When he meets Leorio’s gaze this time, brushing his hair back and out of the way with a hand, there’s no hint of red in his eyes left at all.
They move to the bathroom when Leorio’s finished wrapping Kurapika’s ankle. Kurapika takes maybe two steps by himself before Leorio insists on half-carrying him there, ducking his neck underneath Kurapika’s arm and curving his own so he can set a hand on Kurapika’s waist. He helps Kurapika to the closed toilet seat and then kneels to fill a tiny basin with warm water from the shower; for all the blood that had been on Kurapika’s clothing, a substantial amount of it has still soaked through to his skin and needs to be wiped away.
When that’s done, Leorio moves onto rubbing ointment into the open cuts to stave off infection, and then bandaging. It’s methodical, calming work. Kurapika keeps watch as Leorio works, gaze never quite leaving his face or his hands. With Leorio’s fingers splayed over Kurapika’s torso, he can feel every quiet breath he takes in the rise and fall of his skin. It makes something hurt in his bones, the good kind of ache, that Kurapika trusts him enough for something like this.
There’s one moment in particular that feels more intimate than even that. Leorio moves away slightly to get the washcloth again, and when he returns he jolts as he feels a hand brush along the curve of his jaw, featherlight. Leorio almost asks if it’s an accident before Kurapika curves a thumb along his cheekbone, slow and deliberate.
When he tilts his head up, gently enough that Kurapika’s hand doesn’t move, Kurapika is already looking back at him. His face is haggard and he looks so tired, and even like this he’s still very beautiful.
Leorio’s mouth goes dry. “Yeah?” he asks quietly, feeling suddenly acutely aware of everything: the hard tile against his knees, the muted yellow light, the cold of the porcelain juxtaposed with the warmth of Kurapika’s touch.
Kurapika swallows, working through his words, and Leorio tracks the ripple of the skin stretched taut against his throat unwillingly. “Nothing,” he says, voice barely a whisper. “No reason. Just wanted to say thank you.”
He holds his touch there for a moment more before letting it loosen, fingers relaxing slightly. Leorio catches his hand, feeling like he’s not entirely in control of his body, and twines their fingers together before letting them drop. There’s an audible, shuddering breath; Leorio isn’t entirely sure of who it comes from.
His heart is caught somewhere in his throat. “You don’t have to thank me,” he says, voice hoarser than he’d like. He wonders what Kurapika can see in his expression, if it looks as vulnerable and honest as he feels. “You can come to me for anything, you know that right?”
Kurapika’s face scrunches up like he’s trying not to cry. “Of course,” he says, voice catching and strangely tender. He clears his throat. “Of course I do.”
He tucks his hands back in his lap, gripping at the fabric of his slacks. There’s a look in his eyes that simultaneously eases some of Leorio’s worry and makes him feel out of his mind with something restless. Leorio gets the washcloth at last, shifting carefully to clean the red off of a forgotten part of Kurapika’s shoulders.
“Good,” he says, when he trusts his voice again, scrubbing gently. Kurapika still looks pained, unavoidably, but he gives another one of those not-quite smiles that makes Leorio’s heart rest a bit easier. “I’m glad.”