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Mito feels sick as her only home disappears behind the waves.
She doesn’t get seasick, but she imagines it to be a lot like this. Her chest is tight, and her unspoken promise to always love Whale Island for what it is and the way it’s taken care of her family has been broken. Leaving is a betrayal of who she used to be.
The sun reflects on the ocean, an endless blue that swallows her future whole.
The cliff face of Whale Island was overly familiar to Mito’s hands. She’d been climbing up and down the rocks since she was three, or hopping across the creek with clumsy steps and getting the bottom of her skirt wet.
When Ging sent word that he became a Hunter just like he promised, Mito was still young enough that she wasn’t supposed to go out there—but she did, and she wondered if maybe she could become a Hunter like him. Maybe then she would stop feeling the all-encompassing pull of his back, leaving her behind.
But Mito had no other need to leave, other than that. So she didn’t.
In the shadows of her hollow cave, across the creek and close to the cliffs, she stared at the tangle of roots and plants blocking her view, and decided that as soon as she had a reason to leave other than to find Ging, she'd do it.
When she got back home covered in mud, her grandma scolded her for making them send out a search party, since none of them could find her.
“Only Ging could find you,” she said. “And he’s not here right now, so you need to stop going missing. I’m worried about you, dear. How am I supposed to know you’re safe?”
Mito ducked her head and apologized.
The cliffside above the unfamiliar town is taller than Whale Island’s cliffs, but it doesn’t jut out over the ocean, instead sitting above the buildings themselves. Mito feels oddly safe here, though nerves still fray when she thinks about how new things are after leaving home.
There are birds calling from far away, flying in flocks over the cliffs, diving down and circling back up. Mito watches them with fascination.
The radius of the town is small, but it still feels too large. Mito circles the blocks and feels like a child. The buildings are larger than any on Whale Island—the hotel could fit every single resident, and probably have room to spare.
She wonders if anyone will find her here.
She wonders if Gon felt this lost when going to a new place. Did he feel that same lump in his throat, the feeling of the wind on his face?
The cliff is nice, though. Mito stops in the middle of the sidewalk to gaze out at it as the sun dips lower into the sky. the clouds turn pink and orange, gathered at the horizon, and she shields her face with one hand. The birds are still there—tiny black shapes fluttering around the trees at the top of the cliffs, if she squints. She’s too far away right now to watch them.
Maybe the sense of newness is why Ging left. Mito holds onto this idea, thinks it over.
No, it must have been something else. Something further away from this little nook, something larger, further up into the sky. Ging is, after all—well, he’s Ging. He was looking for something, and it can’t be this.
“Are you leaving? Again?”
Ging’s face was completely different from when he was a kid. He had stubble, for God’s sake—he was barely a shadow of Mito’s long-faded memories of him.
Ging turned—his face was half-shadowy, standing in the entrance with all his things in a pitifully small bag. What use are objects to a Hunter? All his other things—the baby clothes, snacks, and toys—are sitting on the empty bed in the room he was supposed to stay in while Gon plays with their grandmother.
“I told you,” Ging said evenly. “I have to go.”
“Where?”
“Away.”
“Where?” Mito asked again, more forcefully. She felt small, a fragile creature; digging herself further into this hole of anger. Her hands balled into fists and she wanted to pummel them worthlessly into his stomach like when she was four and he was her whole world. “You can’t just—no! You can’t just come back and leave your kid with us without telling us how to find you!”
“I can’t take Gon with me for this, come on. Try to understand.” Ging’s eyebrow twitched, the first show of emotion she’d seen on him since she came stalking to the door after him.
“You shouldn’t have had a kid at all!” Mito snapped.
It didn’t feel like relief. It felt like horror when Ging looked at her—really, truly looked at her as the panes of his face shifted into dim light. His eyes pitied her, she thought, and it burned like molten metal through her insides.
“Mito,” he started. “You’re being a child.”
“Never come back! Just leave Gon with us!” Mito turned and ran. When she slammed the door, it sent a jolt through her whole body, a decrease in momentum that made her stumble. She didn’t look at his back as he left—she didn’t want to see what expression she would receive, if anything at all.
She had hoped that Ging would show up, but the Freecss’s court date came and went without a word. She avoided her grandmother’s gaze throughout the whole thing, bowed down her head. She’d scared Ging off and he silently gave up custody to the two of them—the only thing that could scare him, apparently, was a teenage girl.
It didn’t feel as funny as it sounded when she whispered it to her grandmother.
Mito carried the sleeping Gon back and forth from the tiny courthouse. If, perhaps, she had a purpose, it must have been to take the long walk from one end of Whale Island to the other in the new summer’s heat, carrying a toddler against her shoulder.
“Do you want me to take him?” her grandmother asked.
“No,” Mito huffed. “It’s fine. I’m just upset at him! Why did he do that!” And she raged at the sun instead of the man who had left her behind again, and Ging didn’t hear her cries.
The cliff where Ging waits for her is a pretty long climb. She guesses it’s Ging’s way of testing her, or something. Her legs ache near the end of it, though she took the easier, more winding path rather than the one recommended for Hunters.
In a way, she’s still weak. She’s no Hunter—she’s just from a line of people who leave to go on adventures that she’ll never be part of.
And even so, she finds, reaching the top, an area full of trees and calling birds in their cliffside nests—looking out at the buildings, at the distant lake she hadn’t realized was out there—it’s worth it, after all. Even if Ging makes this worse, she can’t regret this moment.
The world greets her, and Mito—
She doesn’t know how to greet it back. This is the first time she’s looked it in the face.
Mito, the letter read. I need your help. I know you won’t want to give it, but hey, worth a shot. Just listen to me.
The letter had no name attached, but she knew who it was from.
Ging is lying on the grass in the shade.
The grass makes it impossible for Mito to be quiet as she approaches. It doesn’t really bother her, but she remembers that as a kid she always tried to be sneaky when she followed Ging out into the forest.
Ging opens his eyes and looks up at her. “Hey, you came.”
“It’s been over a decade, Ging,” Mito sighs, but sits down next to him. “Why do you even need my help?”
Ging laughs, audaciously, wheezes humor out of his body. Mito gives him annoyance right back. Ging stops laughing just to grin at her, something wild and distinctly Hunter-like in his smile. “Why do I need your help? Why not?”
“I’m leaving,” Mito says, but makes no move to get up.
Ging closes his eyes again. It’s so annoying that it makes a bubble of anger fill Mito’s chest—but it quickly pops, unable to really comprehend what he’s doing.
“Oh, you’re not actually going?” Ging says after a few minutes, lazily opening one of his eyes again. “Hm.”
“You don’t like me,” Mito says matter-of-factly, bitterness seeping into her voice. “You don’t really want me here. It’s all a game to you. You want to involve me in something without letting me understand it.”
“Sure.”
“You’re not denying it?”
Ging sits up slowly, turning to look her in the eye. “I mean, it won’t make you believe it less if I argue against you, and I don’t really care. I just wanted to give you the option. And, hey, you’re still here. But I like you just fine, Mito.”
It’s the first time he’s said her name in—god, she doesn’t want to remember. Despite herself, she knows how he said it: Mito. You’re being a child.
Mito curls her legs to her chest. “Whatever.”
“How do you like it here? This is your first time leaving the island, right? Or did you leave with Gon sometime?” Ging grins.
“No,” Mito says. “Gon left on his own. You know that.”
“I mean,” Ging waves a hand around vaguely. “Since then, I wondered if you’d gone with him. He’s the kind of kid who drags other people with him everywhere he goes. I wouldn’t be surprised if that included you, but I guess not. So. Why now?”
“You asked me to come.”
“Huh.”
She feels like she’s given a wrong answer. “When Gon came back, he said what you wanted as a Hunter was everything you don’t have.” She threads the grass through her fingers. “Why? How did you want that for so long?”
“There’s always more,” Ging says like it’s nothing. “So I keep hunting.”
And Mito keeps staying in place. She wishes Ging had wanted her to come for some bigger reason than this—dancing around the subject, letting her ask questions with obvious answers. In a way, it was only Ging who could pull her out of Whale Island and into this world.
There’s always more that Ging wants, and there’s nothing Mito can let herself hunt for.
Mito lets them fall into silence. The whispers of the wind come from the cliff—the sun is still warm, a tiny flame still burning. Mito still hasn’t caught up to Ging.
“I wanted to apologize,” Ging says. “For shoving Gon onto you.”
Mito’s head snaps up.
“Well, it’s all in the past,” Ging continues. “So you don’t have to forgive me or anything, ‘cause it won’t change anything. He’s a good kid, and I don’t regret having him. You taking him away from me is probably the best thing that ever happened to him—not that he’d understand that.”
Mito wants to tell him he’s wrong. That he hurt Gon, good intentions or not. But—Ging was a terrible father. Is a terrible father. So she says nothing.
“Anyway,” Ging leans back on his hands. “I wasn’t lying about needing your help, either.”
“Sorry,” Mito says, and gets to her feet, standing above Ging. She plants her feet, breathes in the sunlit air, and speaks. “I can’t do it. You—you should apologize to Gon yourself, and not make excuses. I don’t need your apology.”
Mito’s chest is tight. This is the reason she left Whale Island—to understand someone she hasn’t known for years.
“Okay,” Ging says. “Do whatever you want.”
It’s dismissive, and it makes Mito feel like she’s going to drown right here at the top of the world. And yet—because Ging called her here, she didn’t have to search for him. This is an easy journey in comparison to what Gon went through, no matter what tests Ging gave him. There was no game, no hide and seek, only the cliff. There’s nothing else Mito can do.
“I’m going to go somewhere else,” Mito says. “Somewhere that isn’t here, and isn’t Whale Island. And I’ll live my own life, and then I’ll go back home. If you still need something from me then—come back there instead of calling me away. Grandma will want to see you.”
She won’t betray that island, with all her friends and her entire life laid there. There are things deeper rooted than blood inside her. There are trails she will miss, homesickness that will follow her as long as she follows Ging’s path through the world.
Ging smiles. “Good for you.”
And that’s the last she sees of him for now. A final image that supersedes the image of his back, leaving her behind.