"You're all by yourself again, Gon-kun?"

The island boy glanced down from his post atop a long, sturdy tree branch to see Haku stepping through the bushes below. He smiled at the man and slid down the trunk with ease to join him.

"It's okay, I was just thinking."

"Do you think better at high elevations?" the man joked.

"Nah, I just feel at home in the forest, that's all."

Haku nodded.

"Your friend is busy today, too?"

The tanned boy shrugged and smiled. The bespectacled man however, frowned.

"I couldn't help but notice that Killua has been supposedly 'busy' every day after we've finished working since Yuto arrived here last week…" the man announced cautiously. He crouched down to Gon's level and took his shoulders in his hands as he said, "Listen, Gon-kun; I know that you're trying to be nice by letting your friend have some space to chase Misaki around, but…"

His eyes grew less confident, and they dropped gracelessly to the ground. Haku's lips tightened.

"What is it, Haku-san?" Gon pressed, curious and mildly alarmed.

The adult ran nervous fingers through his own dark hair and sighed.

"Misaki is not the type of girl you keep. Do you understand?"

The boy did not understand, and Haku had known that he would not even as he had been amidst breathing life in to the words. He studied Gon's knitted brows and slightly inward-creased forehead as he attempted very seriously to create any sort of sense of the statement.

"Do you mean," he tried, his voice still confused and disbelieving, "that you're supposed to throw her away?"

"No!" Haku immediately protested, a disgruntled noise escaping him as he considered how to restate his point. "Okay, it's not so much that she's not the type of girl that you keep, as it is that she's not the kind of girl that you run to."

Unfortunately, this seemed to do little more than further confuse the boy, who placed his chin in to his palm as though it might assist him in decoding the sentence.

'I wish I could just tell you,' Haku thought sadly, 'but I can't do that. What would you think of me if I did?'

Standing once more, the man patted Gon's back.

"I know this sounds phony," he admitted, "but the fact is that your friend needs to let go of this obvious infatuation he's developed for Misaki because she's not a good girl to get close to in such a manner. I can't tell you why, and that probably isn't helping my case, but please… believe what I tell you."

Without missing a beat, he replied, "I believe you, Haku-san."

"You do?"

"Of course; you're my friend, so I believe you."

Pressing his fingertips beneath his frames and against the inner corners of his eyes, Haku fought to suppress the tears that threatened to spill.

'A friend… I've never really had a friend before now…'

Misaki's first ever business trip to the Volcanic Islands occurred on the eve of her fourteenth birthday. She had challenged the Hunter Exam just over two months prior and had thankfully passed, which allowed her exponentially cheaper transportation than she had ever thought imaginable. The exam was like nothing she could have ever anticipated, and despite her daily practice and procedures to strengthen her nen, there were some others present who were still far more experienced.

Nevertheless she had managed to collect the license, and with it a larger range of higher paying clients. This was a definite advantage to her, although she did notice that her contracts had risen to become about eighty percent assassination-rooted as opposed to the other odd jobs she used to be considered for the majority of the time. She also found that she was becoming almost constantly busy, jumping from one job to the next with little time for even quick trips back to the forest which she loved so much.

On the evening in question, a young adolescent Misaki was seated amongst the atypically few other passengers upon the airship to the Volcanic Islands, reading over the file she had been sent via text message. This alone told her the story of her newest client's inexperience as far as hiring an assassin, as of course it was foolish and risky to send full files of information this way.

The man, who had only given a single name (but stupidly his surname, the girl noticed), "Kamaka", had an order for assassination of an "Ano Kamaka". The girl's lips stiffened as she read the name, and inwardly she cursed the man for having leaked the information to her (whether accidentally or intentionally), that the victim was in some way related to him. Slaughtering family members was somehow a difficult thought, and she wondered honestly if she could follow through…

'I'll never take a contract that I won't keep,' she reminded herself stubbornly, snapping shut the phone.

It wasn't for another few hours that she actually met her client face to face inside a townhouse-like building that was actually a small pub. She hesitated for a moment when the bartender requested her drink order, as she had never been considered old enough to purchase alcohol before. Ultimately she settled for a "Vermouth on the rocks" since it was the only drink she could locate in her then limited liquor vocabulary. Her first gulp was larger than it ought to have been, and she struggled to keep her expression deadpan as the overwhelmingly bitter taste rose through her nostrils and left a burning sensation in her throat as it went down. She sputtered out a series of congested-sounding coughs for a few moments and finally opted to hold her breath and take smaller, more modest sips.

"Excuse, er… I think I'm here to meet you?"

As her amber eyes fixed on the man that had spoken behind her, Misaki was not at all surprised that this man could have been the one that made such foolish mistakes in hiring a hit-man. He was in his twenties probably, wearing coke bottle glasses with black frames twice as wide as the girth of the lenses. His eyes appeared gigantic through them, almost as if he were rather holding two large magnifying glasses over his pupils. His charcoal grey slacks were not long enough to reach his ankles, and stopped abruptly three fifths of the way down his shins. This made his blindingly white socks stand out all the more, having rolled down from their original position at two different lengths.

Tapping at the lower half of his neck, he said awkwardly, "The bandana… I'm supposed to look for the girl with the black bandana…"

Reaching her hand out to shake, she said, "Tanoh…"

Instead of shaking it, the man took it and kissed it as he was taught to do when greeting a woman.

"…Misaki," she finished, shooting him an awkward glance before wrenching back her hand and wiping the back of it on her denim shorts.

"Kamaka, Ha-… I mean just Kamaka," he said quickly. "So what I was thinking of doing-…"

"Not here," she cut in.

"Oh, of course not. Where would you like to go to discuss things?"

"Do you like Vermouth?"

Kamaka's face contorted, though he did manage to answer, "I… suppose so…"

"Then here," Misaki said, pushing her drink over to the man. "Down this and then we can go talk about what you want done exactly to your victim."

"My father," he corrected, taking a sip and smacking his lips at the bitter taste he was not used to.

"Father?" she repeated, a painful lurch twisting in her gut at the thought.

"He's very successful," Kamaka whispered, "and with my inheritance money I can finally pursue my dream of being a geologist instead of taking over his silly retail clothing outlet. Not to mention his promise that I can have his nen ability when he passes. It's all bound in writing already, and you should see his 'Bottomless Pit' move…"

"Your father…"

Perhaps Misaki had overlooked something in her "tolerance" as far as killing went. Never before had she been told who her victims were on a personal level, and especially not in relation to her employers. This made it simple to disassociate them as real, living, human beings with families and jobs and emotions. She knew this now more than ever, as her insides burned with protest at the thought of murdering this young man's father.

She remembered her own parents, and how they had endured ups and downs of all sorts together from typical to unbelievable… She thought about how she had returned to discover that her parents had apparently "suffered an accident" and died in her absence. Then, she considered her mission to purposely sever a family, as if to take her own and chop it up in to sloppy, bloody pieces and toss them apart. Would she ever be able to wash the blood from her hands?

The girl felt ill, and much to her own dismay, she did follow through and assassinate Ano Kamaka, despite her tears hindering the performance some. The client was so grateful that he paid her double his offer, and even gave her his number with the promise that she could depend on him if ever she needed a favor. A "reasonable favor" rather was how he had stated it.

It wasn't for another ten years that Misaki finally had the nerve to scroll over the contact name "Haku K" in her list and call in that favor, of course...

A/N: Originally this wasn't my plan for this chapter, although it was my intention to fit this in somewhere. Hopefully it's not too disruptive to the flow of the story...

Also, thanks to the "guest" reviewer who got through all the chapters in a couple days. I hope you didn't hurt yourself XD although I'm flattered.

Lastly, there are a few people that are apparently disappointed in the fact that this story is not 100% focused on Killua developing a full blown romance with Misaki. To those people, I apologize if I've misled you somehow. There are plenty of stories where Killua and an OC are falling head over heels for one another and starting a relationship, but I'm sure you can probably tell if you've made it this far that that is not entirely my aim. "Romance" is not one of the main two categories I've selected (as someone kindly pointed out in a review before), and so I hope that does not come as a complete annoyance to anybody.