The cold was absolute. It clawed and stung at every inch of Mito's skin until it subsided into a dull, penetrating pain. She managed to open her eyes for a moment, and she saw a dead, green light from all around her. The water was still, and thicker than it ought to have been, holding onto her like jelly.
A voice reverberated through the water. "Stay down here." The sea snake from her dream stared out at her with patient eyes. It didn't open its mouth; it didn't even seem to notice that it was speaking, and yet the voice in the water couldn't belong to anything else. "Let go, and I can give you everything. A beautiful dream."
With all the strength in her body, Mito pushed herself upward, flailing and fighting desperately to reach the surface. Her fingertips grazed air, but a current swallowed her struggling body and forced her below the surface.
"Stop resisting," the snake commanded. "There is nothing for you up there. Your home is here."
No. That was a lie. Mito still had so much she had to do. Without her, Gon would die. She kicked and grabbed and growled with exertion, with all the ferocity she could channel. But no matter what she did, the currents kept their hold on her.
The voice roared in frustration, and the snake jetted toward her and wrapped its body around her neck. And squeezed, tighter and tighter, until she could no longer resist the compulsion to gasp for the air that did not come. Her vision grew dim, details fading into a hazy afterglow. And with nothing left to try, she reached out with everything she had, with something from within her that she had not known she possessed.
Something reached back. She seized on it with all her strength, and pulled.
Her body was flooded with a new vitality and lightness. The currents battered her harder than before, but she resisted them and leapt up, slicing through the water. She broke through the surface and gasped greedily for air. Mito collided with the slick floor, too exhausted to even consider her landing.
She doubled over on her hands and knees, a violent cough wracking her body. Water pooled below her mouth, expelled from her lungs. Mito wondered if the damned beast she'd met at the cabin was watching her even now.
"Very impressive. But you are mine, all the same."
A deep rumble filled the air, and then the snake's head surfaced, many times larger than before. It only continued to grow, until its head nearly scraped the cavern's ceiling. Mito ran before the thought could even take shape in her consciousness. She ran for the first exit she found, into a tunnel without light. She didn't care which direction it went, as long as it led away from the snake's den.
Then, a disturbance. She felt—with that foreign sense that felt simultaneously alien and natural—the snake leave its den. She felt its presence push in on her. And she could tell it knew exactly where she was.
She ran faster than she knew she was capable of, darting nimbly around corners and following the pull of her newfound sixth sense. But the snake kept pace with her. She knew it intended to force her into a slow battle of attrition, to run until she collapsed with the effort.
She stopped hard and tumbled to the floor, unable to counteract her own momentum. The snake drew steadily closer. It would be upon her in a matter of minutes, and now that she had stopped, there was no hope of outrunning it. All she could do was hide, and pray she wouldn't be caught. But there was no hope of hiding from it, not while it could see her in the way that she saw.
She remembered how the animals on Whale Island would hide. When she turned to face the rabbits or squirrels, they froze. But it was more than just that. Even then, she could feel a faint presence flicker out of her notice, as though they simply stopped existing. So she laid against the wall, behind a crag of rocks, and pressed in on herself, on the energy leaking out from within her. She had to fade into the energy around her, become nothing at all.
The sea snake slithered through the tunnel in front of her. It looked in her direction, but she saw no recognition in its eyes. "I know you're hiding," it growled. "I'm going to find you." Mito clamped a hand over her mouth to hide her breathing. She held her body rigid; she would not move an inch, or she would be found. But the snake began to move into the next tunnel.
Mito allowed herself to relax a fraction, and rolled over to face the ceiling. She held a hand over her heart; it hammered against her hand like the beats of a hummingbird's wings.
"I suppose that's one way to take care of it." The wiry beast who left her in the mine revealed himself. "That was only a low-level beast. Still, using Zetsu without training? That's certainly something."
"What do you think you're doing?" Mito whispered as sharply as she could manage. "It could come back!"
The beast huffed out a laugh. "Right, right. Hold still."
The beast carried her through familiar corridors, where she had made a point to memorize landmarks, and then to rooms that she might have passed through or not. But the beast stopped in a room with an impossibly high ceiling and walls that sloped steeply up, as though they were at the bottom of a giant vase.
"Get off," he commanded. Mito unhooked her hands and feet from the beast's body and slid herself onto the ground. Her knees wobbled on the impact, but she steadied herself. The beast regarded her for a moment, running his eyes up and down her body like he was searching for something upon her.
"Do you know what the creature you faced was?" the beast asked. He didn't wait for an answer. "That was called a songsnake. Although they aren't especially strong, they are extremely crafty creatures. I'm sure you've already figured out how they lure their prey, yeah? They offer to answer three of their victims' questions while they simultaneously put them in a state of hypnosis. Then, they lure them into their dens where they can easily stun and devour their prey. It's pretty lucky that you escaped. Speaking of, how did you escape?"
Mito shook her head. "I honestly don't quite know. I just felt something latch onto me, and then whatever it was gave me the strength to get away from the snake. Was it that Nen thing the snake told me about?"
"It must have been," he mused. "Damn. You actually awakened your Nen? And," the beast circled around her to inspect her more closely, "it looks like you pulled some from the mine too."
Mito paused, utterly confused. "Should I not have done that?"
"No, no, it's a good thing you did, and beyond lucky too. It takes some extreme talent to awaken it on your own in such a short time. Of course, it helps that you were in a life-or-death scenario. But now you're leaking Nen like crazy, so we've got to fix that."
"What does that mean?"
"How do I explain it?" the beast thought aloud. "Well, every living being constantly puts out a trace amount of Nen. But since you've awakened yours, you're emitting much more Nen than normal, and if you can't control how much you put out, you'll eventually run out of aura and get exhausted. So we need to teach you how to control your output."
With horror, Mito realized that she had stopped hiding herself the way she had before. She had allowed her presence to reappear. She spread her senses as far as they could stretch, but no disturbances rippled back to her.
"You can calm down. The snake won't come back for you." The beast came closer, in two great strides as long as her body, and stopped too close to her. "We're going to do a bit of training now. Get into stance to channel your Nen. You want something casual and loose. Do what feels natural for you."
Mito spread her legs wider and stretched her arms outward, curious to see where they would fall. Her hands stopped at her front, grazing her thighs, and she held the stance.
"Good, that'll work nicely. Now, try to feel the Nen you're putting out. Close your eyes and let yourself sense it."
She did. She did not reach out with her Nen as she had before; she only stood still and let herself look without really looking, without any special attention paid to the act of sensing. She felt the walls and floor that hummed with an aquamarine buzz, kept in a violent balance by grinding and lashing against itself. And she saw herself, from somewhere outside of her own body. A bit above and behind. She glowed an angry violet, and energy flowed out of her, unbridled and eager to run.
"Do you see it, how quickly you're losing Nen? You shouldn't worry about it; that's perfectly normal for newly awakened users. But it isn't sustainable. So you need to stem the flow, so you're letting off the same amount you're producing.
"Everybody regulates their aura a little differently. The most common method is to imagine it as blood, or at least a liquid flowing through your body."
Mito imagined it, the violet sparks dripping and melting into a pool of liquid and welling up in her veins. Her aura grew lethargic and its bucks against her control were weak, but still it struggled against her attempts to tame it.
"Not that then. I didn't peg you as that type anyway. Maybe something with a bit more movement to it? Look at how the Nen around you is moving, and try something like that. This way requires a harsher style of control, so try to feel a strong negative emotion."
She summoned fear to the front of her mind, all the strongest fears she knew of. Losing Ging first and Gon after him, facing death in the snake's den, and all the smaller fears she had picked up over the years. She held a rough hand on her Nen and wrestled it in, and when it raged against her and against itself, she didn't even try to calm it.
"That's wrong too." The beast hammered a foot against the ground quick and in time, a nervous tic he didn't even seem to notice.
"What? But I've got it all held in?" She said it as a question.
"You do, but just barely. It's all held in, but it's obviously unnatural for you. Let it out now. Trying too hard to contain it will just start you with bad habits."
She released her hold, and the Nen went back to running out of her grasp, as if to taunt and punish her all at once. Mito rubbed two fingers against her temple, feeling the rumblings of what would soon be a terrible headache. "Why is my Nen so weird? Hard to control?" she asked.
"Honestly, I teach you some Nen and now you think I'm your therapist. I don't really know why it's being difficult for you specifically. In general, though, people's Nen tends to mirror their personality. Nice and normal people have nice and normal Nen. You just need to find an image that helps you to visualize balance, something that works for you."
What meant balance for her? She didn't know, or maybe she did know once and had just forgotten it. Long ago, she used to like staring out at the sea. While playing hide-and-hunt with Ging, she had happened upon a patch of banana trees high on top of a rocky cliff where nobody came anymore, and she gave up the game to sit and watch the sea and eat her fill of underripe bananas. She came back there often, and she even found it peaceful. But after Ging left, the sea became something else to her. She began to think of the sharks with rows upon rows of teeth, and she thought of the sea storms and typhoons splitting ships, happening where she couldn't see them. She wondered how long it would take to cross the sea, and then went home and calculated it out to find that it would take three days to the nearest land mass.
But once, she had looked at the sea and seen nothing more than it. So Mito remembered the sea as no more than she saw it. She asked her Nen to become waves, crashing and swirling into tides within herself, and it agreed.
"Interesting." A sly, bemused smile grew upon the beast's face. "So you chose something in between the extremes. You know something, I think the Hunters are going to want to meet you. It's past time anyway."
A/N: Another chapter I'm not entirely sure about. I tried a different writing process—I usually edit as I go, but this time I did something like free-writing with editing at the end—and I'm not sure if it worked out. But I hope you enjoyed it!