Hi guys! Welcome to me new story! Some of you might be wondering why I'm uploading this so closely with my story Edaline, and to that I'm going to admit that I dropped that story. Bleh, it's disgusting just to say! Dropped. Anyway, my passion for that story just kinda ran dry. Then it sparked to life three times more powerful when I had the idea for this one! This is my first story in third person, and it switches between character viewpoints. You'll see what I mean. Anyway, it's been seriously fun to write so far! So, like usual, I plan on leaving out the physical description of the OC so you can either imagine her how you like, or put yourself in her place. When I post the last chapter, I'll reveal how I personally have always imagined her. But enough of my rambling!
Let's get onto the story!
The night sky was unusually bright tonight. She wouldn't have noticed this, though, if she hadn't been forced onto her back. Why had she been forced on her back? She didn't quite know. She hadn't seen anything hit her. There were other things that confused her, too. Like the sounds. She had never before heard the small, deafening explosions that surrounded her. She didn't understand, but her solution was simple: go somewhere else.
So she sat up.
This drew the attention of Feitan nearby. Hands in his pockets, he eyed the girl as she slowly raised to her feet. She had been in his path when he'd been culling the mafia guards, so he'd just went ahead and killed her, too. At least, he thought he had. He swore he had. But he must not of, because here she was alive, no hole in her to speak of. He must've made a mistake. He must've torn that hole in her shirt and thought he'd hit her, and hadn't. As irritating as he found the thought, he had to admit it had been awhile since he'd last made a mistake. It was about time for him to slip up, simply because he was, after all, human.
But this was a mistake that could be easily rectified. He didn't waste a moment. Once she was up on her feet, he plunged his arm through her chest precisely where the hole he'd made earlier was. Blood sputtered from her mouth as he retracted his arm, kept clean with the help of Nen, and he watched in satisfaction as she slumped to the ground. Whether she'd die from suffocation or blood loss first, he didn't know. What he did know is that either way would provide her plenty of time to suffer. He turned his back on her, facing instead an impatient Phinx.
"That was a waste of time," Phinx scowled, eying the soon to be corpse behind Feitan.
"You think we should have let her live?" Feitan inquired, tone implying he already knew the answer.
"I'm saying you didn't have to take the time to skewer her through. You could have just…"
"I could have just what?"
Phinx's frown deepened, his eyes still focused behind the sadistic boy. "Maybe you couldn't have. Maybe you should have decapitated her."
Confused, but careful to keep it off his face, Feitan half turned to look at the girl. To his surprise, she was rising again. The hole in her shirt still gaped, but clean of blood, and the hole in her chest...gone. That can't be right. He just had his arm there a minute ago. She couldn't have healed herself with Nen, or he would have sensed it.
"What's this?" he wondered aloud. He completed his rotation, so his chest pointed fully at the girl. "Why aren't you dead?"
She didn't answer. She barely even acknowledged him. Her eyes flicked in his direction when he spoke, but the moment sounds stopped coming out of his mouth, her eyes were elsewhere. Where, Feitan couldn't tell. They looked glazed, unfocused.
The only thing on her mind was the wrongness she felt. The loud bangs had yet to stop, and that boy kept pushing her down. Neither of those things, she felt, were supposed to happen, so she needed to move away from them. When she had taken her first few steps, though, the boy was suddenly in front of her. She stopped. Then he pushed her down again, his hand using a force she was unable to resist. He watched her, then, when she decided it was time to get up and try to leave again.
As she sat up, Phinx mused to Feitan, "That's something I've never seen before."
His frown hid by his coat, Feitan responded, "I don't like it." Then his arm was through her again. This time, through her head. She crumpled like before, and like before, only about a minute had passed before she stood back up. The hole in her head had sealed. Feitan and Phinx had watched as the bits of her skull had levitated back to her head, how the blood had seeped back into the veins it'd come from. How her eyes had blinked, and she'd straightened back upright as if nothing had happened. The entire time, she hadn't made a sound, or fought back in the slightest.
"Just leave her," Phinx growled. The boss had ordered them to go crazy, not sit around and pick on a chick. Even if she was weird beyond belief.
"...You go on ahead. I've killed enough to make the boss happy. I think I'll take her to the base." Phinx grimaced, but he knew better than to argue with the boy when he got like this. And he liked keeping all of his body parts attached where they belonged.
The girl allowed herself to be dragged away by Feitan, if only because she wanted to get away from the noises. And besides, he wasn't pushing her down anymore. When they got where they were going, he threw her into a chair and tied her to it with chains. Even when the metal scraped into her wrists, she didn't so much as twitch in reaction.
Her blank expression got on Feitan's nerves, but at the same time, it got him excited. How much would it take to crack her mask? How much would it take for her to scream? Was there any wound that he could inflict that wouldn't heal? As much as he found her irritating, he was almost giddy with the knowledge that she was a toy that wouldn't break quickly. The poor girl. If she had literally been anywhere else, he wouldn't ever have discovered her. Thank god she had been where she was.
And so it came: the scalpels, the water, the acid and syringes. He didn't spare her a single tool he had collected. She was burned, she was drowned, she was poisoned, she was diced. And every single time, her skin would revert to normal, she would breathe after having been submerged, she would react and then recover from poisons. He watched her entire arm fix itself back into its socket without being touched. The entire time he kept careful watch of her Nen, but he never found anything to signify her using it. She had it, it was there, but there wasn't even a single sign that she'd trained with it. It never hardened, it never spiked, nothing. The only time he ever saw it react was when he visibly saw a slice in the skin close, and even then, he never felt it. It was like her Nen was doing in all on its own.
The only time she ever made sound was when he directly elicited it from her. Only when he's put pressure on her lungs would she wheeze, only when he grinded her vocal chords with his hands would she gasp before being cut off by lack of airflow. And her eyes. The hair on his skin stood on end when he watched her eyes remain unaffected, boredly half lidded throughout every type of torture. It's as if she wasn't there.
She was unsettling, even to him, but he had his fun. Never before had he been able to run so many experiments on a live subject. He could pour gasoline down her throat and drop in a match, and watch as the fire broiled out of a living person. Sometimes she would appear weakened, but it never lasted long. Even when she had a fire eating her from the inside out, she sagged in her seat only a few times before the fire extinguished inside of her. When that was done, he moved on to other chemical reactions he could cause in her stomach. It was all too soon when the rest of the troupe returned to interrupt him.
He felt them before he heard them, and heard them before he saw them. Well, saw Shalnark. Shalnark was about the only one who would ever enter Feitan's territory.
"Phinx told us you got a new toy," he said, stretching as he walked in. His eyes went straight to the chair where she was tied, curious. "She still looks fine. Have you not done anything with her?"
"I've done everything," Feitan stated plainly.
Shalnark's expression remained as constant as the smaller boy's. "Everything, huh? And she's still like this? Impressive."
Without a word, Feitan dug his fingers into the girl's arm. Shalnark had to admit, he'd never seen anyone put up with Feitan without screaming. Heck, she wasn't even flinching. Blood ran down her arm long before the boy removed his fingers, leaving five gorey holes. Shalnark nearly repeated that this was impressive, when the dripping blood started to flow against gravity. He watched, fascinated, as her arm healed without a trace of the injury.
That definitely explained Feitan's interest.
"We'd better show this to the boss," he decided, not asking for the boys permission. Feitan didn't argue, although Shalnark got the feeling he was upset about sharing his toy.
Upon hearing Shalnark's vague 'you've got to see this', Chrollo joined him to Feitan's torture chambers. Entering, he found nothing extraordinary about the girl. If anything, she looked dead to him. Not because she was wounded -in fact, she looked perfectly healthy for having been with Feitan for so long- but it was her eyes. Her eyes didn't see anything, and for a moment, he had to wonder if she was blind.
Feitan gave Chrollo the same demonstration he'd shown Shalnark, who was undoubtedly filling in the others on their find. When the holes healed right up, Chrollo stepped closer to the girl, Feitan moving aside. When she didn't react to his presence, he knelt to face her at eye level.
Finally, she was looking at him. Her eyes bore into his, rarely blinking. He returned the stare, the two of them seemingly searching each other's souls and coming up with seemingly nothing. Chrollo then aggressively spiked out his aura towards her. His hit hers with crushing force, but she didn't budge. Her Nen didn't even react to protect her. Instead, to his intrigue, it had felt like his own aura had hit an immovable wall.
So he asked, their eyes still connected, "What's your name?"
Until Chrollo had met her eyes, she hadn't been thinking much of anything. She had observed where she was, observed the boy who was with her, and observed all the things he had done to her. But when the pale man in the fur coat had knelt in front of her, their eyes had locked, and she had found something inside of them that had prevented her from looking away. Perhaps that's why, when he spoke, she actually heard his words. Specifically, she had heard the word 'name'. She recognized the word. She couldn't quite put together exactly what it meant, but she had a response. She didn't know what the response meant, either, but she knew that was what she was supposed to say when someone said to her 'name'. Her lips cracking, bleeding as she moved them for the first time on her own, she gave her answer.
"Ilya."
"Ilya," Chrollo repeated. Then he stood, but her eyes followed him. "Who are you, Ilya?"
She didn't answer. Although she heard what he had said, the only word with significance that he had said was 'Ilya', and she didn't have an response for that.
The man continued, "What is your ability?"
Again no response. This time, Feitan offered, "She has not said a single word but the one she said to you."
"Does she speak another language?"
"Not that I can tell. Judging by her reply to you, she seems to understand ours."
"I don't think that's right," Chrollo denied, studying her. "I think she understood the phrase, or the word, but not the language. She's only been taught bits of how to communicate. Either that, or she wasn't taught and she's picked up only pieces on her own." His words sounded reasonable to him, but Chrollo still felt that he was missing something. Considering all he'd seen, he asked, "Can she heal from fatal wounds, too?"
"Yes."
"It's possible there was an injury to her head that killed many of her brain cells. When they reassembled, they must not have retained the functions they had learned before." That had to be it, Chrollo reasoned. Still, he couldn't shake the nagging feeling that he wasn't seeing the whole picture.
Feitan thought back to when he'd put a hole through her head, then dismissed it. She had already been acting strange before he'd done that. Instead of dwelling on that, he inquired, "What must I do with her?"
Chrollo pondered this for a minute. An immortal body could be extremely useful for the Phantom Troupe. If he trained her well enough, and she was able to replace him as head when he died, the Troupe would be as immortal as her. Yes, she was definitely worth keeping. The problem would be that she was basically a shell.
"Do what you want, but don't harm her head. I plan to try to see if I can mold her into some use."
So? First impressions anybody? Have you begun to form a picture of Ilya in your head? This is my third Hunter x Hunter fanfiction, actually. I'm shocked I've written this much over one anime! But with such a wide canon world, there's just so much to do! And my first one was so much fun to write (also being over the phantom troupe) that I guess I just craved to repeat the process. So here we are, on my third Hunter x Hunter fanfiction! Can you tell it's my favorite anime? Anyway, I can't wait to hear your reactions! And I can't wait to hear how you imagine Ilya!
Till then, Kisses from SnowyNeko! :3 MEOW!