Follows 1999 anime. Post-Yorknew arc. AU in second person. Hints of Leopika if you squint hard enough.

Here you are again. You're up on the dilapidated rooftop.

There's this sense of privilege and privacy so intimate up here that you'll find yourself sympathizing the suicidal and the broken, as if you're on top of the world only to realize that it's just those washed-out daydreams in your head and your feet are traitorously rooted on the crumbling earth that's just at the seismic brink of collapsing down into a depression. You're not a child anymore and you've stopped deceiving yourself with dewy-eyed fantasies ever since there's such things as monsters in human façades and the world's opened out a barbed wire embrace around you to welcome you to the war zone—all broken bones and fucking spiders and chains.

Stop fooling yourself; you're no Daedalus, but all that you are is an impetuous Icarus who's flown too close to the sun and found himself burnt and broken and sunken underneath the crash of waves that latch him there forever in its cold iron shackles. You've fallen, and it doesn't have to be slipping off a steep cliff or hurling down from the topmost skyscraper to know what it feels to be in a nosedive, head down for a crash-and-burn collision towards the mire. You're no shooting star. You're a fiery meteor in its descent down to the stratosphere, bobbing about in midair in hopes of clinging, praying for the inevitable—just before the impact and the kill-kill-kill—killer.

You close your eyes, see all the red-streaked sparks beneath your eyelids like crimson irises peering back at you. You've always been calm. It's that part of you that you've always favored before anything else. Calm and controlled. It's always been you, the one with the placid temper, the reasonable intellectual. It helps you think, helps you rationalize, helps you keep in check the tidal waves of emotions you hold in before it rushes forth like a broken dam, and god, it's not a pretty sight.

As a pragmatic person, you know what's best and that emotions should be kept at bay. It gives you the worst case of nerves and it makes you weaker, seem inferior in a stir-crazy delirium.

However you're up here and no one will give two shits if you break under the sky this once.

Because it's just you and the metal railing and the white noise.

You're about to scream, a glorious scream that can get your throat sore for months—and a second later, you're still clutching onto something, trying to be in control even though you can feel yourself tear apart from an almost-scream that's clawing its way from your neck, and you're thinking again—because thinking consoles, thinking makes you feel more sane, less rabid, less of an emotional wreck that you know you are.

You're mulling over about a lot of things. Like how the distant buildings of the city are all blue silhouettes and winking lights from the rusting steel mesh of the dewed railings, how it's too early in the post-rain morning and the world's like a brooding virgin in smog and a dark blue shroud. There are broken patches of the sky beneath your feet and you can touch the smoke-gray trail of clouds from your fingertips though before you immerse yourself in a dream, you can still spot the rubble, the cracks in the tiles that's waving at you like a crooked hand and slapping you across the face to get a fucking grip.

You realize you're overthinking again. You're starting to feel detached from anything and everything at that moment, only a few intervals of meaningful solitude and static—you're alone, and maybe, it's better that way. You're alone and numb and never breaking away from the invisible tethers on your feet. It's that choice you made that's carved for you by a damned Spider years ago.

You're breaking now, and shit, it hurts. It hurts.

But you're not screaming. You're not crying. You're not collapsing on your knees. There are always these wide imaginary eyes watching you smugly at the back of your mind and you hate feeling vulnerable this way.

You breathe, you calm down, and you implode.

That's what you've always been best at: imploding into a million pieces and still finding the will to be intact.

It's an explosion not in the chorus of gut-wrenching wails but in quiet droning static.

And—

"Kurapika."

You stop. You ignore Leorio for awhile until you swallow down the hot lump on your throat. Swallow it hard. (all that pain-scream-buzz—killerkillerkiller . . .)

Exhaling out a breath, you glance at him from the corner of your eye, and he's beckoning you inside with all that unshaken assurance, that juvenile smile, and those kind eyes that are a little too distracting for all its worth.

You come to your senses and pad towards him, in which he greets you with a blanket around your shoulders instead of a good old spoken Mornin'. Walking side by side, the both of you retreat back to the tumble-down apartment, and then he asks, "What're you doing up there?"

You don't answer him. He frowns, sighing and pushing up his glasses.

You smile a little.

Leorio's a bit too good to you today, giving you a pass from an expected censuring for your recklessness. He's guiding you inside in his casual way with an arm around your shoulders and a familiar scent of virile musk and strong cologne. There's really something magnetic in the manner he holds you, when those callous fingers barely brush on your collarbones. His grip on your shoulder is firm and warm and all the right pieces that hold you together, just barely, just enough.

If you aren't so keen in standing on your tiptoes, maybe loosening yourself around him just this once is fine. Just a gentle lean, a dipped arm against the spine, and a body drop like those fall-on-you-back trust tests. Your weight is on his shoulders and you can't help but worry if it's too much for him to handle because it's heavy and you're at the point of giving in from the burden of carrying dead bodies on your back.

But, goddamn, this is Leorio, and he can take it. He's never the strongest, but it's that inner strength that you've always admired about him.

Though you're at ease with him at the moment, even if you're breaking from the pressure and the cold wind, and you're getting a little lightheaded and distracted from the eyes behind those tasteless glasses. You're still a tip away from cracking right there, right now, with open fissures like blood-red capillaries beneath your skin and you're just begging for that long-awaited scream to erupt from your pale chapped lips. But you still hold it in.

Today you're calm, tomorrow you break. For now, you're making half-lie, half-promise nothings against the silence.

Disclaimer: I don't own Hunter X Hunter.