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“Wait, wait, wait—” Leorio’s voice is high-strung, swerving into the next intersection and cleaving through the whipcord tension. The protest of tires and shriek of horns. Panic turned over into confusion with the gunning engine. “You two know each other?”
Kurapika keeps his glare forward, meeting Leorio’s curious eye in the rearview; white knuckles curling against the door.
The insinuation of it is enough to have him snarling, stamping out Leorio’s questions then and there, but then the captive at his side decides to open his big stupid mouth. “Oh, yes!” Despite the jostling of the car, and Kurapika's manhandling, Kuroro sounds almost cheerful; leaning forward as much as he could wrap in chains.
“We used to fuc—” Is all he gets out before Kurapika’s fist is snapping out. Reflex. Instinct. Self-preservation.
A warm rush splatters Kurapika’s knuckles as his vision tints red to match.
“Quiet!” He snarls, the words coming out in a voice not his own. Absolute malice. “Get us out of here, Leorio.” He feels horrible for it when he catches his friend’s flinch in the corner of his eye. Melody’s stray stare weighed on him until his shoulders come loose, molars aching with effort and the warmth under his skin. The wet give of cartilage under his knuckles had felt sickly and too real. He takes a breath. “We need to put space between us and the enemy before they catch on.”
He says enemy because he can’t get himself to say, Troupe. The fuckin’ Phantom Troupe. And their leader is in the backseat with him.
Kurapika dreamed of this.
Fantasized for years, but fantasies are flimsy on his tongue. He glances up again, trying to meet Leorio or Melody's eye, needing something to buoy him in, but both have their gazes fixed ahead. Heater off. Music turned low.
On the roads outside the city, it's so quiet.
Kurapika can feel the prickle in their silences. The don’t be reckless and, even worse, shouldn’t have done this that drifts in the back of his mind; aided by the events of this evening, and solidified by his results.
Gon and Killua still captured, one Spider dead, and another—
He cannot even look at the man beside him right now. Can’t even begin to untangle the horrible knot in his stomach that had twisted up the moment Kurapika saw him—the black hair, the blue earrings, the Saint Peter’s cross-stitched down his back—
His knuckles clench again at the memory of a fur-lined jacket, matted and soft in his palms.
He digs in his nails until he breaks skin.
The streetlights flicker through the speeding car, the silence broken only by the mumble of their hostage, groaning over his head, which cracked against the window. The neon light of a passing strip club makes his hair flash blue for a moment, like crow feathers, hollowing out the line of his cheek, dark blood dribbling down his chin.
He is stunning in profile. High cheekbones, full mouth, long lashes.
His eyes have already taken up that particular sleeplessness Kurapika had come to associate with the beginning of their time together. Shadows and hollows, a bar in the late afternoon, a bite of wind in the air.
The smell of sea salt and lime.
“Angel,” he breathes, nasal from the broken nose. Kurapika’s chest expands, lightheaded. Kuroro’s dark eyes are watery at the corners. His gaze sweeps over Kurapika again and pauses at the frilly ribbon of his receptionist uniform.
Kurapika shifts, bare knees pressing together.
Kuroro licks his lips, smearing blood on the corner of his mouth and his expression turning pensive at the flavor. “I never thought it would be you.”
He didn't know. Kurapika knows it instantly. The surprise in Kuroro's voice, was so soft and genuine. Backtracking through the last ten minutes, the bright hotel lobby, and then the back alley with a knee in the gut, unable to fight back as chains wound tight around him. Unfamiliar faces and then Kurapika's shriek ("You've got to be fucking kidding me!") before Leorio shoved the both of them in the backseat. Kuroro's shift in expression when Kurapika's voice fell into view, pinched and hateful.
It's worse that he believes him.
It pulls something unexpected, something soft and tender and wrapped in sunlight. Singed before it burns, feeding the heat in his chest.
“And I never thought it would be you.”
He binds Kuroro’s nen.
A gift for you, my love, he thinks, vindicated as Kuroro’s eyes go wide and he grunts when the blade pierces deep. He is unsteady on his feet as the chains bind him, pulling him taut. Kurapika feels his temper cool under the ragged breath, the tone evening out as the conditions roll off his tongue like a prayer. And to the messenger; a woman, Pakunoda—Paku, a friend Kuroro spoke of with such softness, Paku his greatest ally—
I will cleave all warmth from your bones. He curls his finger around the chain like a beckon, a messy tangle between his fingers, winding tighter to crush those arms, those shoulders, that body. I will make sure you have nothing left.
Until you’re just like me.
The chain fades away once the conditions are set, there but not. He can still feel the weight of them against the pulse of a finger, like a vein, in his heart. He feels sick with it.
The unwinding of the Judgement Chain leaves an impression on Kuroro’s skin, pale as he is. Kurapika can trace the lines of it from the soft of his mouth, the curve of his neck, and it all feels so horribly brutal for a moment that Kurapika is tempted to look away, but he keeps his eyes firmly on him, forcing Kuroro to break the stare first, to speak first, but Kuroro’s expression is damnably neutral.
The frustration of a loss buried under the layers of skin, leather, and bone. Without a word or backward glance, he exits the airship, knowingly descending into Hisoka’s waiting jaws.
It feels—
Anticlimactic, though he’s sure Leorio and Melody would disagree. He had always imagined his meetings with the Phantom Troupe would go so differently. That he would not have to think, that anger would take over, that his promises whispered over wet grave dirt would fulfill themselves, that he could separate himself from the violence revenge required.
He hates the little part of him that is grateful for not having to kill again.
It feels like weakness.
A sentiment that he has no use for.
Miniscule, and rotten, a thought that sinks like the cavity that remains of Uvogin and their blooded encounter. The chain he wound around Uvogin’s heart had been the same one he wrapped around Kuroro’s. Like Uvogin, he had felt the breath catch in Kuroro’s lungs, felt the stutter, shudder, gasp, of him in pain.
That blade that sunk through Uvogin had sent a tremor through him and Kurapika had felt it when he died.
An unforeseen slight in his chains.
He would feel Kuroro if he died.
He catches a final glimpse from the window, unsurprised to find Kuroro staring back. Romantic as he is, proud as he showed himself to be. The monster in his nightmares stares back at him as impassive as before. He had not wept, had not begged for Kurapika to spare him the fate of loneliness because within him he knew.
It’s mercy, he’s giving. It’s mercy with the only comfort being living. Alone and without. Until you’re just like me. Just like me.
No one asks again how they knew each other, though Kurapika is sure Leorio and Melody put the pieces together.
“Perhaps there are other ways to make it right,” Melody says softly. Her voice, now and forever, is like the gentlest music. Kurapika can feel the muscles relax behind his skull. Brain unspooling to the slow lethargy of waking.
Kurapika doesn’t blame her for skipping the niceties of good morning or giving in to his demands, or questions, but instead lies in her words, mind still half-curled around a dream. Exhaustion and a desert, eastbound. His body sinks into the thin mattress in an unfamiliar room. It smells like coffee. And antiseptic.
Sunlight gathers in a corner where Leorio rests, back to the wall, chin dipping low on his collarbone.
His neck will hurt when he wakes. Kurapika almost wants to point this out, but he is, at once, too tired. And Melody is waiting.
“What do you mean?” He asks, voice rough, the sandpaper scratch drawing out a ragged cough. Kurapika’s body winds tight and rocks through it, accepting a bottle of water when Melody offers. He sits up, taller than her, but not by much.
She waits for him to quiet as he drinks. The clarity of morning pulling through him.
“I mean, what would you rather do?” Her eyes are wide, doe-like, and infinitely patient. Gentle even with brutality. “Slaughter those who took your family and kill your soul with each life you take? Or, find a way to lay them to rest. ”
In her mouth, the word rest falls like a coin into a fountain, wishful and Kurapika feels like he might collapse back into the pillows beneath him, brow-beaten from the light.
He had thought he put his family to rest when he buried them. Calluses built on his hands, on his heart, as he laid every familiar face, every loving memory, to rest in the dark soil of what was once their home. He had laid them gently to bed. Crossed their hands. Arranged their hair. Closed their—
Eyes.
He had not had to do that. Could not look at hollows where they once were.
He had fixed himself on jaws. Childlike fear of his clansmen rising to the taste of soil in their tongues had plagued him, but it had taken so long. Days. Winding up fabric beneath chins, relaxing masks of agony before rigor set in. And he had been so young, so tired, so caught in the perverse horror yet distant from it; he had taken a break a short way through to cut makeshift shrouds for the faces he buried.
“Collect the Eyes?”
“Yes.”
“You think the flesh market would be a more achievable task, then?”
“More noble,” Melody says and then, “You might sleep better, Kurapika.”
He doubts it.
He had not realized before that his attempt of nobility, of doing what was right, would blooden his hand beyond recognition.
When that iron-clad chain of nen struck from Kuroro’s heart, and the conditions that bound him were made null, Kurapika felt it.
Like someone stepping nimble-footed over his future grave. Not a cold sweat, not a painful lurch in his stomach that wound up his chest, but a skip in the pulse curling under his littlest finger. Pressure like a familiar ring, now gone.
Slipped from his finger and into the gutter.
Nothing changes around him. Weak sunlight, cold tea. Linssen glances up from his paperwork only to lower his gaze when Kurapika avoids it. Nothing amiss, but something broken.
Broken free.
Kuroro is free, alive, and has his nen. Has rejoined his Spiders, and Kurapika feels the terrible sickness of paranoia as yet another string slips out of his control.
He expected it to feel violent. Like so much else.
He expected it to hurt.
But it doesn't matter. Next time he encountered Kuroro Lucilfer he would bind him tighter than a curse, seven generations deep; deaf, dumb, and blind, and kill him deader than before. What should have been done in the first place, severing the head from the spider once and for all.
And there would be nothing to it. No sickness, no hesitation.
Just a terrible countdown as the days bled to weeks, to months, to years. Gathering and waiting.
But, when he makes that vow, he never thought the circumstance would be this—
Queen Oito’s private chamber late at night; empty, except for the Prince and himself. Quiet, except for the deep breaths and the click of Kurapika’s shoes on the marble, the shift of curtains, and the tell-tale drag of familiar nen needling down the back of his neck—
He finds the thief leaning over the Prince’s cradle, hands behind his back, body tipping as he peered in, gazing down at the sleeping baby.
He draws a dark figure that makes Kurapika recall stories of changelings, beings with cold fingers and icy veins, swapping human babies for wailing lookalikes and clay dolls.
His chains feel terribly cold on the gauntlet of his wrist. As if they weren’t a part of him.
Fear, confusion, and anger more than anything else, but it is all allayed and his hand stilled when—
“I knew it was you, but I had to be sure.” The voice curls from the darkness, the only light in the room is spilling in from the yawn of the corridor, bright gold in the dark. Kurapika can make out the shape of him much better like this.
A nightmare come to life. A wolf looming over a baby.
The Prince.
“Get away from her.” The words come out much calmer than he feels. Something is dragging against the yoke on his neck, a stead-fast loyalty like his chains, coiled along the wrists of those who sat under his skin—Leorio, Killua, Gon, Melody, Bill, Queen Oito, and Prince Woble —
All in his charge.
All he would fight tooth to bloody nail to protect. Just as the thief might defend his own.
Kuroro straightens, uncaring of the gossamer thin veneer of calm, but heeding it all the same. His profile catches the light, and Kurapika takes him in.
He notes the subtle changes, the shift in dress, the pull of his brow, and the deep, dark circles cresting like bruises under his eyes.
He looks like Hell.
Cracked marble, muddied paint, broken strings, and Hell.
Good, he wants to say, and with feeling, good, because he is a terrible person, gnarled beyond recognition of a soul, good. It’s been years, but he is happy to see that the years weren’t kind but marks it as a shame that Kuroro's nose healed straight.
“Still too close.” He says, feeling the cold slip of his chains on the back of his hand, rings vibrating at the ready, chain-jail swinging along his middle finger, enticing him to violence. Not yet. Too risky.
And Kuroro knows it too. “I would prefer not fighting if you don’t mind. I am keeping a low profile these days.”
He sinks back behind Prince Woble and lands on the settee at the foot of Queen Oito’s bed, rich fabric cushioning him, all casual, right knee over left. Prince Woble between them is like a silent, sleeping barrier.
Kurapika feels his jaw tighten in a vice, bared against all the words he wants to scream at him. It’s no use. He is alone in Queen Oito’s suite, alone with the Prince, capable and yet—
Dark eyes are on him.
Swallowing him whole.
And Kurapika cannot for a moment, for a second, find it in himself to look away—
Kuroro’s lips part. “I didn’t expect to find you here. A bodyguard of all things.” There is a hitch in his voice, a laugh, as if their circumstances were laughable. Not something that Kurapika had staked his life’s purpose on.
“How does it feel, once again, having to answer to a power that is not yourself?” Kuroro asks, casual as always, as usual, but the exhaustion of his words catch in Kurapika’s ear. His mouth tugs. “Last time it nearly destroyed you.”
Kurapika supposes that might be true.
At first, his loyalties were locked with the Nostrades, the blood-deep mafia connections, and dirty money, adrenaline sparkling like a line in his blood, and the horrible give in his stomach when he presented Neon with a new addition to her collection—Scarlet Eyes, leaving him in despair.
And now, the Hui Guo Rou family. The gambit of the succession war and the safety of Prince Woble, and her mother, falling into his bloodstained hands. A chance to do right by something innocent, and the filthy secrets locked away in the Fourth Prince’s chambers, a face screaming for Kurapika in his sleep.
A chance, once again, to get back what belongs to him before he can rest and put to rest.
“Last time,” Kurapika says, rolling the words around his mouth, “you nearly destroyed me.”
It’s an admission if he ever gave one.
The weight of all that was between them buckled something in his guard, and in Kuroro’s too. The presumed congenial edge in Kuroro’s stance, shifts. A tell in body language that is more feeling than show. A fine and a guess I won’t play nice then.
It eases Kurapika’s nerves, at least.
“We never got to talk afterward.” Kuroro continues on with a touch of curiosity, delayed caution. “That’s a regret of mine.”
“I have nothing to say to you.”
“Yet the words come so easily, don’t they?” He grins. “We never have to pretend with one another.” Kuroro eases back against the mattress, filthy hands spread across Queen Oito’s duvet as if it were his own. “I do love that about our relationship.”
Kurapika scoffs. “Our entire relationship was based on lying to one another.”
“Lying,” Kuroro tips his head one way, and then the other, “Or admissions of the truth.”
“Same thing.”
“Quite different.” Kuroro exhales with a sharpness. “I never named what group I ran with, but I never hid from you that I was affiliated with some unsavory things.” A slant of golden light falls across his mouth, carved from Kurapika’s silhouette. “ You, however, told me you were going to Yorknew to meet friends. Instead, you wind up killing two of mine.”
Lips curl against his teeth.
By his count, his deeds vastly under weighed the damage the Troupe had done. He had only fought and killed two, Uvogin—intense, bloody, brutal—and then, the woman, Pakunoda—
Kurapika feels a shiver roll through him, tense along his shoulders.
Kuroro’s eyes reflected back that coldness as if the ice were something of his creation. “If anything, I felt rather lied to.”
“You’ve taken so much from me.” Kurapika seethes. “I was just paying it back.”
Kuroro shrugs, still playing the game. “Some taken, some given.”
Anger snares him by the throat. “You motherfucker—”
“Ah, ah, ah, careful,” Kuroro tuts, finger pressing to his lips and then he points at the cradle between them. “Little ears.”
The whiplash of emotion burns volatile in his gut, anger, uncertainty, and, in the furthest corners, guilt. Small and skewed and not well enough to be sorry or take it back, but something he meant. Something he would do again, cold and blooded, and sick with it, in that desert, in that airship, in those clotted streets on cold rainy nights. He would do it all again, and again, and worse, so it was all so meaningless, so there was nothing left.
A chain loosens itself from his fist, the charm swinging like a pendulum, though Kurapika is not sure which it is. Doesn’t want to loosen his fist to check.
Kuroro’s gaze tracks the sway of the chain, but he glances away again, as if bored. Eyes lid. Kurapika is tempted to step forward but keeps his ground. “Do you want to kill me, Kurapika?”
Kurapika can feel his answer though he cannot voice it. Yes. Yes, the magnetizing pull of it. Seductive like the curve of a hip or the edge of a knife.
“Tell me,” Kuroro continues, eyes brightening with some manic dead-alive energy gleaming beyond. “How would you do it?”
His chains.
His chains are the obvious answer. His chains which he sacrificed and staked his life on. His chains make him a worthy adversary of the Phantom Troupe, which puts him at an advantage.
But no.
Even though they are an extension of himself, they do not feel like enough. As if seeing Kuroro lying dead in a spool of chains, motionless, would not grant him the release he needed. It would not feel real.
It would not feel earned.
“With my hands,” he says, fingers going numb with the grip of his fists. There is something deeper, more visceral, more animal about it.
Bare, thin-fingered, knuckles bruised with the press of his rings wrapped around an alabaster throat.
It feels right.
Kuroro seems to think so too.
“How intimate,” he muses. “You’re so Old Testament in your rages,” he laughs, taking time with his amusement and giving Kurapika a moment to pull back, that sick, sick energy abating. Kuroro’s eyes were on him again, brows furrowed. “I wonder what you would unleash if you were to well and truly snap.”
The baying flames of anger urging him on, making him want to spring, but he remains in place, body-locked, teeth grit.
Prince Woble sleeps soundlessly in her crib, none the wiser.
“This isn’t a Biblical story. It's not Cain and Abel—”
“I love that I’m Abel.”
“—you’re not. First of all.”
“Why? You’re certainly not an innocent lamb, and I've never led you to slaughter.”
“You’re right,” Kurapika hisses, voice tuning high, almost hysterical. “You only ever led the slaughter of the rest of my clan. How can I forget?”
Silence banks between them, twisted up like wrought iron and rusting away.
Kurapika’s brows pinch, something far more irksome than Kuroro’s casting, catching a snare in his mind. He can feel his lips peel back from his teeth, pressure building in his throat.
“Why—fuck, why are you here? If not to get your revenge, or chase Hisoka, then what? Me? You hardly knew me.” He asks, words running together in his mouth, one right after the other. “Me as I was. As I never was. You don’t know me .”
Kuroro frowns. “I know you. I know you better than you think.”
“No, you don’t—” Kurapika whispers, punctuated with heat from his tongue.
“Then I understand you,” Kuroro says, droll, then with an archness that Kurapika does not want to venture too far into. “Better than your friends do, at least.”
“No.”
“No?” He snorts, mouth pulling at the corner. “You never had to pretend to be more noble than you are. Never had to pretend to be better.”
“Stop it—”
Kuroro leans forward, elbows on his knees as if he were feeding on Kurapika’s disgust. As if he could not get enough. “I’ve carried your dagger in my heart, my dear. Did you know I felt you as you felt me too? Did you know that? Did you think—?”
“That’s gone. You broke it.”
“Still there,” Kuroro says, tapping two fingers against his beating heart. “I can still feel it, and you do too.”
And lately, words have been filling up the space between his teeth, snarling with that aching pull of something twisted growing down the graveyard line.
“I don’t want you anymore!”
His own admission—the second this night, he is being too generous—tears from him like something bloody from his mouth. Sore and festering inside of him, and pouring out for Kuroro to see.
Stiff-limbed, erratic, hurting.
“How could you think I do?” He asks voice ragged at the edge. Not tears, not yet. “I’m not yours. Don’t pretend to know me.”
It comes out almost as a moan at the end, as if it were too much. And it is. Like something staked deep within him laying claim where it has no right. Demanding more when he had already given his all.
“You wanted me once.” He says, and with it carries all the memories of them intertwined with those feelings that drew him up in strings, in chains.
“Before,” Kurapika agrees, eyes closing, warmth burning behind his eyelids. “Before I knew what sort of person you— what— you are. Before I knew that I—” The words catch in his throat, hard against the lob of tears caught deep within him.
How he longed to cry. How he longed to let himself unbrick, unmake, and unravel.
But not in front of Kuroro.
He had been vulnerable enough in front of Kuroro and he never wanted to be again.
“I never said that I—”
“You implied.” Kurapika chokes out, swallowing against the knot in his throat. He is surprised to see Kuroro standing, without the Prince between them, without his book, he stands lone and not too much taller. But Kurapika can’t yet scrounge up the energy to attack, even as Kuroro reaches for him.
His thumb soothes against the sleeve of his jacket, tugging as if asking for him.
“I’m sorry then.” He says, voice heavy in his ear. “I take back what I said. I didn’t mean it.”
He sounds so fucking repentant, it makes Kurapika laugh.
“No, you don’t,” Kurapika whispers. “You’re not.”
Kuroro’s eyes flash with question.
“You’re not sorry because what you said was untrue. Or, for what you did! You’re sorry because I’m angry with you and you don’t want me to be.” Kurapika spat. “You’re a horrible person! A horrible, terrible human-shaped thing! Of course, you’re not sorry.” He rips his arm back, outrage sparking, and at the sight of Kuroro’s huge dark eyes, doubles back. “And—and you can’t possibly still want me. Not when I killed—”
Kurapika can feel the weight of Kuroro’s stare, the cold balanced out with the dreamy ire. The accusation glinted deep beneath, though Kurapika cannot bring himself to say it. He has killed before and he killed after. Ashes and dust. It’s how the business goes. How the blood stays new.
Sometimes when he kills a young recruit or self-aggrandized mafioso, he wonders if meteorite runs through their veins. If Kuroro might put a claim on them as he had the Spiders and call for retribution.
But it’s all just wishful thinking when the blood grits under his nails.
The guilt, bright and hateful as a migraine, burns at the edge of his consciousness. Pressing in until all he can see are bodies and blood and that horrible, horrible adrenaline that comes with a tin-flavored tongue.
He has killed, but he is not a killer.
He never had the stomach for it. Especially not his firsts.
The touch of Kuroro’s hands are gentle against his elbows, more insistent than yearning; lifting him up and pulling him in, distance still polite, but too intimate for strangers.
Too intimate for Kurapika, really.
“Uvogin,” Kuroro says gently, “and Pakunoda.” Their names were a soft whisper on his lips. Someone beloved, someone missed. Kurapika feels sick with it. “It was unfortunate and terrible what happened. Uvo just did what he knew, and we had such faith in him to return. Paku, she—she did what she thought was best. ”
Kurapika shudders, the cool fever of horror rolling down his spine.
“It’s—complicated. How I feel.” Kuroro murmurs, slowly easing him closer and closer. “In any other case, you would be a Spider by rite of combat, such are our rules.”
Kurapika presses his lips together. “But Pakunoda—she’s?”
“Yes.”
He felt it. He knew.
He’s not sure why he asked.
It had been so slight. Fleeting like a flame snuffed out in a gust.
He had thought it was Kuroro for a moment, for a second, but that pulse on his finger had kept him in line. Kept him in heart.
He is suddenly too numb, and shaking, and when Kuroro pulls him against his chest, Kurapika feels a dreadful sense of peace creeping against his barriers. Kuroro is all soft edges and mourning pall, it's hard to think of him as a threat much less his enemy. Just like before.
Some terrible part of his mind still has this idea that this man was split in two. There was the Kuroro that was his monster, this horrid, soulless curator of destruction and grief. And then where was the Kuroro he met in those too short months, well-spoken and hesitant to touch, keeping him up in the little hours and holding tight in his bed.
They were one and the same, and yet—
His lips press into the hollow beneath Kuroro’s throat and inhales deeply.
Coffee, cigarettes, and sea salt.
The edge of sleeplessness against Kuroro’s wrinkled collar was familiar to him as his own face in the mirror.
His fingers are hooked around the opening of Kuroro’s jacket, the cold bite of the metal digging into his palms, thick material pressing against his nails. He can’t look at him. He can’t. He can’t without everything he is trying so hard to keep together slipping through and betraying him. He wants to press into this embrace and shove Kuroro to the ground. He wants to hold him and let him go, but if he loosens his fists now, they’ll shake with something violent.
He wants to dig his thumbs in until Kuroro’s vision goes spotty, black mold inching along the edges of consciousness, mind fuzzy. He wants to gather that body against his and break it. He wants to dash out the memories, all sensory and visceral, grit with love and soft hands and sweet words whispered into ears.
Gentleness pared down in motion, deathless under the sway of that body, those hands, that mouth—
It’s that voice that lifted him up and carried him under. It’s the scarred hands that laid him out across a narrow bed above a bar. Three a.m., sudsy silence eked out against the bed frame. The foreign weight of another, awkward jabs and nervous fingers of the first time, peeling back layers to flush skin, prickled eager. Heart underhand. Pulses frantic.
He had been taken by a kiss laced with rum, the last vestiges of innocence traded then given. An act of love that sounded more like worship as his lover came to him on bended knees, name whispered in reverence of praise, that silver-tongue rolling against him, spinning yet another clever poem as he brought Kurapika to his peak.
And in that time—all those times, but in that delicate tangle of three weeks, too little for love—summer borne on his shoulders and kisses growing darker in the light, Kurapika felt chilled by the idea that he might actually be happy—
—but all those things that once gave him pleasure destroyed him. The one who had been his solace had been his original undoing. Cutting up the fragile, fragmented remains and rearranging them in a stained-glass mosaic of grief.
And Kuroro notices.
Because he always does.
Knows and understands him so well. Heedless, he had kissed his eyes before he left for Yorknew, telling him to keep on the horizon.
His mouth tips against Kurapika brow, a parting kiss without the press of lips. His nose was buried in his hair. “Stay hating me, angel.” He whispers, cold fingers trailing after heat.
Kurapika’s hands are left grasping at nothing in the darkness as the door rolls closed.