Additional warning for: one reference to suicide. General darkness. This is also cross-posted on AO3.
In his line of work, few people Illumi meets are deserving of mercy. He has come to appreciate the ones that do, even if he has never spared a one.
Illumi does not admit easily to the things that bring him pleasure. Unlike Hisoka, whose pleasure is a gambolling, white-teethed sylph, leery and lovelorn and in as much control of Hisoka as Hisoka is in control of it; exactly the way he likes it. Hisoka is deliberate. Hisoka is an exhibitionist whose pleasure cannot exist without other people to demarcate it and to fear it; to give it lines, a life that he can then colour in, cut out, and invert like a summer storm's umbrella. Hisoka is cruel because his cruelty bears no alternative. Illumi is none of this; Illumi is neither wild nor cruel. Illumi is unkind. If Hisoka is a circle, then Illumi is a square.
His official kill count is eight, a trivial fact to which only Illumi is privy. The Zoldycks don't keep count, because—well, is there a point? They live as they kill; kill as they live. When others speak of him they speak of thousands, no, more and Illumi wants to correct them, tell them that numbers with three or more digits have little romance and even less practicality; that his life is not a series of lives taken but a direction, a personal style, a canon and creed that exists wholly outside of him, his job occupation.
Illumi is keenly aware of his mortality, however. It never strays far from his mind: from the long list of those he has yet to kill, one will be without subsequent. Illumi fantasises about this, salivates over it. What will it be like? He would like to be well-dressed; he would like it to be special. A seventeen-course gourmet meal of death and good technique. Maybe he would like it to be Hisoka, he thinks. He would be creative, with him. Maybe he thinks of killing Hisoka more than is appropriate. But of course Illumi knows this is not likely. More than likely it will be some grunt he doesn't know in some country he doesn't care for in clothes he doesn't like all that much in a method he will have used so many times it will feel like taking a shit on a warm toilet seat. Killua will be family head by then, he hopes, since Illumi refuses to die before Silva does.
Illumi isn't afraid of dying—he is too ruthless for hypocrisy—but he is not so childish to think that death fears him in turn. Illumi is twenty-four and a Zoldyck, but even so he has taken up an unusually wide variety of hobbies. One day, one of these hobbies is going to kill him. Of course he fantasises about this as well.
He would like to be beautiful, still. Illumi knows the illogic in this, but cannot fathom dying as an old, wheezing man. His face will sag and it will be an abomination. Naturally, then, he thinks about being killed by Hisoka; Hisoka, who will never age. Even when he is sixty, Hisoka will be beautiful. It is in his nature, to be so. What Hisoka could give, Illumi has been trained to take since he could first hold his head up. Hisoka wouldn't be able to deny himself, but not out of lust. For all that it drives him, uses him—lust does not anchor him. The pin through a butterfly's wing; even Hisoka is not completely without axiom. All that desire, that deception, the fickle caprice; beneath that, a naked dissatisfaction that Illumi senses rarely and randomly, but knows it acutely. It simmers, aches and shows itself in pockets of gentler amusement, dryer wit, clearer impatience. Sometimes Hisoka is startlingly lucid. Illumi would like to meet this dissatisfaction head-on. He would like to tame it, or be tamed by it.
Outsiders say his family is a family of assassins as if speaking of zoo animals: here, a passel of Great Stamps, careful, don't get too close, ah, but you see here this is their habitat, don't go too far or they'll rip your fuckin' head off... no, his relatives are simultaneously more and less than a 'family of Assassins'. Case in point: on his way to the Hotel of Six Spinning Stars, Illumi walks through the busy market street and is an assassin. When he leans his hip against the door to room 201 and strikes a single pin through Mazarin Fern's brain, he is an executioner. Now, standing before a naked and frightened woman (not the subject of his assignment, but rather its whore), he is briefly a god. This woman is his.
He is momentarily curious, as if having a leaf land on his shoulder and before brushing it off, examining its veins in the sunlight.
"Would you like to live?" Illumi asks the woman who is younger than him but cannot be very much so; she was still fucking the corpse lying next to her when he walked in.
Illumi considers mercy in the same manner most depressed people will consider suicide. It does not mean he has never shown it. It simply means less when the benefactors of his better moods are the likes of Killua and Hisoka, who may require mercy but certainly do not deserve it.
"Y-yes, yes, sir," comes the answer smally. She cannot seem to look away from him, as if the clues to her fate might lie in the planes of his face. They do not. The planes are unyielding, and fate is for people who want to be told what they are. Illumi meets her gaze anyway. She has clear blue eyes; he'd see straight to the back of her skull if he looked hard enough.
She starts up again. "Please, sir, I—I have family. Sir, I'll do anything..." This accompanied by a lick of her lips, an upwards glance through alabaster lashes. The blanket she has clutched to her shoulders drops to reveal the upper curvature of her breasts. Illumi has to wonder—does this ever work? It is unnervingly unattractive, this display of—well, he supposes it is desperation.
He coughs acidly. "Wrong temperament, unfortunately." He grimaces at his own comment and adds, "Family? So you have family too, hm?" Illumi raises an eyebrow as if to say, do go on, what family?; at least, this is how it is interpreted. The words fall out of her like an upended jug.
"A sister, sir, a little sister. She's very smart, and she, ah, she goes to school"—her voice cracks like a series of broken fingers, splits like the skin of a tomato just parboiled, and Illumi revises his assessment of her to a girl, a child, a one who deserves—"and, um, I won't say anything. God. I swear on my ma's bones, I'll never. Please, I'll do anything for you, I'm all she has…"
She says more, but Illumi has heard it all before. There are the ones with stories; with legends, with lies, with dreams laughing fatly and dreams stifled, stifling, grasping, gasping. The noise alone—a cacophony he has heard. A symphony he has heard. Likewise, of course, there are the ones with naught to say and naught to give, with eyes that may judge but do not beg and simply wait. Illumi is not fooled. The little details of their lives are written with equally tragic clarity in what they do not tell and what they do not do, in how they bleed, how they hurt, and how they do it all in silence. Lack of principle is still principle; silence is no equaliser. Man or woman, old or young, strong or weak, rich or poor, beautiful or ugly, happy or sad—it is all irrelevant. In the shadow of a god, only one thing matters: how much they want. How much they want.
That is the equaliser. Illumi stares down at the cowering girl, who has finally fallen silent. The contempt rising into his throat is nauseating. He can hardly think of anything else.
"Are you begging for your sister's life or yours?"
"Mine, sir, mine." Her breathing is the loudest thing in the room. Illumi will not sound like this when he dies.
The conviction of death without mercy comes before even the conviction that he is a Zoldyck. It is, in fact, what makes him a Zoldyck. A successful one, at least. He cannot imagine a life lived differently. He cannot fathom the child that might've grown up in his place had it not been born to Silva and Kikyo—that thing would not have been Illumi, even if it had borne his face, his power, and his name. That thing, that abomination would've deserved to live, and Illumi would not have let it. The Illumi he is today, he is because he allowed it to be so, and indeed, chose to be so. It is still a choice today, and will be the same tomorrow; Illumi makes it every time. It is different for Hisoka, whose first choice of self was not a choice at all, but a circumstance.
"Your name, please," he commands.
Painted lashes frozen comically wide, the girl's eyes dart to Mazarin Fern's very dead body. There is little information to be gleaned from him: were it not for his eyes, open yet unerringly blank, one might even mistake him for post-coital, rather than post-mortem.
"Sakura, sir," she says finally, eyes swivelling to his and softening fractionally. "Chrysogona, that's my boss, she says she's got a picture of a tree with flowers like this"—she gestures at her hair, a sickly shade of pale pink—"in a book somewhere, or something."
She smiles easily if cautiously, and her eyes are warm, but Illumi can read a face better than he can read his letters; he will not let her begin the attempt. He knows the game, he is the game. Stepping forward until his hips are flush with the end of the bed, Illumi flattens his expression into something in the realm of the nearly inhuman, something Killua used to say made him look like a piranha.
The sun is setting; he will be expected at the main house before it does.
"Sakura," he says, almost gently. The syllables clack against his teeth, unpleasant. "Sakura, Sakura, Sa-ku-ra. I'm sure your sister will be fine without you, wouldn't you say?" This of course is a lie. Illumi knows that whatever sister of whatever Sakura will be very unhappy without this Sakura. He says it for her benefit, not his.
It takes a long second for her eyes to jump wide again. Sakura shakes her head so hard the rest of her chignon falls out, spilling attractively over her bare shoulder, stopping just above her waist. What a waste of perfectly good hair. "No, no," she says, voice building to pathetic levels of volume, "I thought—I said—I wanted, I wanted to live, you asked!" Ah, this was unkind of him; Illumi sees it now and regrets it no less.
He smiles, does not even try to make it genuine. It doesn't matter on a face like his. "So did I," he says matter-of-factly, attention already beginning to drift. The main house, his family...
Illumi rarely dreams. Hisoka does—long and twisting things that leave him pin-straight and breathless—but Illumi sleeps well whenever, wherever. He sleeps like a corpse. When he does dream, his dreams are bizarre and fantastical adventures whose fragments amuse him gently in watery morning light and are completely subsumed by noon. He wonders why the nightmares go to Hisoka, who is a nightmare more than enough, and never to Illumi, who is empty, empty, empty. Come daybreak, Illumi will watch Hisoka paint his face white and gleaming, and he will come to the apathetic conclusion that this is the universe's way of telling him that he is well, truly, and forever fucked. Well, so be it; Illumi has never been one to deny a good fucking.
"I always thought it was going to be one of them," Sakura murmurs, staring at his hands. Pig for slaughter. He tries not to be flattered. She looks up again, pupils blown. "I forgive you," she says, with pompous, petulant magnanimity. "Just a little bit. God, I hate this fucking place. And I hate you. I hate everyone. I hope I see you in hell, loser." She eyes the window.
"This is the fifth floor," he informs her. "I don't advise it." It will be neither quick nor painless.
Sakura's mouth twists into a facsimile of a sneer; it misses 'angry' by a mile and lands mostly in 'bitter'. The left corner curls into 'sad'. Illumi knows how to read.
He knows how to tell time, too.
"Well, I don't forgive you," he informs Sakura before flicking a succession of pins into her head. He studies her expression in the instant she recognises death: surprise, rage. How very unfair of him. He recalls the pins with a dry laugh.
Illumi knows so many things that sometimes he wonders if this is what it means to be powerful. In power. If it is meant to crush him down, carve him away, choke him into—
A quarry, a knife; a misshapen page in a book closed too quickly. A pressed flower. The forests beneath the mountains and the stars above them. Spit stains in the mirror. Water, coming to a boil, and salt, dissolving quietly.
It eats him, it does.
Notes.
I want to write a fluffy AU of this one-shot where Illumi picks up Sakura's sister on his way out and they become buddies. Murder buddies. Or maybe just regular buddies (?). Hisoka will absolutely be the third wheel. Killua will be jealous, a little.