Chapter Text
) ● (
Chrollo blinks the water out of his eyes. The figure that stands over him, painted in blurry watercolors of red and gold, slowly sharpens into focus.
“Kurapika?”
The name is sputtered from his lips, a thing both divine and damned. The face that looms above him is something straight out of scripture — golden hair framing their face like a halo, eyes burning with holy flame.
A flame of fire, Chrollo thinks, and is struck with the mad urge to laugh.
It’s only when the mouth above him twists, those twin-flame eyes burning even brighter, that Chrollo realizes he actually did. It’s accompanied by an immediate strangling sensation in his chest, his water-logged lungs rebelling against the breath drawn into them, as he descends into a coughing fit.
Static cuts across his vision. His body is yanked abruptly forward.
His knee bangs against the side of the bathtub, and water sloshes over the edge. Pain knives through the fog in his brain, the world dancing around him, a dizzying cacophony of colors and sensations that refuse to make sense. He’s shoved down onto something solid, cold, as he hunches over and coughs.
Once the water is expelled from his lungs, he looks up through shaky vision. Bathwater — and possibly tears — stings at his eyes.
Kurapika Kurta stares back at him. Fury blazing in bonfire eyes.
“What the f*ck, Lucilfer?”
Strange. His apparitions have never taken this form before.
They have only ever been his spiders, up until now. Or Sarasa. Sheila, her ghostly visage the same as that day in the cemetery when they parted, hissing at him in accusation: Didn’t I tell you? Didn’t I say it would end just like this? You, alone, elbows deep in their blood?
Never Kurapika.
Chrollo wonders what his subconscious is trying to tell him, that it has chosen this face as the one to torment him now.
The world floats around him. He stares up at those burning eyes, a single piercing point of stillness. His ears are clogged, his throat burning, and he tries to remember where he is. When he is. The air is cold against his bare skin, and everything is deep underwater. Distant, echoing, a struggle to push through and touch.
Except — no. He isn’t underwater. He was, but he isn’t anymore. Right?
Paku was here, wasn’t she? Where did she go?
“…ilfer. Lucilfer. Chrollo!”
A sudden crack pierces the silence, loud and harsh, as Chrollo’s head snaps brutally to the side. The pain follows a second behind, his cheek and jaw blooming with fire, and the world goes blindingly bright for a moment. He blinks black spots from his vision, turning his head back forward.
Kurapika lowers the hand he just brought down on Chrollo’s face. “Can you hear me now?”
He blinks at him. His ears are ringing, and he tastes blood in his mouth. He struggles for a second with his vocal chords. “…What?”
Kurapika scoffs. He mutters something under his breath that Chrollo doesn’t catch. But as he looks at Chrollo again, the scorn in his expression shifts to slight discomfort. He averts his gaze from the other man’s naked, soaking wet form.
“Stay here,” the apparition orders. “Don’t move.”
Where would I go? Chrollo wonders.
Kurapika turns, a whirl of gold and red and blue, and is suddenly gone from his sight.
Not real. A hallucination. But Chrollo presses his tongue against the cut on the inside of his mouth — feels the sting, the metallic tinge of blood. The throbbing of his cheek. All things that suggest that Kurapika is here, is real. Unless Chrollo’s mind is even more f*cked up than he realized, that it’s giving his hallucinations corporeal form now.
He tries to understand. To recall the chain of events that led to his enemy standing in the bathroom of his apartment. But all his mind conjures up is the image of Paku shoving his head underwater, holding him there just below the surface as he struggled and drowned.
But that can’t have been real. Paku is no older than twelve in the fragmented memory. She’s older now —
No. She’s dead.
They all are.
Your fault, Shal reminds him.
Sheila perches on the edge of the tub. I told you so, she tells him, in a child’s sing-song voice. I told you so, I told you so, I told you so.
“Be quiet,” Chrollo says.
Uvo scoffs. Can’t even kill yourself properly.
“That — ” Chrollo can’t swallow. There’s something thick in his throat, his hands trembling against his knees. “I wasn’t trying to kill myself.”
Bullsh*t. At least own up to it, Danchou.
“I didn’t mean to.”
“Didn’t mean to what? Drown yourself in the bath like they used to do with unwanted puppies?”
His head snaps up at the voice. The ghosts go skirting back to the periphery of his vision, like co*ckroaches scattering when the light turns on.
Kurapika has returned, a bundle of clothes tucked under his arm. It’s a mark of how out of it Chrollo is, that he didn’t even sense the man’s aura as he approached. Or perhaps it’s further proof that he’s nothing more than an apparition, just a creation of Chrollo’s own mind, despite the throbbing of his cheek that says otherwise.
“Maybe I thought I was Saint Peter,” Chrollo says. “I had a moment of doubt, but you were there to pull me out the instant I started to sink.”
The blonde's mouth is a sharp and unamused line. “Spare me your pretentious metaphors.”
Chrollo looks back at him. “Your eyes aren’t scarlet anymore,” he observes.
The response is immediate. Kurapika’s face darkens like a storm rolling in. Brown eyes flash with a hint of scarlet, as if to purposely bely Chrollo’s previous words.
“Here,” he snarls, and chucks the bundle of clothing at Chrollo’s bare chest. “Get dressed. Or don’t. Drown yourself in the bath again if you want, I won’t f*cking stop you this time.”
He spins around and exits the room again, slamming the door as he goes.
Chrollo sits there, unmoving, for a span of time — one that feels simultaneously like forever and no time at all. Then he stands from the closed toilet seat and grabs a towel to dry himself off with. He dresses in the fresh pair of clothes.
As he moves to drain the bathtub, he stares down at the water as it disappears down the pipes. I almost killed myself, he thinks, and lets the realization settle slow in his mind.
There’s a sense of detachment to it, a sense of unreality. A thick pane of glass sits between him and the world, as it has for months now. He wants to rage against it, to shatter it into pieces against his knuckles and feel the blood drip down his fingers; but he lacks the energy required for him to try.
How pathetic, Phinks says. No, not Phinks. It’s Feitan.
Chrollo doesn’t respond. He doesn’t disagree.
When he steps outside the bathroom, he half-expects to find the apartment empty. Kurapika gone, just another figment, vanished back into the air that he came from. But he hears noises from the kitchen, and turns the corner to find the blonde is still there — invading his kitchen cupboards, his back facing him. The rich blue of his tabard and the gold accents woven into the fabric, only a few shades darker than his hair.
“ — all you have to eat?” Kurapika is saying. “This is pathetic. How have you not starved by now?”
Chrollo’s cupboards are dusty and nearly entirely bare. Kurapika slams them closed with a quiet huff, turning toward the refrigerator. When he pulls the door open, he’s met with the exact same sight.
“Are you serious? There’s a store right across the street.”
“What are you doing here?” Chrollo asks, ignoring the disparaging commentary.
Ghosts whisper and flicker in the corners of his vision.
The other man pauses for a moment, before closing the fridge door and turning to face him. “I’m here to kill you.”
“You’re doing a poor job, then.”
“Well, I didn’t expect to show up to find you doing the job for me.”
Silence falls between them, fraught with blood spilled.
Chrollo is wearing a white, button-down shirt with a simple pair of black slacks. His feet are bare against the apartment floor, water still clinging to damp hair. Somehow, he feels more exposed now in such casual clothing than he did completely naked in the bathroom. The persona of the Phantom Troupe leader, so carefully cultivated over the years, is nowhere in sight now. Chrollo doesn’t bother trying to reach for it, knowing already it won’t be there.
The Spider is dead — exterminated. Its leader has perished with it, just as the Red Cleaner perished with Sarasa.
There is just him now. And just him has never been anyone.
The shades on the edges of his vision whisper their agreement.
The attire Kurapika is wearing now — the tribal clothing, blue and gold that falls to his ankles, rather than the black suit he donned while employed as a bodyguard aboard the ship — brings Chrollo right back to three years ago, in this very same city. The airship, the chains wrapping around his heart, Paku’s face burnt into his memory for the last time… For a moment, he experiences the disorienting sensation of having taken a step back in time.
He focuses on the differences. Kurapika’s height hasn’t changed since then, but his hair is a few inches longer. The angles of his face are sharper, clinging vestiges of adolescence now filed away. His eyes are older — less angry, more tired.
Kurapika is the one to break the stretching silence. “Come on,” he says, his body turning. “Get your shoes on and let’s go.”
Chrollo blinks. “Go?”
“To the store.”
The words make no discernible sense. He stares at the blonde from behind his pane of glass, still feeling much like he’s trapped in a dream. “…Why?”
“Because I’m starving,” Kurapika says, as if that explains everything instead of nothing. “And I can’t leave you here by yourself. You might slit your throat with one of the kitchen knives. Or toss yourself out a window. Then I’ll have wasted the money I spent to get here.”
He moves toward the apartment door, looking back at Chrollo expectantly.
) ● (
Chrollo goes with Kurapika to the grocery store across the street.
Kurapika pushes the shopping cart down the aisles, stopping periodically to reach for items on the shelves. He looks at Chrollo when he does this, asking for the older man’s input, but Chrollo never gives an opinion. Kurapika stops asking at around the fifth time.
It's a surreal experience, and not at helpful in snapping Chrollo out of his dream-like fugue.
Kurapika stretches up on his tip-toes to grab something from one of the top shelves. A box of ground coffee, one of the darkest blends in stock. Chrollo speaks up for the first time since they entered the building.
“I’m not drinking that,” he says.
He doesn’t see Kurapika roll his eyes, but he hears it in his voice. “Then don’t. It’s meant for me, anyway.”
“I don’t have a coffee machine.”
“Then we’ll buy one.”
Just how long are you planning to be at my apartment? he wonders.
He says nothing else. Kurapika places the coffee into the cart, and they continue perusing the aisles.
When the shopping is finished, they head over to one of the registers. Kurapika begins unloading all their items onto the conveyor belt — including a brand new coffee machine — and snaps at Chrollo in annoyance when he makes no move to help. Once the cashier has finished ringing them up, she reads out their total.
Kurapika looks expectantly at Chrollo.
Chrollo’s eyes narrow in response. “Why are you looking at me? I’m not paying.”
“You’re the one we’re shopping for. And I told you, I spent most of my money on the blimp ticket to get here.”
“I fail to see how that’s my problem.”
Kurapika’s jaw clenches. “Fine,” he snaps. “How about because you’d be dead in your bathtub right now, if it wasn’t for me?”
An emotion echoes through him at the reminder. The barest brush of something hot — anger, or perhaps humiliation. He feels the words poised on his tongue sharpen in response: “Two of my spiders would also be alive still, if not for you.”
“Doubtful. Hisoka would have killed them too. My clan, on the other hand, would definitely be alive if not for you.”
The cashier is looking between them like she isn’t sure if she’s meant to be amused or horrified.
Chrollo thinks about killing Kurapika right there, in the middle of the store checkout. Watching his blood splatter across the white-tiled floors, just like Hisoka’s. Just like his spiders’. He thinks about killing the cashier too, just because she’s there, and he can, and he thinks it might make him feel better — if only for half a second, before the feeling once again freezes and dies in his chest.
He pulls out his wallet and pays.
By the time the two of them get back to the apartment, Chrollo has decided he’s done with this day. The entire right side of his face aches with a developing bruise, and the ghosts are hissing at him so loudly that he can barely hear himself think. Kurapika pulling him from the bathtub feels like an eternity ago.
He wants to curl up under the covers of his bed and forget about his own pulse. He wants Kurapika to leave, but he doesn’t have the energy to make him.
His hands shake as he fits the key into the lock. Kurapika says nothing about it, and Chrollo thinks he might have killed him if he did.
Once inside, he shoves off his shoes and drops the bags onto the counter. Vaguely, he’s aware of Kurapika speaking to him — he can see the blonde’s mouth moving, as he flits around the kitchen putting everything away — but he hears none of his words. His voice is muffled and distorted, blending in with the dozens of others in Chrollo’s head.
Next to Kurapika, the handle of a kitchen knife glints in the holder. Chrollo thinks about grabbing it — about plunging the blade into Kurapika’s chest, and watching as his eyes go dull.
But then he thinks about the time it would take to clean the blood off the floor.
“I’m going to bed,” Chrollo says.
Kurapika blinks, cutting off his flow of words. “Okay.”
He doesn’t mention how it’s the middle of the afternoon, and that Chrollo has no reason to be tired. There’s a look in his eyes that is far too knowing, far too understanding.
It only fuels Chrollo’s desire to be angry — the idea that Kurapika thinks he could ever understand anything about what Chrollo is feeling. But he’s too numb to be angry, so it just makes him more exhausted.
“I don’t know why you’re here,” Chrollo tells him. “But if you aren’t gone by morning, I’ll cut out your eyes and put them up online to bid on.”
Fury washes over the blonde’s expression. But Chrollo is already turning away, ducking into his bedroom and shutting himself into the dark.
) ● (
He doesn’t re-emerge until the next day, a full seventeen hours later. Kurapika still hasn’t left.
He knows this before he even opens his eyes, because he can hear the noises from beyond the bedroom door. He can smell something frying too, an enticing aroma that sneaks in through the door’s cracks. Prying his eyes open, he observes the thin strip of light coming from beneath it.
Chrollo stares at it, wrapped up in the suffocating warmth of his covers, as he remembers — remembers Kurapika, and processes that his blurry memories of yesterday were real.
He doesn’t feel at all rested. Lethargy still weighs down his limbs, and he wants more than anything to close his eyes again. To forget that there’s a world beyond his bedroom door. Instead, he throws back his covers and forces himself up.
Kurapika is standing at the stove when Chrollo steps into the room. He’s frying eggs on a skillet, and doesn’t turn when Chrollo enters. To anyone else, his unprotected back might read as a sign of trust; but Chrollo reads it for what it really is — confidence in his own abilities.
It isn’t that he trusts Chrollo not to attack. He trusts himself to be able to defend.
His hair is up today. It’s been gathered into a loose bun with a rubber band. A few strands have been missed, free against the nape of his neck, skin bare and on display as his head tilts slightly over the skillet.
Chrollo pulls his gaze away. “You’re still here.”
“Yes.” The blonde still doesn’t turn around. “Are you going to kill me like you said? Cut out my eyes?”
Do it! Uvo urges him. Danchou, it’ll be fun!
Chrollo considers it, but it seems like a far too exhausting task for so early in the morning. “Not right now.”
“That’s disappointing. Let me know when, then.”
“Courting your own death?”
“That’s you,” Kurapika replies, “not me. I just thought it’d be a good opportunity to kick in your teeth.”
Chrollo’s jaw clenches. “What are you still doing here?” he demands, as he moves to sit down in one of the chairs.
The younger man turns a dial on the stove, the gas in the burner dying down. “Stopping you from slitting your wrists with a razor blade,” he says blithely. “Or hanging yourself from your ceiling fan. Downing a bottle of pills, stepping into traffic, putting a gun to your head — ”
“I don’t have a gun,” Chrollo lies, because he feels suddenly very nauseous and wants Kurapika to stop talking.
“I don’t believe you,” Kurapika says.
I wouldn’t use it for that, Chrollo thinks.
He doesn’t speak it out loud. He means it, he does, but it doesn’t sound as certain in his head as he thought it would. Also, it sounds like he’s attempting to defend himself, and he isn’t going to be made to do that. Not to Kurapika Kurta.
I don’t owe you anything.
(Don’t you? a quiet voice asks.)
“You were there yesterday for a reason,” Chrollo says. “Before you found me. You were already coming to see me. Why?”
Kurapika is motionless for a moment. Then, as if Chrollo didn’t speak, he begins placing the eggs onto two of the plates they bought yesterday.
When he sets one of the plates down in front of Chrollo, it’s with a hostile energy that cancels out any kindness that would normally be found in the action. He sits down at the table with his own plate.
“Eat your breakfast,” is all the Kurta says.
Chrollo imagines hurling the fork in his hand at Kurapika’s throat. He imagines the prongs impaling him, the blood spurting, the man’s hands pressing uselessly against his own neck. He imagines those brown eyes — those scarlet eyes — going dull. Just like Nobu’s. Just like Shal’s. Just like Kalluto’s, like Machi’s, like Sarasa’s…
Chrollo lowers his eyes. He begins eating his breakfast.
) ● (
Chrollo spends most of his days holed up in his bedroom. His awareness of the world around him waxes and wanes, the sun coming and going in the time it takes him to blink. He lays there, himself and his ghosts, despising the sound of his own breathing in the silence.
Sometimes, noise bleeds through from beyond the door. Sometimes, Chrollo is able to pull himself from his bed to step out.
Kurapika is always there.
Chrollo should kill him. He said he would do it, after all. Or if not kill him, then he should at least throw him out of the apartment. He doesn’t know why he hasn’t yet — beyond the idea feeling completely exhausting.
But. Also.
The ghosts are quieter when Kurapika is around.
And when Chrollo is around him, he feels more firmly in his own body than he has in months.
) ● (
“What are you still doing here?” Chrollo asks.
It’s around the seventh time he’s asked this question — or some variation of it. Kurapika never answers, only deflects.
Today, the younger man is sitting in the armchair across from him. Curled up in the small space, legs folded and tucked under him to make his entire body fit. Chrollo has only ever seen him lethal and sharp, a blade carefully honed; but right now he looks strangely soft, socked feet and comfortable clothing, one of Chrollo’s well-loved books open in his lap.
For a moment, Chrollo gets the sense that he’s looking at a different person entirely.
Kurapika looks up from the book’s pages. “Do you want me to leave?” he asks.
Chrollo doesn’t answer him.
Kurapika stays.
) ● (
Stop f*cking shaking, Chrollo thinks, with the kind of helpless frustration that’s reserved for his head alone, and never out loud.
His fingers tighten around the handle of the razor, the blade held inches from his face. The image of himself that stares back at him from the bathroom mirror feels distant and separate from himself. There are dark shadows pressed beneath his eyes, too-long bangs pushed out of his face. The lower half of his face is covered by a thin film of shaving cream.
And his hand, gripping the razor, won’t stop shaking. Like he’s fifteen again and has just killed for the first time.
He tries, for a couple more minutes, to make the trembling stop. His hand rebels against him. With a frustrated twist of his mouth, he throws the razor down. It clatters as it lands in the sink.
Machi laughs at him. Pathetic, Danchou.
Kortopi suggests something else he could do with the razor, that his trembling hand could accomplish far more easily.
There’s a flash of gold in the mirror. A brush of ash and copper against his senses.
“I can do it for you,” Kurapika says.
He’s standing in the bathroom doorway, appearing with a shimmer of gold hair and blue fabric. Barely visible behind Chrollo in the mirror, his lithe frame leans against the door jam. His arms are crossed over his chest, brown eyes meeting gray ones in the reflected glass.
Chrollo still isn’t used to those eyes. He’s gotten used to the artificial black, but he hasn’t seen a glimpse of Kurapika’s usual contact lenses since he arrived.
“Get out,” Chrollo tells him, even as his bright presence sends all the ghosts scampering back into the shadows.
“No. I’m making sure you haven’t come in here to try to off yourself again. Do you want my help or not?”
Chrollo turns away from Kurapika’s reflection in the mirror to look at the actual person in the doorway. “You?” he asks, an eyebrow raised. “Have you ever shaved a day in your life?”
“What is that supposed to mean?”
The words border on a snarl, eyes sharpening and turning lethal as he shoves himself off the doorframe. Chrollo recognizes immediately that he’s hit against a pressure point — though this time, for once, it was completely unintentional.
Still, he isn’t going to apologize. Let Kurapika think Chrollo was purposely mocking his gender. Maybe he’ll get angry enough to finally f*cking leave.
No such luck. When Chrollo doesn’t reply to him, it only takes a few moments for the sharpness to bleed from Kurapika’s body. His glare cools to something less furious, less hostile; and settles instead into a careful, practiced indifference. He steps farther into the room, reaching into the sink to snatch up the discarded razor.
“I haven’t shaved before,” Kurapika admits. “But with how badly your hand looked to be shaking, I’m still the one least likely to slit your throat while doing it.”
Accidentally, maybe, Chrollo thinks.
Kurapika moves to stand in front of Chrollo. He places both of his hands on Chrollo’s shoulders. “Sit,” he orders, like Chrollo is a dog, and he pushes him forcibly down onto the closed lid of the toilet.
It sends a muted spark of irritation through him.
(Also, a bolt of something hotter he refuses to acknowledge.)
Kurapika frowns. There’s a brief moment of indecision on his face as he considers how best to maneuver himself, before he seemingly throws out any reservations regarding personal space and awkwardness. He pushes Chrollo’s knees apart and steps between them.
He’s positioned himself very carefully, the two of them not actually touching. But if Chrollo shifts either of his thighs more than a few inches, then they will be. Chrollo fights against the instinct to tense, everything about the blonde’s close proximity — the blade in his hand — screaming threat.
Kurapika grips Chrollo’s chin between his thumb and forefinger, tilting his head back. “Stay still.”
“Sir, yes, sir,” Chrollo says sarcastically.
Kurapika rolls his eyes. “I’ll remind you that I’m about to hold a blade against your throat. You might want to watch what you say for once.”
The younger man’s fingers keep their grip on Chrollo’s chin, holding his head in place. Shaving cream smears against Kurapika’s index finger and the pad of his thumb. His other hand moves to press the straight razor to the underside of Chrollo’s chin.
Chrollo holds his breath at the first drag of the blade against his skin. Despite his inexperience, Kurapika’s motion is smooth and steady. Without anywhere else to direct his attention, Chrollo finds his eyes falling and locking onto Kurapika’s face — the press of his lips, the wrinkle of concentration between his eyebrows. Brown eyes, such an ordinary and common shade, yet for some reason they hold Chrollo’s focus.
He burns Chrollo to look at. The artful fall of blonde hair, the dangling ruby earring, the indecipherable gaze — it all brings him back to the Black Whale. To Nobunaga’s blood coating his hands. Hisoka’s head rolling across the lounge floor. Chrollo fracturing right down the center, collapsing in Queen Oito’s arms, and Kurapika refusing to do him the courtesy of averting his eyes.
Not even his spiders had ever seen him so low.
He wonders if it’s the same for Kurapika. Does he see Lukso’s blood-soaked ground, whenever he looks at Chrollo? Images of his clansmen’s mangled bodies, going off in front of his eyes like flash grenades?
If so, then how does he bear it? How can he willingly stand here in front of Chrollo right now?
The razor blade slides up, over the soft juncture between his larynx and his jaw. Chrollo is extremely aware of the vulnerability of his position — how easy it would be for Kurapika to simply push, and bury the blade deep in his throat. He could kill Chrollo right now, so easy, so quick. It would probably be the least of what he deserved.
And yet, for some reason, Kurapika doesn’t.
“Why are you here?” Chrollo asks him again. “Why are you helping me?”
The razor stills for a brief moment. “This again?” Kurapika’s eyes flicker with annoyance at the persisted question. “I told you already.”
“The actual reason.”
Why did you save me? Why were you even here to do it?
Why don’t you leave?
“I’m a masoch*st,” the blonde snaps at him, “clearly. Now shut the hell up. I’ve been resisting the very strong urge to slash this razor across your throat, and the sound of your voice makes it worse.”
“Go ahead,” Chrollo says.
Kurapika stares at him. Chrollo wonders when the blonde became so skilled at concealing his thoughts from his eyes. Back three years ago when they first met, the seventeen-year-old was so easy to read. An open book with bleeding pages. Even when they reunited on Black Whale, he was much more guarded and controlled, but still not completely inscrutable. But now, he’s akin to wall inscribed with ancient hieroglyphs. Chrollo would have needed a Rosetta Stone to decode him.
It's disconcerting — especially since he gets the feeling that Kurapika is having no such difficulty in reading him.
Without warning, the razor at his throat shifts. It presses forward, in tandem with the Kurta’s body, deadly and lethal as it digs into his carotid artery. In less than a fraction of a second, transformed from a tool to a weapon, in a merciless hand that Chrollo knows will not hesitate to go for the kill.
“’Go ahead,’” Kurapika echoes, sotto voce. Strands of his hair tickle Chrollo’s face, inches between them. His breath smells like the cinnamon of Chrollo’s toothpaste. “Are you sure about that? Because I will do it, Lucilfer.”
There is no fear. Chrollo’s breath doesn’t catch. His heart doesn’t kickstart behind his ribs.
“Then why haven’t you?”
He’s careful to speak around the pressure of the blade. Still, the movement causes it to dig a millimeter more into his trachea. He feels a slight sting as the razor breaks skin.
Kurapika looks at him for a moment — studying him, neither of them blinking. The stillness between them feels solid and tangible, like something that can be struck and shattered. One of the blonde’s knees digs painfully into his groin, pinning him in place where he sits, and he catches a coiling hint of his cologne in the air. Coconut and lemon.
“You really mean it,” Kurapika says. There’s an odd quality to his voice “You really don’t care if I kill you right now.”
“I’ve never been afraid of my own death. You’ve known that since our first meeting.”
“No. This is different than then.”
Chrollo says nothing. A second passes, then the blade is lowered from his throat.
He swallows a cough, as the weight on his groin disappears and Kurapika steps back. Chrollo brings up a hand to touch his stinging neck. His fingers come back red. He looks back up at the man in front of him. “Not going to kill me, then?”
In response, Kurapika echoes Chrollo’s previous words right back to him: “No. Not right now.”
He resumes what he was doing before, and the two of them don’t speak again.
)●(
That night, Chrollo has the dream again. The same dream he has at least three times a week, only this time it’s slightly different.
It begins the same — standing amidst the trash and the debris of Meteor City, blanketed by an achingly familiar gray sky. The rancid taste of rot and waste against his tongue, as he breathes in the polluted air. It’s horrible, as always, yet it fills him with a melancholic sense of homesickness all the same. Phantom laughter, children’s laughter, seems to travel two decades through time to echo on the breeze.
He walks forward slowly, aimlessly. His feet are soundless against the hard ground. When he looks across from him, someone is standing there as they always are. But it isn’t one of Chrollo’s spiders this time.
It's a young boy. Skinny and starved, like all the children of Meteor City, his clothes hanging off his malnourished frame. His shins are bruised, his elbows scraped and scabbed, and dark bangs fall over a bare forehead that hasn’t yet had a needle taken to it, a cross inked into the skin. His gray eyes are an identical shade to Chrollo’s — but different, less apathetic, more expressive and open.
Chrollo hasn’t seen the boy in years. His feet come to a halt when he spots him.
A reflection, eighteen years rewound.
“How could you do this?” Young Chrollo asks.
No, not Chrollo. Chrollo might have been this boy once, an entire lifetime ago, but this boy has never been him. He never will be. Chrollo ensured it, when grinded him into dust beneath the heel of his shoe all those years ago.
He looks to be around eight or nine, which means his actual age is probably around eleven or twelve. The exact age he was when Sarasa was stolen from him. The age he was when he made the vow, standing over her grave —
I’ll drive the monsters out of this city. Even if it means becoming one myself.
There will never be a victim like Sarasa again.
The young boy looks up at him. His eyes are sharp, accusatory, in a way Chrollo can’t remember them ever being. The color of a blade. “You threw me away. You forgot all about me.”
The normal script doesn’t work here. The words ring with an unmistakable truth. Chrollo feels it in the crevices of his ribcage, and he tastes the rain from that day on his face. His freezing fingers, against the rope, as the water reached his bones and froze them.
“I had to,” Chrollo says. “To do what I had to — I couldn’t be you anymore. I mourned you — ”
The boy cuts him off, his eyes pinning him in place.
“No. You killed me. And now you’re nothing.”
Chrollo wakes up covered in a disgusting layer of sweat, suffocating under the weight of his covers. It takes a moment for the waste and garbage to be replaced by the clean, filtered air in his apartment. A terrible heaviness presses down on his chest.
He can already tell that today is going to be a bad day.
He’s tempted to pull his covers over his head and just go back to sleep. Why even face the day, if it’s going to be a bad one? He can rejoin the world tomorrow. But the heaviness left behind by his dream refuses to leave, and the seat inside his room is suffocating him like he’s trapped inside a sealed coffin. He shoves the blankets back and forces himself up.
Chrollo doesn’t have a clock in his bedroom, but the sunlight creeping through closed curtains tells him it’s daytime. There’s no light creeping through the bottom of the door though, which is strange — if it’s daytime, then Kurapika should be out there in the apartment’s main living space. He should have turned the lights on.
But when Chrollo stands up and opens the door, he’s met with a dark and empty apartment. He reaches across the wall to flip on the lights, a wave of unexpected wrongness crashing over him.
He's alone. Kurapika isn’t here.
It’s such a foreign sight, after these past few weeks, his brain takes a few seconds to process and understand. It doesn’t make sense. The Kurta is always here whenever Chrollo exits his bedroom — sometimes cooking breakfast in the kitchen, other times curled up in the armchair and reading. So why isn’t he here now?
Kurapika had, at some point, moved into Chrollo’s apartment — though Chrollo never consented to such a thing, and he only realized it had happened when he spotted the second toothbrush in the holder on the bathroom sink. Despite this, Chrollo knows the other man doesn’t occupy the apartment twenty-four hours a day. He’s been out on multiple grocery runs. To a bookstore, after he read through all the books on Chrollo’s shelves. To visit his friend Gon, after the young boy called him on his cell phone to beg him.
But Kurapika has always managed to time his excursions perfectly, for when Chrollo has locked himself away in his bedroom. This is the first time he hasn’t been present when Chrollo opens his door.
His apartment is vacant again, just as it was before. Only ghosts and shadows for company. And Chrollo finds he doesn’t know what to do with this — with the immediate sense of all-encompassing emptiness.
Yes. Today will be very bad day.
)●(
Somehow, he ends up on the floor of his bedroom with his body tucked up and folded into the narrow space between his bed and the dresser. Settled against his half-bent legs, are the dusty and crinkled old scripts he found and took with him from Meteor City — a doorway into the past, once soldered shut, but that his most recent dream has forcefully pried open.
The pages have grown fragile with age. Their writing faded. Still, Chrollo recognizes the unsteady hand as his own. Messy, chaotic scribbles of a young boy who had taught himself how to form each letter of the alphabet, and who had yet to refine his handwriting.
He was the only one who was fully literate back then, so he was always the stenographer. Still, he recognizes a few scribbled words in the margins of the pages from one of the others — letters too misshapen and wobbly to read.
The writing is his, but it doesn’t feel like it when he looks at it. It feels like it belongs to some other child, completely separate from him.
You forgot all about me.
The lights are off in the bedroom, but the sunlight that spills through the sliver in the curtains is enough to illuminate it. The room around him, while not a complete mess, is in a rather uncared-for state. Quite unlike him — but then, who even is he these days? Who is Chrollo Lucilfer, but a patchwork of traits and behaviors that he’s stolen from those around him, and then stitched together to serve as his skin?
Now you’re nothing, the boy said in his dream.
I am killing you, Hisoka said.
Chrollo stares down at the pages in front of him. Something clenches in his chest, as he stares down at the handwriting of the boy-who-isn’t-Chrollo. Impulsively, hands shaking, he tears the papers up. The noise is loud and jarring in the silence.
A fog-like haze has fallen over everything. Nothing feels real. For a moment, Chrollo wishes for Kurapika. The blonde has an uncanny, unexplainable ability to make the fog disappear. To make everything sharp and bright and real again. Even if the feelings that usually come out of that clarity are negative ones — hostility and anger, blood in the back of his throat and poison held in his teeth.
He feels like he did when he allowed the water to drag him down. Untethered, unanchored. His hand has slipped into the bottom drawer of the dresser, fingers closing around the handle of the Ben’s Knife he has hidden there.
He waits for the ghosts to converge on him again. To offer up their encouragements or condemnations. But for once, there is nothing. No whispers. No flickers in the periphery of his vision. Just silence.
Sorry, that silence seems to say. But this is your own choice, this time.
Chrollo drags the blade down. Once, then twice, before his fingers go numb.
The world floats. It goes black several times, then returns as a floating blob of color. At one point, he thinks he feels a pressure on his arms — tries instinctively to buck it off, to get away, only to feel it tighten in response, bruising, a voice cursing in a language he doesn’t understand.
“…kidding when I said I should hide all the knives, but clearly I should have actually done it. And now you’ve gotten blood all over my clothes. You will be paying my dry cleaning bill — ”
Kurapika, Chrollo thinks hazily.
He’s the only one who’s ever sounded that hateful when speaking to him.
Slowly, the fuzzy image in front of him focuses. Kurapika, squeezed into the narrow space with him, trying to keep as much distance between them as possible but still practically kneeling on Chrollo’s own legs. He looks more disheveled than Chrollo has ever seen him — blonde hair out of place, strands in his eyes and sticking to his cheek, where a smear of bright red stains pale skin. His clothing is also heavily stained, vibrant blue interrupted by a dark crimson.
It smears the mahogany floorboards beneath him, like the scene of a crime. His Ben’s Knife, the serrated blade, coated with red.
There’s a warmth trickling through his arms. Soothing but slightly uncomfortable, the brush of someone else’s nen against his aura. Chrollo looks down. A familiar chain, a cross dangling from the end, is binding both of his forearms. His skin has been knitted back together, no trace of any wound. Only still-wet blood left behind, heavily smearing unblemished flesh.
The Holy Chain retracts. It curls back around Kurapika’s thumb, like a snake coiling into a ball to sleep. Then it disappears, as the rest of the chains on the Kurta’s hand dematerialize.
Kurapika’s jaw is clenched, his eyes like flint. “If I had gotten here five minutes later,” he says, tone forcibly even, “then I would have found you dead. You would have bled out on your bedroom floor.”
Chrollo says nothing.
“You’re utterly pathetic, Lucilfer.”
Something sparks in his chest at the words, at the tone. Disparaging and mocking. His jaw clenches. “Shut up. You don’t understand — ”
“I don’t understand what?” Kurapika cuts him off, merciless. “Having everyone I love ripped away from me? Having my entire world ripped away from me? You’re right. I couldn’t possibly understand what that feels like. How f*cking dare I.”
“It’s not the same.”
“No. It’s not. Your friends actually deserved it.”
In a fraction of a second, the discarded blade is in Chrollo’s hand again. The blade is slick against his skin, wet with blood, as he lunges forward in the small space and presses Kurapika up against the side of the bed. Knee pressing into one of his legs, a hand against his chest, the other holding the knife against his throat.
The snarling beast in his chest, the one that crumpled into dust that last day on the ship — it’s attempting to resurrect. Rage, the sort that only the person in front of him seems capable of evoking in him.
Kurapika raises his chin. There’s no fear in his eyes, his gaze never wavering from Chrollo’s own.
“Go ahead,” he says.
The echoed words cause Chrollo’s fingers to slacken in surprise.
There’s a familiar fire burning in Kurapika’s eyes, beneath the cool collectiveness he’s taken to wearing so frustratingly. That same fire and fury as when they first met, only tempered now, rather than a wild, blind thing. It’s the same as the anger that is currently coiled in Chrollo’s chest, baring its teeth and digging its claws into his heart.
And the fire dies, his chest going suddenly cold, as he sees what he somehow was never able to see before. Or maybe he did see it, but he never truly grasped it. He never actually let the observation be understood.
Kurapika’s eyes are a mirror. The realization passes between them, no words needed.
In this, too, I understand you.
In this, too, we are alike.
Chrollo drops the blade from Kurapika’s throat. He sits back against the dresser, against the blood still drying on the wood, and suddenly feels very, very tired.
He looks across the inches of space between them, as Kurapika leans back against the side of the bed. A thin line of red against his pale neck. The realization should be surprising — to see some of his own pieces reflected in that fragile but lethal frame. And yet, somehow, it isn’t.
Chrollo has always been a reflection.
“Is this how it always feels for you?” he asks quietly.
Kurapika has his knees bent, his body folded into a similar position to Chrollo’s, so the two of them can fit in the narrow space without touching. Facing him, he looks up from the hands on his knees. “What do you mean?”
“The anger,” Chrollo says. He swallows down the remnants of it, the embers still burning in his throat. “The feeling, like — it’s choking you. Like it’ll tear open your chest if you don’t let it out.”
Kurapika doesn’t respond immediately. When he does, he shakes his head. “No. Not all the time.”
He reaches across the two inches of space between them, and his hand circles Chrollo’s. He takes the knife from Chrollo’s pliable fingers — the knife he just used to cut through his skin, to try to end his own life for the second time.
“Sometimes it feels like this, too.”
Their hands dangle off their knees, mirror images of each other. Their knuckles brushing. Chrollo stares at them, their hands both stained in blood. Chrollo’s knife held by Kurapika’s fingers. The blood surrounding them, and the desolate, grieving look in Kurapika’s brown eyes. And the thought flickers through his mind, like the hundredth-second flash of lightning in the sky —
Maybe I don’t mind being a reflection, if the reflection is you.
)●(
The next day, Kurapika approaches him with something in his hands. The blonde holds it out to him.
“Here. I fixed them the best I could.”
Chrollo looks down. It’s his old childhood scripts — the ones he tore up in his bedroom yesterday, unthinkingly, while in the middle of his suicidal spiral. The ripped sheets of paper have been taped and glued, pieced back together with time and care, to the best of the blonde’s ability.
Chrollo takes the mended scripts from him. He says nothing in response — but only because he fears if he tries to speak, he’s going to cry.
