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Yorknew City doesn't change much, Gon realizes as he sits down alone in a corner booth at a cafe. He orders whatever the waiter's favorite is without looking at the menu, and stares out the open window, searching for something new.
He's never been to this café or this neighborhood before. He's never seen any of these people passing by outside his window before. There are women who smell like cigarettes and men who smell like incense and some who just smell like smoke, and they're all moving to get somewhere with the single-minded focus of people with a purpose.
And Gon’s feet don’t even twitch. The people all hurry past him, disappearing into the distance, their eyes fixed unwaveringly ahead of them. Off to their own adventures, while he stays seated and watches the ice in his glass melt, unable to remember what it felt like to have a reason to keep striding forwards the way they do. There are undiscovered treasures all around him, endless pathways branching off in every direction that he could pursue. But Gon stays seated, and waits for whatever it was he ordered to arrive, so he can eat it without tasting it.
Zepile is the latest old friend on his house-call list. Gon's been crashing on his couch and watching him work for a week now, but hasn't been able to muster up any enthusiasm for the tips on oil pastels and wood grain matching that Zepile shows him, instead blinking and nodding slowly to indicate he's listening even as the information slips out his other ear, unable to latch onto anything. He shrugs off the paint brush and blank canvas offered to him.
It was Zepile’s idea for him to come here today. Gon had barely done more than slink around Zepile’s studio since he arrived.
Go stretch his legs and see the city, Zepile had said. That Gon hadn’t gotten the chance for sightseeing the first time he was here, when he was too busy running headlong from crisis to crisis, went unsaid.
When he asked where he should go, all of Zepile’s suggestions were as far from Bull Market and Middle Park and the Southernpiece Auction house as he could get.
So that’s how he ends up in a random cafe in Kings, replaying a slideshow behind his eyelids of the exact same look of strained pity on the faces of Bisky, Wing, Aunt Mito, and now Zepile. Everyone keeps trying to point Gon in new directions, taking him by the shoulders and turning him away from anything that might bring back memories of who he was before. They want him to move past this “funk,” they call it, if they call it anything at all. A spa day, or aikido, or learning to paint, or a good meal and strong coffee, that will help.
When he said ‘ Nen ,’ they blanched, the gentle caution wavering for a moment, revealing the horror beneath the veneer. For him. For themselves. Maybe for the whole world. They don’t trust him anymore. And soon after they send him off to another old friend to see if they have a better distraction.
He cups his hands around his glass of water and concentrates, picturing every vein and capillary in his body flowing with pure energy instead of blood. It rushes and builds within him until it explodes like a geyser, pouring into his glass, overflowing the sides, drowning the restaurant; pressure so intense it splinters its confines.
But when he opens his eyes and looks down, not so much as a ripple has formed in the water’s flat surface. The days where he learned ten in less than six months feel like a story he heard about another person, some boy genius who scaled every mountain and broke through every wall in his path.
He used to be limitless. He used to decide what was possible and then mold the world to make it true. People flocked to him because he showed them how to throw aside hesitation and live with every fiber of their being.
Until he took it too far, and everything his friends loved about him became the things they feared about him.
He volleys the drink side to side with his hands until it overflows anyway, splashing over the tabletop. When it skids close to the edge and he considers pushing it off, smashing it on the ground so that ice and glass fly everywhere, indistinguishable until it’s too late.
Once Zepile turns him out he doesn’t know who he’ll go to next. Morel and Knov were always frosty with him to begin with. He can’t access GREED ISLAND the way he is now. Leorio’s busy enough with school and only God knows where Kurapika is.
He used to have stronger instincts. Like a bird flying North he unerringly knew which direction to travel. He would ride the currents through storm clouds and alight safely. Unconscious, innate intuition.
Now, Gon thinks, and stumbles, and falls. His body is too big on him; there just isn’t enough of him left to fill it.
He hasn’t seen Killua since the World Tree.
The thought of his best friend seeing him like this disgusts him.
Just as he’s about to give the glass one final shove over the edge, a figure in the street catches his eye. Long black hair and a lanky frame, a thin package slung over the shoulders, gait loose but intentional.
He passes by the window and time ticks backwards, to a different restaurant in the same city. He’s even wearing the same green linen shirt, just slightly more threadbare.
Nobunaga, the frontline killer of the Phantom Troupe, who once saw something in Gon worth cultivating.
He’d wanted Gon to join them, even when he barely knew nen . They were immeasurably stronger than he was, but recognized his drive, his conviction, his passion. All the things he’s lost.
The Spider’s gone in a moment, and all the oxygen rushes out of the room after him. Even without nen Gon recognizes the oppressive aura of a master, the ozone-smell of raw power clinging to him. For a long moment, Gon can’t breathe, too busy falling backwards in time to two years ago when he knew who he was and he knew the difference between friend and foe. Back when he understood good and evil as black and white, not this hazy grey fog he sees now.
When their friend died, the Spiders mourned. They cried. And then they fought in his memory.
When their leader was taken, they did everything in their power to get him back. They died to save him.
Gon tore the world apart for someone once. He killed. He died for them. And when he came back, no one was waiting for him.
So as long as his friends hold him at arm's length, watching him out of the corners of their eyes. As long as they nod and handwave over the things he asks for, the help he actually wants in favor of distractions and platitudes. As long as Killua no longer stands by his side. Why shouldn’t he do this?
He slams 100 jenny down on the tabletop and leaves through the open window, landing in the middle of the fast-flowing river of busy Yorkers. He might be weak now without his nen , but he’ll always be fast. He can still track Nobunaga down. And the Phantom Troupe will give him his nen back.
Behind him, he hears glass shatter as his water falls off the table, and the exclamation of the waiter approaching with his food, but Gon is already gone, nose to the ground of his new hunt.
