*HxH Disclaimer*

Author's notes of Edited Version: Yep, I've decided to revive and continue this fic again after a whole of TEN years! So many has happened since then… both in my life and in the Hunter x Hunter universe ohohoho… However, while I've made some changes to what I've posted years ago, I'm still keeping most of my original plans for this story, and may not include updates, such as incidents which happened in the GI Arc. I'm still preserving my old author's notes if it calls for them. :P

Author's Notes: Er hehehe... In case ye chaps remember I am in debt of the second weird and bizaare tale... but that would have to wait, maybe till the wee days before Christmas. o.O I'm quite in the mood now for something more serious, so hehehe bear with me. I'll splash a bit of comic relief here and there...

HxH CAST: (all turn their heads to LEORIO)

LEORIO: (in an unbearable, irritating whine) Wwwhhhhaaaaaat?!

Author: Things to look out for? A bit of bloodshed, a bit of angst, a bit of drama, some swearing, maybe a bit of "romance", and of course, a bit of comic relief-

HxH CAST: (all keep their heads turned to LEORIO)

LEORIO: (in a state of acquisition) I'm being oppressed, am I?

HxH CAST: (wordlessly and enthusiastically nod)

LEORIO: (waves a pathetic-looking hanky quite forlornly, in defeat) Somebody please love me...

Author: (sardonically) AAawwwwwwwww!

(note: don't misinterpret me, Leorio fans. i'm fond of the guy. admit it, it's absolutely delightful to poke fun at the blessed creature... ^_^*)

The Bridge to Being
by: DW-chan

One: The Stranger upon the Road

On the far end of a seashore, a foreigner was being cleansed from a disease. The folk which took their abode by the sea one night encountered a man by a bottom of a cliff; it was a poor creature, his face seemingly bruised beyond repair, with sunken cheekbones, emaciated features wrapped in less than respectable clothing. When they first discovered him they thought he was a cadaver which somehow tore itself free from its body bag, a disgraceful accident committed by a careless ambulance, perhaps, on its way to the morgue. But no; the man was alive and in a trance of half-sleep rudely disturbed by the commotion brought by the sea-faring villagers. The man had barely any opportunity to speak, and the sun was so hot that his brain fell into a fatal slowness, and he was thoroughly agitated.

The villagers drew back when they saw what they saw: was it a new plague suffered by their mountain-faring neighbors? These villagers were superstitious folk and believed that the sea held a cure, so as soon as the man had been able to walk they dragged him to the shoreline and unto a boat, and when the boat was rowed far enough they dipped the injured foreigner into the water's depths. The man had become bewildered by this ostensibly cruel treatment; after a series of methodological attempts to purify the patient of his ailment the fisher-folk drew back, a great veil of failure looming over them. The victim had not been cured.

The victim was still feverish and delirious from the swelling crimson of his eyes.

It was his eyes that startled the villagers: it brought the men to inoculate themselves with the sign against evil and death, while the women reached the peak of near-hysterics; and the children, after a glimpse of shock, ran back to their homes and behaved themselves, if it just so came to happen that this live corpse was an omen of the world's end, or something similar. The man, were he a more healthy subject, could have been very handsome, with his hair of spun flaxen that hung down the sides of his face like fine harp strings, and the thin, shapely lips and even with the sodden nobility of his gait. But it was his eyes that overshadowed the hopeful geniality of his person-his eyes were a fiery red, more fearsome than live burning coals, more intense than the streak of fire-wrought metal hammered in the forge. The man's pupils were immensely dilated and they carried the appearance of rubies freshly delivered by the sun. They immediately dreaded this symptom; and in silent fear they nursed the man, the latter locked in isolation with a new batch of clothing and food.

After a week, the man emerged.

The fisher-folk heaved a general inflection of sighs when they perceived that the man's eyes lost their unlawful scarlet brilliance, replaced by a very wholesome shade of beryl; the color was very noteworthy for it was also the color of the sea. They then realized that he came from afar, farther than they had deemed to imagine, and was certainly not a citizen of the mountains that surrounded their domain. He was the first, true foreigner that had set foot upon their grounds. The stranger, interpreting a sense of gratitude attempted to voice it out; but try as he might, it seemed as though an awful shadow had seeped into the folds of both his mind and conscience and he was lost for words and meaning. He was situated there, dumbfounded, an example of an irreclaimable human being.

He left the shore and its inhabitants, remaining the puzzle as he was when he had arrived.

He thought he was the sole survivor of the Kuruta genocide.

It had to be genocide. There had been no one left; for if there had been, then perhaps the ruins had undergone even a bit of repair by now. There was no one left; for if there had, then at least some of them would have come for him. For ten years the world had neglected his existence, as he lay buried in an underground cell of a barricaded prison that kept him from the light of the sun, from another human voice, from another human touch. His had been a crime that should have not been. It was self-defense, he had pleaded to the authorities. He did not mean to stray from the bounds of the Rukuso region. He so had purposely slighted the fact that he did not belong to the outside world, that anyone from the Kuruta race did not belong to the outside world-or else their isolation would have been nothing but absurdity and pretense.

It was self-defense, he had pleaded. He was certainly convinced it had been so. He really had not meant to kill those who had assaulted him because of his outlandish features and his remote nature. There were some in the outside world who despised foreigners. Unfortunately, he fell upon their hands. Though he lacked the exposure of affairs unaccustomed by his race, he tried not to appear as a fool. It had not been entirely his fault, for the denizens of the Kuruta nation had sharp tongues and even sharper temperament. That group of men, he recalled, had been insulting his unpolished manners unfit for the city. What they spat at him veritably had not been the friendliest of words; in a spur of a moment they were wounding his dignity and the dignity of his tribe. One pointed word he spat in return to retaliate caused the men to lift themselves from their stools and initiate a brawl. He had skills, of course. He meant to only disarm them to quiet their assaults but his mind was hot and everywhere he turned, he saw everything in choleric shades of red.

He killed them, in a murderous feat he himself had thought never to experience committing.

The men had relatives and there were those who had witnessed the violence; consequently, the favor did not rest upon him, for he was an unfamiliar face in a land that hated strangers. An immediate trial resulted in immediate conviction, and he was sent to prison. Somehow he had managed to send messages of confidence to his fellow tribe members and in turn, they had been sent replies of assurance. We will come for you, the last message to reach him had said. There had been always a strict bond among the Kuruta members. Their very actions were fueled by forces of love and patriotism. When a promise is done, it will be carried it out. He had received that message in the fourth year of his imprisonment; in his seventh year, they had not arrived. A sinister atmosphere had hung about him in those years of waiting. It would only take death to free a Kuruta tribesperson of his or her pledge. He had suspected the worse.

And the worse had come.

In instant madness he dug his way out of his cell. It was an act of desperation and after long months of doing nothing but that, and of longing nothing but freedom with it being only a hair's breadth away, he drifted from the reaches of sanity and mechanically, he worked. In those years of labor there had been incredible unrest in the town whose prisons he had been confined in. It was not an ordinary town; it was the capital of a state known to many regions in the area. There had been civil hostilities being exchanged between politicians, the military, and the citizens against the politicians and the military as he worked, so outside there was chaos. Surely they would pay little heed to an escaping prisoner. He took every advantage as he dug, and dug, and dug: by hand, by makeshift spade, by spoon, by bowl, by crusts of rusting metal. When he had finally crawled out of the worm hole he had created for three years, he did not feel the warmth of the sun on his face. He did not feel the newness of the air his lungs took in. He was deaf to all sound and blind to all movement. He did not revel in the glory of his long-sought freedom. He had simply deteriorated-in body, in mind, and most especially in spirit. Dragging his broken countenance, he left the town forever. Many political enemies were being executed that day. There were far more important prisoners to take care of, so even as there were those who saw him passing by in his slow, unmeasured walk, they let him be. Perhaps they did not even realize that they had a prisoner such as him until the moment they saw him again. The world had neglected his existence for ten years.

It was time to return to Rukuso. He had chosen his destination by mere impulse. And when he did return, he found nothing, and no one.

He remembered that he was still in a half-deranged position of mind when he beheld the gaping ruins. The great river that had separated and guarded their region from the rest of the world for as long as he recalled had dried up. He was wondering where it went. Maybe its disappearance had been yet again only one of his delusions. But no, the wilderness that covered the ground where his nation used to stand was very real.

The smell of the ocean was not far. In his boyhood he would follow the river and cipher the tributaries that flowed to a much bigger body of water. In drifting blindness he retraced those steps and at the back of his head were the images of ships. Not all Kuruta peoples were fond of sailing but they had built ships as necessity, not for recreation. Yes, they must have taken the ships; there must have been some, even a little, who had made it to the ships, and sailed, sailed to where he may someday reach them. But the docks, the docks were in a sadder ruin than the extinct village. It looked as though the docks had never been built. He remembered that there were five ships, thirty passengers to each. There may have been more ships, but he knew his people do not revel in extravagance. They only created what was needed. And five ships were all that was needed. He only sorely felt a blow when he came across the rotting debris of wooden planks-ship parts. Out of habit, he plundered into the remnants and counted four mastheads. Four ships had been destroyed. But where was the fifth? A tremor shook him. That was all the reaction he emancipated. He did not expect anymore hope to arise. When he grew conscious of his surroundings again, he realized that he had returned to the village.

"You there! Who are you?" came a cry that hailed his attention. When he looked, he discovered that he was being addressed by perhaps a guard who patrolled uncharted lands. In the back of his mind he would have accused the guard of intrusion; instead, he had only asked in a pitiful voice: "Wh-what happened -?"

He had not been able to finish but the guard seemed to have understood him at once. "-To the inhabitants of this land, you mean? Why, they're all dead! Dead for years now. About five years, I suppose. I've heard only a few reports about it, but I don't remember all of them Mass deaths, you know: a plague, famine, killings-I'm not so sure. You had not answered my first question. So who are you?"

The revelation had been so succinct, so bluntly administered, so inhumanly enforced that a new breed of stupefaction overtook him. The guard had stated the news simply as though he were greeting an acquaintance on a fine-weather day. He only had the remaining strength to reply: "I... I... am... I am... no one... I am no one."

"Hmph." The guard wheeled his horse, for he was mounted, and shook his head expressively, with a distasteful look on his face, and turned away, ordering his steed to a trot. There had been an abundance of madmen the past few years; perhaps that squalid, wasted creature was only one of them. He looked innocuous enough, though. There was no need to report him to the headquarters.

As for the man, the seemingly only living Kuruta tribesperson left, he fell into a frantic search and scoured the ground for protruding earth, for any sign of grave sites. He found none. In the stead of burial mounds, however, he took to consideration a pile of charred bones collected under a roofless stone house. The vegetation was unusually lusher there. Vines seeped through cracks in the walls and extended their wiry fingers towards the remains of the once-noble Kuruta race. Who could have done the rites of consuming the bodies of the dead? Cremation had been a custom practiced by the Kuruta for many generations. The mystery did not last for a frightening darkness shook him; suddenly he broke in a dead-run, and fled.

He must have run for days, and in those shadowy moments he lost his footing once, twice, and a final one sent him toppling down a cliff hundreds of miles away from the borders of his home which nearly ended his days (and sometimes he wished it had). This man was nine and thirty years of age.

And now, upon the old roads the stranger trudged. He carried with him an air of despondency, still barely recovering from the shock of losing his entire nation. It was a small nation, true; but in that nation lived those that he had valued more than his own life: his young wife, his infant child, his brothers, his sisters, his mother, his father; cousins, uncles, aunts, nephews, nieces-the man shielded his face as he felt his head drown in thoughts of despair and shame and guilt. From his throat emerged a momentary sob, the first tangible strand of emotion that flowed from him after a long repression.

The man plunged down the road, unmindful of where it would lead him to. It took him a lengthy while before he finally realized his solitude, his poverty, and his homelessness. He also realized, after days of traveling devoid of conscious direction that he was as good as starved. He resorted to pawn the good overcoat the sea-faring village women had given to him as a mysterious parting gift, and obtained money for a night's meal and lodging with perhaps enough to spare till the next five days. If this is what had been willed for him, so he must accept it. He must continue to live, then. He will find decent work, and feed, shelter, and clothe himself. He would do so in the years to come.

And then he would plan his revenge. But the shock of reality struck him to the core that the wound he bore in his being remained in him till the rest of his days. He was forever a lost man.

The impact of trauma was potent enough to cause him to forget his own name. Perhaps he only remembered the names of his wife and only child; but even after many long instances devoted by just clearing his memory in search for his own name, he did not succeed. So he christened himself with a new name, and fumbled in the world's existence since then.

In stray nights his wife and child still called to him.

Ey now, that was a rather lengthy introduction (well, for me, that is… *sigh*)!

Now don't get all impatient with this introduction (hint: no, it's not an alternative universe/reality fic)! The next chapter's coming soon, so just sit tight, will yah? ^_^

Cheers!

DW-chan:-)

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