Disclaimer: I do not own Hunter x Hunter, its characters, and its plot. Those are the property of Yoshihiro Togashi. I do however own all my OCs, all the places I have created and the concepts I have come up with.
Last edited: March 1st 2021
Prologue: Into the Void
She pried her eyes open, twitching eyelids revealing a clouded blur. Out of breath, drenched in sweat, she was crushed on the floor, quivering. Pain slowly came to focus as she regained consciousness — claiming her, one inch of her body at a time until it was all she felt, twisting in her gut and throbbing in her skull and prickling all over her skin. A dull ringing in her ears subsided, the noise dissolving into a cool, heavy silence only disrupted by her ragged breathing and distant sounds of zapping. A string of blood trickled down her face, the droplets weighing on her eyelashes.
With tremendous effort, she dragged her hand on the floor, her fist shaking as she pushed on her elbows and propped herself up — or tried to. Her body was a riot and she had never felt so, so weak. As if her blood was mercury, her bones were lead, and her limbs were stitched up with barbed wire. She craned her neck, scanning her surroundings.
Where…?
The room was dark and still deathly quiet. Rubble littered the ground. An electrical cable snapped, coiling like a dying snake; for a brief instant, it illuminated the destroyed furniture scattered along the walls — as though it had been shoved to the side by a massive force. Shattered pieces of wood pierced her skin and debris spilled from her back when she tried to straighten it. She breathed in smoke, cement, the acidic smell of sweat. And blood. Everywhere.
As she moved, sharp pain screamed in her side. She winced, reaching for the burning sensation. Her fingers came out red and wet. Her stomach clenched, and then she saw it. A pool of blood expanding underneath her, her shirt damp with the liquid rust oozing from the wound.
In the midst of the agony, of that lacerating sensation of being torn in half, questions crowded her head.
What happened? Where was she? She knew she was supposed to do something important, but what? Was she alone?
More importantly, had she failed?
She clenched her teeth, working on her labored breathing to calm the pain, when a dark immobile figure on the floor caught her attention. She distinguished legs and arms.
Who…?
Something — no, someone — moved on the opposite side of the room, swift and quiet. She froze. Caught signs of breathing. Clothes ruffling. Pieces of glass clinking as the stranger pushed them away. She listened for the source of the noise, silenced her wheezing breath, a panicked prey searching for a predator.
And he came into focus. A tall form in a dark coat, with one burnt glove and a tear in the fabric of his pants, on his thigh, right where he had been shot. Right where she had shot him.
And everything rushed back to her.
The mission. They were on a mission. She and her friend. She and Feri. They were chasing a man. A criminal. A murderer. The Whisper. They had tried to ambush him. Then, the fight. The blackout. The explosion.
The Whisper had survived.
What about Feri?
Her heart missed a beat. All the elements linked together.
She had failed, and Feri had paid the price of her incompetence.
She crawled toward her friend, fueled by despair. Ignored her lungs that pressed for air, her heartbeats that hammered against her chest, her wounds that throbbed and begged and pulsated. A broken thing swimming against the tide, dragging its ruined armor to the battlefield, terror fitting in every crack of her sanity. Soon the blood, coppery, intoxicating, was all she smelled, a metallic fog hiding a macabre promise. It was hopeless, and yet she kept clawing forward, each second stamped on her as a second too late. Each pathetic lurch, each time her chest hit the ground and her fists trembled and her knees scratched the concrete and her gaping wound kissed the floor with morbid intimacy.
How ironic was it that she, the hunter, had become the prey?
With one last effort, she reached the immobile body on the floor. Feri.
Her hand landed in a pool of blood. Thick. Gross. Still warm. It seeped into the space between her nails. She widened her eyes, dizzy. Used all her strength to kneel. Wobbled like a broken toy.
And then, as the light flickered above her, she saw it. The void in Feri's chest. Hollow where his heart should be.
Shock hit her like a tidal wave, flooding her, numbing the pain. She was being buried alive and this was the taste of earth as it filled her throat and choked her. Her stomach churned, her head spun, her breathing got ragged, uncontrolled, shallow. She stared at him — glimpsed his face frozen in death, fear forever carved in his features, and she cried, whimpered, "no, no please," her voice cracking and dying each time.
It couldn't be.
It couldn't be.
Tap, tap. The man's steps drummed across the room, mixing with her own cries — her irregular, breathy cries — while she rocked back and forth between consciousness and dizziness.
Dead. He was dead. Feri was dead.
She couldn't process it, couldn't accept it. Hell, she hadn't been trained for that. She was just sixteen, she hadn't been trained to see her friends cold and dead, bathing in their own blood. She hadn't been taught how to live with the grief and nightmares and the guilt — ugly, capricious — that already prowled. It was her fault. All her fault.
It was there, the blame. Gleaming in his eyes with silent reproaches.
Tears flooded her face, leaving streaks on her dirty cheeks.
But the Whisper now towered over her. Still, quiet.
She stared at him. Half-conscious.
Processed his presence.
Barely seeing him.
He moved.
A hand.
And—
Hana couldn't describe what happened next. Not that she had forgotten — she could never forget. But she couldn't say it. You had to live it to understand. You had to lay for weeks on a hospital bed, hallucinating, spasming, screaming, with fire for a heart and agony slicing you apart and your entrails knotting together as though to keep you from bursting out of your own body to understand what it was like.
You had to become the pain.
For the few weeks that followed the incident, Hana became pain and pain became her. The Whisper, with his hand slowly moving toward her, haunted her dreams. His open palm reaching for her neck, thumb down, fingers flexed and ready with a curse to burrow through her chest. The tattoo that peeked through his burnt glove — a black amaryllis with diaphanous petals and long stamens that curled like tendrils — was forever engraved into her memory.
How insignificant she had seemed, then. How fragile it was, this big concept called 'life' hanging onto a string above the void. Just a slight skip, a split second, a minor disruption, and the string would snap and life would tumble into the void.
That was the best way to describe what happened three years ago.
She had stared into the void.
A/N: Hi there! Thank you so much for giving this story a chance! I hope you enjoyed the prologue, and hopefully you will choose to keep reading this story. I've been working on it for so long and, to be fair with you, I'm a bit nervous about publishing it… but here I am!
Edit March 1st 2021:
Some things you should note before diving into this story:
- There is some level of gore. Nothing worse than the Chimera Ants, but still note-worthy.
- There is sex, later in the story. Hana and Killua are both 19 years old, they're sexually active adults who love hoeing around, so yes. Expect smut.
- The cast is mostly diverse. I'm a bisexual Lebanese woman so if you're thinking "wow a lot of these bitches sound very, very bi", you know why.
- The chapters are long. A lot of them are over 10k long.
- I started writing this story in… 2015? That's 6 years ago. It shows in my writing. I'm currently re-reading it to edit some old chapters, but the plot will remain the same. If you see "Edited [some date]", that's a sure sign I've fixed some things, but I want to leave some authenticity to it because 1- I don't have time to rewrite 500k words and 2- i was baby, I like seeing my growth
- English isn't my first language :] if you see grammar mistakes, that's why.
Reviews are encouraged, they are food for a writer's soul, but I mostly write this for me so if you're too shy to talk, don't sweat it.
Check my profile for links to google drive folders full of picrews, fanart, commissions, and personal art for the story. I used to have a tumblr called poisonedamaryllis too where I reblogged a bunch of aesthetic post. I might get it back at some point. Watch out for that, if you want to :)