This is an alternate ending to the one played out in 'Vigil For a Dying Man.' After years of hate and resignation and pain...it could really go either way.
Warning for Character Death. I don't own YnM. Unfortunately.
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Hisoka often feels like one of those prehistoric insects trapped in sap. The sap makes them beautiful; the sap keeps them exactly the same. But after 60 years, he's become resigned to it, and after 60 years he's seen what he would have become many times over. On midnight trips to the mortal world he hears fragile old souls sit up in bed as Death passes by, close enough to the ends of their own lives to recognize him for what he is. Bowed and fragile with age, with too-sharp bones and dim weary eyes, he's seen them in the street and shuffling through the halls of the Ministry, unable to shake the sense of time even after their deaths. Hisoka knows now that he wouldn't have wanted to become like that, and the memory of pain is distant enough to make him consider his death in a way he wouldn't have been able to before.
That doesn't mean he forgives him, though. He'll never, ever forgive him. But the years have mellowed Hisoka in unexpected ways, and when he makes a request to the Earl for the time left on just one candle, it's not refused to him.
He doesn't tell Tsuzuki, but that's all right. Tsuzuki doesn't need to know.
Hisoka makes the journey on his own, and in the end he's the one who breaks the cycle of abuse and pain. As he takes Muraki's life at the end of his natural life span, he gives Muraki the mercy the man doesn't deserve- he lets the doctor see his face.
Muraki dies with closure.
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