Horticulture

10.

The One that Spins Chaos

Pandora drew the bloody handkerchief from her nose after shutting herself inside the motel room's bathroom and watched the ruby liquid seep into the cotton, spreading across its white surface a pale pink shade. Hisoka broke her nose. If she hadn't doubled the dosage of the drug, he would've done worse. She set the bone with a push of her thumb and the blood flowed past her chin, leaving stains across her navel. She returned the handkerchief to her face with a curse and struggled into a sleeveless crop top and underwear.

"This won't end well," said Illumi from where he leaned against the wall. The broken frame hung at an angle beside him reflection her actions as she stood. "You shouldn't play with your food. It's bad manners."

Pandora smiled. "How precious, you're worried."

"Your ability is too valuable to lose over something this foolish."

She didn't argue. He had a point.

"Well, I wouldn't have had to go this far if you would've agreed to share clients."

Illumi remained unexpressive, but a tiny spike in his aura gave away his annoyance. "We have an agreement."

"I'm not saying I mind," said Pandora. "I didn't think I'd get a kick out of Hisoka like this." She turned to Illumi. "But don't worry, once I strike a deal with him and get what I want, I'll let him go free so you two can continue your 'will they or won't they' relationship. Thank you for the hard work."

Illumi's eyebrows knitted slightly. "Why didn't you take the chairman's job? You were promised double if you succeeded in using your ability on one of the targets."

"Are you keeping an eye on me?" asked Pandora, a smile playing on her lips. "Or did your father comment on it over dinner?"

"Just wire the money to my account," Illumi said, heading out the door.

Pandora chuckled. Guess he didn't really want to know.

She slid into a comfortable pair of pants and stretched her cramped limbs. She rolled her neck and sighed. It felt good to be back in her own skin. Selene's body maintained the rigidness she exhibited in life and it barred her movements. The beauty of Dress Rehearsal was that the tailoring of its nen costumes made disguising as easy as slipping on a different outfit, but it limited its user by confining them to the capabilities of the skin being worn. Selene went through the same training Pandora did in life, but her muscles were always wound too tight ranking her among the slowest fighters in the Meljanac family. Pandora struggled to wear Selene because she capped her abilities. She continued to push the costume until it was tearing at the seams to keep Hisoka interested and the nen giving it life stole its luster. Hisoka helped to wear it out.

Peter was unusable after Hisoka tore into it.

Hermes will be hysterical. She didn't want to deal with it, but her brothers were due to arrive within the hour after a delay in their airship.

Pandora sank into the springy bed next to Hisoka and exhaled. She picked up his hand and threaded her fingers between his. She stared up at his profile and fought back a smile, her stomach giddy. She turned over, lying on her stomach, and kicked her legs up, swinging them back and forth. He looked lovely so unguarded.

Pandora enjoyed the journey home to the tiny island of Bahn. It boasted a population of 20,000 scattered across a single major city and tiny hovel towns surrounded by dense forests. Before Pandora tried to assassinate the entire Meljanac family, it used to pride itself on their protection—at least those that believed a whole family of killers lived in an abandoned temple past the farmlands. The Meljanac base had since been moved to an undisclosed location, thus allowing Pandora to nest in the deserted headquarters.

It took three hours by airship from Deene city and a five-hour bus ride to the closest stop. Pandora opted for a truck rental as the trip was made with Hisoka sealed inside a crate. It functioned as a warning. If the drugs wore off and he broke free, Pandora and her brothers would have enough time to counter whatever form his attack took. They ran through a thousand different simulations until they devised a successful counterattack for each.

Apollo drove with a soured look in his emerald eyes and limited conversation with monosyllabic responses. Hermes rejected the next stages of their plan out of spite, furious that Hisoka ruined two of his designs. Not one, but two, he reminded her throughout the trip, repeating the story to anyone willing to listen despite her promise to provide replacements for Selene and Peter. Pandora relaxed as he ranted, resting her head on Hermes' shoulder, and dozed as a balmy breeze kissed her face.

She surfaced from light slumber when the long road turned bumpy and watched the landscape blur into green and blue. She woke fully when the smell of corn invaded her senses and flooded her thoughts. The high green stalks rose as Apollo drove up the incline and her body warmed with familiarity, their scent mingled with the cold twisted in her belly. She used to run through the towering stalks chasing her younger siblings, imparting onto them the tricks to avoiding their mother's punishments as well as tips to adapting to the cruel and ambitious mistresses of the family.

The curious girl she had once been lured a farmer's son into her family's field and, in a bed of flattened stalks, she mounted him with the front of her skirt pinched between her lips. Her boldness made him squirm and his hands were clumsy. His emotions were tangible like the heat that radiated between them and bore down on her back. Her mother promised her virginity to an elusive target and Pandora refused to give up control in her life. She forced her unprepared body to take the boy in and could not imagine sex as anything other than painful. She never spoke to him again, though she tried to spare him the death her mother delivered. None of it mattered. Her mother auctioned her off successfully and Pandora killed the target.

Pandora tried to ground her wandering mind as the farmlands blurred past the car. Her father carried her on his shoulders when she was a toddler. Her first memory was of her small hands straining to rip the green leaves, that and of his large hand pressing its heat into her back.

She buried his bones in the garden east of the temple by the soft whispers of a stream across rocks, among crowded cypress trees swallowed by spindly overgrown bushes, and a moss-covered lantern made of stone. She dug deep until her nails had broken and the tips of her fingers crusted with dirt and blood.

Hermes shook her awake. The shade of the red cedar trees along the road cooled her perspired skin.

She drank deep from the plastic gallon of water shared between them and cursed the powerful sun threatening to sear the skin off her back. She didn't miss the climate. Summers were hotter than a lava bath and winters were the extreme opposite, the shuttered windows rattled by tundra-like conditions. But springs birthed color in the temple's gardens with red azaleas, that survived every generation to live in the temple, and camellias sprouting from the evergreen, the epitome of natural beauty without a fragrance to distinguish them from the damp earthy smell rising from the grass. The fall was a sunset drop outside her perch on her windowsill, the trees shedding leaves from brittle branches. She didn't mind them.

Apollo took a roundabout route carrying the crate above his head to the residential quarters behind the main hall. Hermes waited for her lethargy to pass and followed three steps behind her to the northern gate. She crossed the threshold of the center and walked along the central road that split between the grass to the dilapidated temple.

It stood a monument despite the wear of age that had rotted its wooden frame or the shattered black roof tiles that had since been replaced with wooden planks to keep the water from leaking inside. Giant statues once lived within its high-ceilinged interior among the crisscrossed cypress wood beams. The tallest had been forty feet tall and her mother often commanded her to stay off it, but Pandora loved the peaceful expression on the bronze deity's statue. She spent hours with her back pressed against a wooden beam, straddling another, mesmerized by the wisdom in its eyes shining through the aged alloy and the modest upturn of its lips. She wondered what pleased this god so, what wisdom he boasted in his eyes, how much compassion he bore for the assassins nesting in his temple.

The day she left, one of the Meljanac mistresses challenged her as she exited the main hall and planned to use the chaos of the evening to kill Pandora during a time when fewer repercussions were likely. Pandora shattered the bronze statue she loved to escape and it tore into her worse than the flesh wound Hera inflicted. The chunks of the broken alloy were left to decorate the hall for when Pandora returned and she kept them like that after she did, afraid the building would lose the peace it once commanded and steal away the laughter of the brother that balanced on the red beams with her telling her stories from the books he had taken from the library without permission about brighter worlds, parallel existences to their underground lives.

Because detached words like "I birthed you and thus you are worthy" were poor substitutions for love in their family and Pandora loved no one quite like she loved Panos.

This was no longer a home, only a temporary shelter.

"Did he know about the Saturn Lily?" asked Hermes.

Pandora shook her head.

"I don't understand your obsession with him." Hermes' tenor dropped, smothered by his disapproval. "You should've pursued your other options."

"You said Hisoka was the best option and you're right. He has no loyalty to anyone but himself and his ambitions," said Pandora. "I can give him what he wants, he can give me what I want. I don't understand your need to feel jealous."

"Then why waste months in a cat-and-mouse game? Why not make him an offer he couldn't turn down from the start?" Hermes' anger engulfed him. "You lured him to that bar in Deene city to give him that choice, but you fought him instead. You didn't need to play your hand or show him your power, you just needed to grab his attention and present your hand."

Hermes was her brother. He wouldn't understand what it felt like to have Hisoka crowd her in that elevator, to take her neck into his hand and breath down her lips, to have the heat of their bodies mingle into a trap of desire. His low voice, his aura like death's caress on her skin, and the promise of a sick, compelling devotion to destroying her rattled her. It was so perverse, so beautiful.

"I wanted to enjoy him." Pandora looked over her shoulder to her younger brother. "All of him."

Hermes frowned. "He could've killed you."

"He didn't, but not for a lack of trying."

"He can still betray you."

"I trust that as long as the circumstances aren't thrilling, he won't."

"And if he does it anyway?"

"I'll strike first."

Apollo rejoined them with a grim expression. His arms folded across his chest. "You should've gotten the Troupe leader's location and killed him."

"You both are about the worst accomplices I've ever employed." Pandora huffed and pushed past them. "You are grown men; this sister complex needs to end."

She stopped halfway down the road toward the temple and caught them scheming behind her back. "Touch Hisoka and you're dead. Understand?"

Thank you for the reviews!

I had time to edit another chapter so I figured I could edit this one as well since it wasn't so long.

To those that read the first version, I think you may have run into familiar text. I reused a couple of paragraphs that were more relevant to this chapter than they had been in the previous context.

Hisoka returns in the next chapter...

I'll see you then. Thank you for reading!