The Night When Leorio Was No Longer Infinite
It's death that scared Leorio most. Pointless, meaningless death. A death for nothing. A death preceded by nothing. Death as a result of unfortunate circumstances.
He is afraid to say it, he's been scared of it for a very long time; a truth so sharp, so maddening and unforgiving, that the only escape from it is to face it head on. When it happened, when the realization hit him, _he in his clinic tending to the sick, to the injured, to the dying_ how painfully pointless Pietro's death was. How unfair in its indifference, the world was, to Pietro, to millions of children before him, and after him. The lack of inherent meaning to life (in poverty, in wealth, in sickness and health) and death (by poverty, illness, child labor) was agonizing. He had seen people die, and the event was surrounded by sadness only because of the existence of loved ones, or their nonexistence. Death itself was just that, an event of little magnitude in and of itself, its people who give it a hallow of meaning.
People die all the time. He knew that. Sometimes you can save them, fix them, give them a second chance at life, and sometimes you can't. No action will ever prevent their eventual death, we all rot and decay, it's simply inevitable.
But Pietro's death was personal, and he doesn't know when he started acting like it revolved around him. It was the world's first offense against Leorio, first real blow, right in the gut, right in the heart. It was the starting point and the finish line all at once, it was a slap, the truth of the world's utter apathy towards them, how irrelevant they were, how Pietro's death crushed him but failed to affect anything else.
After everything was over, when he took a breath, the world was still pretty much the same.
He knew the world was not a sentient thing, there was no hidden, omnipotent emotional collective controlling actions and reactions, and there was no definition and no unified entity to blame for life's little, inconsequential ugliness and tragedies.
People continue living anyway, millions die anyway, and that was the most logical of all other alternatives to life on this earth.
In the deep nights, in the early mornings, in what little break hours he has, he tries to remember when exactly did he begin to lose Pietro. Pietro the person, the individual, the friend, and not Pietro the crutch, Pietro the prop, Pietro the tragic backstory, Pietro the motivation.
He tries to remember when exactly conjuring that face in his mind became more and more difficult. The place they come from was a distant memory, its people faceless figures under the sun, the city, so far away yet so close, full of dreams and possibilities, was little more than a sweltering pile of malice.
He and Pietro sit on the roof of his house, and talk endlessly about the city, about jobs, about the future, about love, about God, about going to church and about growing up and not believing. There's no electricity in their neighborhood and the city is shimmering, but Leorio was yet to see the injustice in that; the city lights were incidental, insignificant, a backdrop that could be replaced with any other.
He is sixteen and he wants to kiss Pietro.
The desire is scandalous, dangerous, thrilling. It's heavy and odorous and insistent, and it was sudden, and scary. He suppresses it.
It's even scarier because when he gazes at Pietro in his memory, the boy he looks at has no face. What did Pietro look like, even? Was he even there to begin with? Maybe Leorio was alone on the roof that night.
His visual memory was deteriorating, but his heart was as solid as ever, so the recollection of his desire to kiss Pietro was vivid and colorful, but Pietro's face wasn't.
He is sixteen and he wants to kiss Pietro, but he never does.
The boy coughs, heaves, wheezes, pants and gasps for air. He wipes the blood like he's wiping sweat. Nonchalant, mundane. He apologizes, like everything is his fault. The apology is painful in its sincerity, brutally genuine. He always apologized, for his pain, for his blood, for his constant exhaustion, for his weakness, for forgetting so much.
Maybe it was his fault. For being so fragile, so prone to illnesses, so poor.
Wanting to die was the first desire he and Pietro did not share. It was painful to not want the same thing, for the very first time. However, their conflicting desires, one to die, one to live, stemmed from the very same reason: neither wanted to be a burden.
Leorio's yearning for life only hit him at Pietro's funeral.
A scorching hot day, the sun was out for revenge, the heavens were fuming. Everything appeared to be dying slowly, the grass, the trees, the houses and tin roofs in the distance, and the mourners around him were little more than massive shadows.
He looked at his hands, useless, unoccupied, hard and callous, and he saw claws and nails ready to dig, ready to forage, ready to build and destroy, and he just knew. He wanted to live.
His desire for life was fierce, intense, profound. It prodded his insides, pulsed and sizzled in such a deep part of his being. It shook him how much he detested defeat. To be defeated without even trying. To accept and swallow the little myths of his home town, of his family, of how 'that was all there is to it'.
No.
The thought of dying, of being forgotten, of being of little consequence to the rest of the world, terrified him. He refused to die the way Pietro did. There was still a fight in him, there was so much fight in him, and he refused to be anything but alive.
At Pietro's funeral, Leorio wasn't sad, he was angry. He was angry and resentful at the people around him, he was angry at the sudden realization of his insignificance, of how little weight he held in the world.
Angry at the sudden realization of his mortality.
The fact of his eventual, inevitable death jolted him. Woke him. Flared his selfish self-preservation instincts, and yet, he wanted to grow up, quickly, wholly, to become an adult, even when it meant his death will only be closer.
Death was not an illness you were too poor to cure, it wasn't something you could evade or fix or amend; you could negotiate with it, stall it, come to terms with it, but you couldn't escape it, but knowing all this never meant he stopped being afraid of it.
That day, he ran. He ran through alleys, through streets buried under dust, under lampposts out of service. He scared the cats and the dogs, the neighbors, they said he was crazy, but he didn't care. He took off his shoes and sprinted in the darkness of the night, the night of Pietro's Death, the night when Leorio was no longer infinite.
He wanted to feel pain. He wanted to inflict pain. He screamed and punched walls and threw rocks and wailed and ran more and took giant, massive breaths. He scratched at his skin, dug his bare feet in the ground, stubbed his toes, removed a shard of glass from his heel. He jerked off under a tree, it was messy and dirty and ugly and it felt good, it felt exhilarating, he moaned loudly, but it sounded like the shrieks of a trapped animal in pain.
It was most pleasurable to gaze at the faces of his family members when he pushed the house door open and entered, a disheveled pile of grime and dirt and blood and semen. How good it felt, in the most twisted, corrupt of ways, when their faces displayed every expression of shock and bewilderment, but not pity. It almost appeared like they feared him, how they fell into silence, huddled closer, upon his presence; it meant he was alive, he existed, he was something to be noticed and acknowledged.
His family never asked him about it. He could never tell them how he felt, and had no desire to divulge any of his secrets to them.
He, alone, came to terms with Pietro's death. He, alone, rationalized it. No one helped, and he felt like he, alone, was responsible for making sense of it. No one else could do it for him, even when his grief and sorrow were too much to bear alone, even when heartbreak and loneliness tormented him and picked at his wounds.
Pietro died, and thus he structured every decision in his life based upon that fact; what he wanted to do, where he wanted to go, what kind of person he wanted to become.
Upon death, the world flourished into clarity right before his eyes, it gleamed like the reflection of sun rays on the surface of a mirror, but it did not blind him. The world was not coherent, or consistent, and he hardly understood it, but he knew he wanted to be part of it; he wanted to be lost but visible, wandering but not aimless.
Leorio was seventeen when he buried his friend, nineteen when he became a Hunter, twenty four when he became a practicing physician, but in his memories, he will always be sixteen, sitting on a roof, wanting to kiss Pietro but never doing it.
In his clinic, he recalls all those emotions and thoughts and memories, but for the life of him, can't recall Pietro's face.