"Activate your Ren."
Nen flowed out of Mito's body and swallowed her up in a inferno of swirling lilac. She noticed for the first time that her Nen supply had grown immensely during her training. Fuma gave an appraising eye to her form and a thoughtful frown creased the lines worn into her forehead. Once she was satisfied, Fuma plucked a leaf from a low branch and set it atop a glass filled with water from a running stream.
"Now you channel your Nen into the water," Fuma instructed.
"What does it do?"
"That depends on your Nen type. We'll know which one you are once we see. If you're an Enhancer, your Nen will make more water; a Transmuter will change the water's taste; a Conjurer will create impurities in the water; and an Emitter will change the color of the water."
Mito imagined that impenetrable dams were built within her body, guiding her Nen from her center, down the length of her arms and finally into her palms. Her hands now glowed an angry shade of purple. Her Nen fought against her attempts to tame it, even after months of practice in fighting it into submission, lashing against the dams she built. But they held long enough, and Mito felt her Nen extend from her palms, seeping through the pores in the glass and settling into the water. But then, something unexpected happened. Frost spread on the surface of the glass and the water pulled inward, as though squeezed by a child's invisible grip. Mito quickly withdrew her Nen and marvelled at what her Nen had done, at the glass of water, now a centimeter lower than it had been, a few lonely flecks of ice half-formed on the surface.
"How did I do that?" Mito stirred the glass with her finger. The ice was real, as cool and clear as any she had seen, but the water was thicker than it ought to have been; it clung to her finger like oil.
"I suppose that makes you a Specialist then," Fuma said. She sighed her signature world-weary sigh, although it did not escape Mito's notice that she eagerly snatched the glass from the ground and studied it intently. "A Specialist's Nen ability falls outside the main five categories, and it's usually connected to their water divination test results."
"So we can use this to figure out what my ability is?"
"Exactly." Fuma tipped the glass to the side and its contents spilled back to the dirt, winding out in a slow thread. "Based on this, there are a few possibilities. Your power could have something to do with temperature, based on the ice,"—although to Mito, that felt wrong for reasons she could not articulate—"but we can only know once you master this exercise. I'll be leaving for the headquarters this week, so I'll be out of town. When I get back, I expect you to have mastered water divination."
Fuma left that night, and Mito saw her off down a dusty road at the edge of town. She left a large kettle of leftover soup sitting on the stove, with a note upon the lid: Hope you like cold soup! Haven't paid electricity bill. As it happened, Mito did not. Instead, Mito walked to a small counter restaurant that just barely fit into the slot between the two stores on either side of it. She ordered the largest bowl of ramen for sale and a cup of water, not to drink but to practice with later.
Mito didn't like being in the cottage now that Fuma was not in it. She was what gave the cottage its attitude; without her to liven it up, Mito could only see how dull and dilapidated it was, so she did not go home that evening. Instead, Mito jogged to her training ground, holding her ramen steady under her arm. She ate up on her favorite tree branch, and from there, she could see the sunset melting the sky into pale lavender and orange. She stayed up there until it was dark and then she stayed longer, channeling her Nen into the cup of water the way she had been practicing.
She still didn't understand what the leaf did, whether its place upon the water held any special significance. As Mito channeled her Nen, the water thickened and froze again, but Mito looked only at the leaf. A film of frost had formed over it, but otherwise it seemed an unremarkable leaf. Mito pulled it out of the cup and cradled it in her hand. Only now did she notice what had changed. The leaf's size had not changed, but it felt heavier in her hand, almost imperceptibly so, but heavier nonetheless. Tougher too; when Mito pulled on each side of the leaf, it resisted coming apart, albeit weakly. Spurred on by her discovery, Mito spent many more hours at the training field experimenting on new leaves. They all turned out the same as the first leaf, ever so slightly more substantial than normal, but she didn't find any new properties to explore and there were no outliers to raise new questions. Mito noticed finally how much Nen she had used; she felt the low, satisfying ache of exercise throughout her body, and that was what forced her to fall back into the grass and turn her brain off for a while. Cicadas hummed their insistent drone; they had done so for hours, but it was only now that Mito paused to hear them. They were a piece of home, recalling many nights spent roaming the forests with Ging, and Mito appreciated that they were here too, so she let herself be lulled asleep to their high humming and to the stirring of the leaves.
Mito only returned to the cottage four times that week and never for more than an hour each time. All of her time was spent out in the clearing practicing or seeing the town and looking for traces of Gon. She kept a watchful eye to all the newcomers to Zaban City and met as many of them as she could, casually asking after a loud boy dressed all in green, but none of them ever knew. From time to time, some of the townspeople whom she had known for longer and liked her better would check in on her, asking whether she had learned anything new ("Still nothing," she would sigh) or reassuring her that they had a Hunter relative who could help her out ("I appreciate the help," she would say, though invariably, the help never came). When Fuma was gone, the city only made her restless, reminded her of all the progress she was not making.
Mito returned to the cottage for the fifth time a week later, finally having run out of spending money for takeout. She pulled the tall pot of soup off the stove and set the lid down. A horrid, hot smell, fermented by a week in a warm, dark house, wafted up and made Mito gag. A faint shuffling of feet on linoleum made her look up, and then before she could say a word, the dull point of a knife was pressed at her back.
"Miss me?" the knife's owner asked.
Mito groaned good-naturedly when she realized what had just happened. "You couldn't have stayed a day longer? I was just getting used to not living with a homicidal psychopath."
"I never!" Fuma exclaimed. "I am not a homicidal psychopath, I am the homicidal psychopath. And it looks like you've got a homicidal streak of your own, opening that pot in the house. You should know that the wallpaper clings onto smells for a long while; it's not coming out any time soon."
Mito turned to face Fuma. At her side was the knife she had snuck up on Mito with, and she was ashamed to realize it was a butter knife, dull and cheap.
"You know, I was even gone for a day longer than I planned, so at this point, you should be able to teach the class on water divination." Fuma did the same thing Mito had done thousands of times throughout the week, filling a glass with water and a leaf from a rosebush from the garden. She set it on the coffee table and sunk back into her recliner. "Now let's see what you can do."
Mito was glad to show what she had accomplished this week, but another part of her was terrified. Not all of her attempts had been successes: each time, her Nen fought against her, and sometimes it won, breaking out of her hands and back into the rest of her body, or else throwing itself so hard against the glass as to send a crack coursing down the side of the glass. She channeled her Nen through her hands as she always did, but with more force than she had ever applied in practice, as much as she was capable of giving. She closed her eyes, and felt only the Nen rushing out of her. When she opened her eyes, she let out a long breath, relieved to see that she had not failed. In fact, she had succeeded far beyond her expectations. The leaf sat at the bottom of the glass, which was now completely dry. Instead of the tiny ice shards she had formed before, the water was now frozen solid, condensed further than seemed possible into a clear, heavy marble that fit comfortably in Mito's palm.
Fuma snatched it greedily from her hands and began turning it around to see it from every angle. "What is this? Is it a temperature control ability after all?"
Mito shook her head timidly. "I'm not completely sure, but I don't think that's it. I tried to figure out what my ability does this week, but I have no idea."
Fuma rolled the marble back and forth in her hand idly, saying nothing. Then, she said, "I think I've got something."
She leapt up from her recliner and to her pantry, and began throwing cans and bags of ingredients aside until she found what she was looking for wedged in a remote corner: an electric scale. She set it on the coffee table and prepared the glass for another round of water divination.
"7.4 ounces. Do the test again," Fuma ordered. An explanation was unnecessary; Mito had already gathered her intentions, and it filled her with incredible excitement to have a real lead. She channeled her Nen with even more force than before, and the water began to chill, shrinking away from the sides of the glass and into a ball like before. By the time she was done, the marble was even smaller than before, perfectly clear and shimmering. But that was not what excited Mito.
"9.2 ounces," she breathed.
And now, an excerpt from a deleted scene (AKA, the reason I was so late on uploading this week).
On the way to his training, Killua had recently taken up the habit of slowing to a crawling pace at random, or stopping to draw figure-eights on the floor with the tip of his sneaker. Each time, Illumi doubled back to deliver a sharp prod in the small of his back or to drag him along by his shirt, like a mothering hound would do for her errant pups, and each time, Killua would begin to snarl and hiss a volley of unintelligible abuses. He didn't stop after that point, not until they reached the training field. Once, it had startled Illumi, but it had soon seemed to dull into routine, although to Killua's credit, he never grew any less spirited. Illumi's presence seemed to awaken an animal rage in Killua, along with an unshakeable confidence of the type only found in a child. (He attributed Killua's bluster to Father's lenience and Mother's doting, although he would never say as much aloud.)
Perhaps Killua thought that one day, his tantrums would chisel out a crack in Illumi's mask, force Illumi to reveal the anger he was so sure was being carefully hidden from him. But Illumi was born with a hole in his heart, in the place where his anger was meant to have gone. This was no more or less than an immutable fact, and he had long since stopped trying to understand what he would feel were it not true.
When Illumi was much younger, he had made the mistake of asking a butler about it during a trip through the forest. "What does anger feel like?" he asked, and it must have seemed entirely out of the blue to the unfortunate butler. She had shrunk away from him, fearing that she had irritated her young master and that Illumi had just devised some torture for her. But still she answered: Anger is what you feel when you think something is wrong. It hurts you, and it makes you want to hurt others. Illumi thanked her for her answer, and indeed, it was a good answer. She had given him what he had asked for; she had done her job. But the rest of the way home, he wished she had not told him. What a comfort it would have been, if she could not have told him what it was just like he could never know it for himself. Now, when he saw her, he could see what he lacked, and even as he envied her, he wanted that butler to live happily. After that trip, he asked Mother to send her back into the city with a generous sum of money and a glowing recommendation. He never saw her again, although he thought of her from time to time and wondered what he was thinking back then.
Now they were in the training field, littered with wildflowers that the groundskeepers had not been able to tame. They had sheared them down and blanketed the field in pesticides, but the wildflowers grew back each time, and Mother had allowed them to give up on the endeavor. No, she had insisted they give up; upon her investigation, she found that the wildflowers were the base of a rare and unusually effective asphyxiate poison, and now she came out sometimes to collect samples and watch Killua train.
Illumi approved of his mother's presence. She held Killua to a high standard in training (unlike his father, Silva, who seemed content with Killua's most perfunctory efforts), but more importantly, she actually succeeded in extracting his best efforts from him. Illumi and Killua's relationship had stabilized into something cool and reserved, in which each did as was expected of him and no more, but when Mother was there, Killua stiffened and quieted, delivering his venom in hateful stares instead of insults, and he began to push himself. Today, Mother watched Killua practice his Ren with the drill Illumi prescribed. His Nen capacity had improved—Killua was a fast learner, even when trying his best to disappoint—but he still strained as he did the exercise, grinding his heels into the soil for stability. He could not have held it like that for more than a half an hour, and it would be closer to ten minutes in a fight. Then, Illumi saw it: the instant when Killua forgot his surroundings. How his eyes dropped to the ground and he turned his focus too far inward. That was when Illumi leapt at him, a needle bared at his neck.
Killua realized his mistake, blurring out of reach even as Illumi swept at the space where his jugular vein would have been a quarter second ago. This was how all spars began and how most ended: Illumi attacked and Killua reacted. But today, Killua batted away with unexpected ease all the needles Illumi shot at him.
"You'll have to do better than that." Killua laughed, cold and harsh, Father's laugh. He meant to goad Illumi into attacking impulsively and overextending himself, and that begged the question of what he would do in retaliation if Illumi did. It was curiosity that beckoned Illumi forward, he would later tell himself. But it was the laugh too, too much like Father's to disobey. The same laugh that beckoned him forward so many years ago, when he was just seven and Father would spar with him, allowing him to throw off a weak jab and then batting him back against the wall for it, throwing the wind from his lungs. And then he laughed. Again, boy.
Illumi burst forward, with all the speed he had been holding back, and then he was there, one hand wrapped around Killua's neck and the other holding a needle to his temple. And then, as quickly as he had left, he was back in his own body. He finally felt Killua squirm in his chokehold and gasp for air. He loosened his grip and Killua fell back to the ground.
"What… the fuck was that?" Killua growled in between heavy breaths. Illumi felt a shock of real fear, cold and clammy. "You just tried to kill me."
"You've improved, Killua. So I decided it was time to stop holding back against you. It was a gesture of respect." There. That was true enough.
Mother stood up from her place under the oak tree and came over to Illumi and Killua. Even as she lectured him for his mistakes in the spar, she knelt beside him in the grass and ran her fingers over his throat. Already, the beginnings of lavender bruises blossomed under her touch. Killua flinched and Illumi saw him force himself not to run back out of her reach. It told him that things were going back to the way they were meant to be. Mother had never stopped loving Killua, but now, in her arms, Killua remembered how he had loved her once. It was plain in his face: soon enough, he would forgive her enough to take refuge in her. Illumi now knew he had not made a mistake; Killua would finally love Mother and everything would be set as it should be.
The emptiness, again. Why had it come now?