The enterprising sense of self-possession was curbed, somewhat, when Kite learned that Ging was in town for the thirteenth Chairman's election. He'd been prepared to embark on an honest-to-God quest in the name of finding the man, and for him to just be announced to be at the Association Headquarters, literally a few blocks away from the hospital… it was anticlimactic, in a way. A little too good to be true.

"It's true, though," Knov was happy to inform him. "I asked Beans while you were in the Tavern, and he confirmed it for me. So now we've got two reliable sources both saying the same thing."

Kite pulled away from the laptop, rubbing wearily at his eyes while the previously three-dimensional bartender blinked back to its place on screen.

"… Isn't that good news?"

"Yeah," Kite sighed. "Sorry. It's just suspicious, is all. I didn't actually think he'd be in any recent news; I only checked it as a part of being thorough. In all my years of chasing him, I've never known Ging to answer a Zodiac summon."

"Well, the election is a pretty big deal."

"I guess," he conceded. "Thanks for letting me use your License, by the way. The headlines cost about four million and some change; I'll pay you back, sometime." Kite then paused to feel the absence of his own wallet. "Oh, and would you happen to know where my stuff is? Just whatever was on my body when I was brought in."

And Knov did turn a bit red-faced at that. "We, uh, don't know that, right now," he sheepishly replied. "There was a… change in personnel when I took over your healthcare, and your things were put in the wrong hands during the transition. They should just be in a locker somewhere, if you want someone to go look for them. But in the meantime, you won't have any regular clothes to wear."

Kite rose slowly from the chair.

"I can come with you, if you like," Knov offered. "Just in case you need any help. You'll have to move quick, since we don't know how long he plans to stick around. Ging's been known to disappear part-way through other important events."

He shook his head, the unchecked mantles of hair slipping over his field of vision. "Thanks, but Ging will run if it's anyone but me. If I don't contact you by tonight, you can assume that something went wrong and do whatever the hell you want."

"Hm. Well, I won't get in your way if you're sure you can handle it."

"I can," he muttered. "I have to."

He was sitting alone in a conference room.

"Hey."

The word came unbidden from his mouth after a few seconds of just standing in the doorway and staring at the man. Aside from the stubble daubed across his once clean-shaven face, Ging looked the same as always, a figure cut perfectly from Kite's distant memory and pasted over the present day. It had been years since he'd seen him last, after all. Years spent apart, and not a single wayward moment seemed to have touched his features—which, in fact, was exactly what Kite had expected of him; Ging would always be Ging.

Kite, on the other hand, knew he himself looked very changed.

"Well," Ging said. "Howdy."

"Ugh…"

And then he happened to notice Beans lying on the floor behind the office door, knocked over by… Kite accidentally opening the door into his face. Mortified, he practically yelped his apology as he shot down and stuck out a hand to help him up.

Beans only smiled meekly at him. "Don't worry about it," he forgave, getting up on his own and brushing himself off. "It happens more often than you'd think. I'm fine, really."

"You sure about that, Beans?" Ging called from the back of the room.

"Yes, I'm sure," he said curtly. "I'll, just… be going, then." True to his word, Beans then picked up a fallen piece of paper and left the two larger men to their devices.

A bell tolled four times across the street.

"So how's life as a burn victim?" Ging asked.

"Painful," Kite answered. "Do you know what's happened to Gon?"

He'd thought Ging would appreciate his directness, here, but the man seemed acutely bothered by Kite bringing up the elephant in the room—what was the elephant from his perspective, anyways. Kite supposed he was sporting what Ging had once dubbed his overly serious expression, which meant that he was about to say something annoying, apparently.

"Yeah, I've heard the gist of it," he sighed.

Kite pulled up the chair beside him, sat backwards in it, and crossed his arms over the backrest. "I wanna hear your ideas for how to fix him—any alternatives to Nen exorcism, in case it falls through."

"I don't have any ideas."

Resistance was to be expected. "Then brainstorm for a minute."

"I'm rather busy right now, I'll have you know."

"That's too bad, 'cause I've got nothing else to do today but follow you around. So don't try me, because I totally will."

"… What happened to you, Kite?" Ging asked after giving him a critical once-over. "You used to be a lot more cool-headed than this."

He shrugged, as mindful of his own nature as he'd ever been. "Taking care of Gon has been a… an experience," Kite replied and then furrowed his brow as he thought a bit harder. "… Wait. You mean you didn't plan for me to be like this?"

"You think I planned for you to get attached to my son?" Ging incredulously laughed.

Well, no, not exactly. But he hadn't been able to completely dismiss the possibility, either. Whenever Kite stepped back to review his life, he was never one hundred percent sure that his will was entirely his own, because if there was one thing he knew would always be certain, it was that Ging Had A Plan. His belief in his mentor's unseen machinations was almost like a religious faith, wherein Kite—in the rare instance of feeling both hopeless and fanciful—might entertain the thought of him having some larger destiny. Or perhaps it was closer to a superstition, that Ging was always watching and on the verge of taking action; make sure you eat your greens, Timmy, or Ging might come and snatch you up.

"No, I didn't mean for this to happen," the man continued. "The only reason I linked you to one of Greed Island's endings was… why the hell not?"

"Typical," Kite muttered. Of course Ging hadn't been offering him his only son. This was all born of a flippant whim.

"And besides, I thought you said you were done with love altogether after your last girlfriend dumped you."

(Kite did not like to think about Machi. In fact, he tried to think as little as humanly possible of the two months he spent in Meteor City when Ging had brought him there long ago. After their stay was up, he swore to himself he was never going back. He also stopped soliciting random strangers for one-night-stands.)

"Gon is different. He… he's nothing like her," Kite asserted. "You'd be proud of him, if you acted like his father. Well, not at the moment, though; he recently did something… really terrible. But even so, he's still a good boy, Ging. He's such a good boy…!"

And now Kite felt like some desperate parent trying to defend their kid.

"Alright, alright. I believe you," Ging said, pointedly pacifistic. "No one's saying he deserved any of this shit."

"So will you at least come check out Gon for yourself?"

The man breathed a long-suffering sigh. "Look, Kite," he answered flatly. "Gon has lots and lots of good friends—friends who you can count on to come up with something. So let them use their resources, okay?"

"Uh-huh. And I'm using my resources, here."

"… Eh?"

"That's right—I'm calling you into play. You're my trump card," Kite said, leaning forward against the back of the chair. "I'm not asking you to help Gon; I'm asking you to help me. Your student. Your friend."

"Hey, I'm nobody's card," Ging scoffed. "Gon will be fine, so I'm not concerned."

And what if he wasn't going to be fine? Kite wanted to ask. Would you even care if you thought he was going to die like this? Is there even a possible scenario in which you would want to help him?

But Ging would never answer something like that.

"And what do you know about Gon's friends?" Kite asked instead. "What makes you think they've got the power to just… magically fix everything on their own?"

And the man just looked at him boredly.

"Because they're the friends my son chose to make."

Like that was even an answer he could accept.

Sometimes, Kite was envious of Ging's ability to just know things. To decide something was true and leave it at that. It made for a good leader, such decisiveness and certainty—lent the impression of having any situation under control. After years at Ging's side, the knee-jerk reaction was of course to just believe whatever he said. And yes, Ging was a genius; part of it was that, in general, he could actually be counted on to have everything under control and accounted for. But there was more to his decision-making process than just seeing one decision as the most correct one. And never before today had the danger of blindly following him been quite so clear. Never before today had Kite seen just how far Ging's peculiar brand of apathy really went.

More and more, he could see the Ging in Gon.

"I meant it when I said he'll be fine without me interfering," Ging restated. "Meanwhile, you still don't know what you want, do you? What you want to do with your life, I mean. And the more time you waste fixating on my son, the less time you have to become an actual Hunter."

Some people wander for no reason; some pursuits are always aimless. Sure, Kite wanted to help Gon, but that could hardly be called a vocation. Much of it could be boiled down to him just trying to fix his mistakes—to return Gon to the perfectly happy, friendly state in which Kite had found him. It was a reactive desire, not truly productive in any larger sense; after all this time, there was still no greater purpose to which he wished his life be ceded. Ging might've believed he could change, but how does one turn from a journey with no destination? How do you learn to land if you've never had a perch to come home to? Because when you move solely for the sake of moving—to keep going, keep breathing, no matter what—you'll find yourself with very little reason to stop at all.

Kite had long since made peace with himself in this regard.

Perhaps that was the problem.

"What would you have me do, then?" he had to ask. "What's the right step forward? To just… let him go?"

"I think you should reevaluate the situation," Ging replied. "Because I doubt Gon needs you nearly as much as you think he does."

"So Ging's a dead end, huh?" Knov summed up.

Kite lay in the hospital bed, head spinning, body aching. The trip had taken its toll on his stamina, and he hadn't been able to leave the Association Headquarters, but then Knov came to his aid (far earlier than their agreed-upon time, before Kite had even begun to consider calling for help) and took him back via portal.

"It would've been nice to have Ging on our side, but you shouldn't let this worry you," Knov told him. "We're still far from out of options. Hell, the Nen exorcist hasn't even gotten here yet."

Kite had no response.

"… You really believed in him, didn't you?"

A few more moments of silence.

"Ging's an incredible man," Kite eventually said. "The world's best Hunter, without a doubt. Of course I believed in him—and I still think he could come up with some bullshit if he bothered to give it two seconds of thought. But even if it was just bullshit, I really thought…"

"That he'd want to help you," Knov finished.

"To at least come see Gon's condition with his own eyes," Kite continued to explain. "Not because he thought his help was necessary—and he doesn't, by the way—but because he knew that doing so would satisfy me, even if it didn't accomplish a damn thing."

And Kite was all too familiar with this state of general need, having been dependent on Ging for so many years. The reason he hadn't cut his hair for the last decade was because the man once said that he liked it long; Kite sometimes marveled at how much of his identity was crafted around wheedling stuff out of Ging.

"I guess I thought I knew how to reach him," Kite ruefully admitted. "As if Ging would ever do something he thinks is pointless just to be nice to someone else. He doesn't believe Gon needs his help, and that's that."

Or my help, either.

"And he's right," Knov said with a decisive edge. "It's nice to have contingencies, don't get me wrong, but Nen exorcism is the most likely thing to do the trick. There's no need for us to do anything but sit tight until proven otherwise."

"But what if it doesn't work, Knov? What then?"

"Then we'll find another exorcist," he answered. "And if that's another bust, then we'll find something else. Mark my words: I'll shove this up HR's ass till the end of time if I have to." His expression gained a softness Kite recognized from when he'd been talking about Palm. "Rely on me, Kite. Let me solve some of your problems. I won't let you down."

And Kite was just beaten-down enough to say, "Okay."

"Good," Knov cheerily replied. "Now, on another note, did you know that the Chairman named you in his will?"

No, Kite had not been aware. "He did?"

"Yeah, he actually left every Hunter a little something," Knov divulged. "All I got was a note that said, 'Be careful.' But I heard you inherited a pretty sizable package! It's in the hospital mailroom, right now; want me to fetch it for you?"

And what Kite looked upon was a box set of books titled, Fifty Shades of Pink: Love without Law. The cover of the first one had what seemed to be a porn star (judging by his state of undress) posing in the front seat of a police cruiser, and then he noticed the phrase printed toward the top of the jacket: A novel by Dr. Biscuit Krueger, Ph.D. Interest and disbelief equally piqued, Kite flipped it open to the first page.

About the Author:

Biscuit "motherfucking Bisky" Krueger grew up in the southern Begerossé Union before becoming a Stone Hunter at the young age of seventeen. Eight years later, she graduated from Yorknew University with bachelor's degrees in Kinesiology and Physical Therapy, both of which she later pursued at the doctorate level. After gaining a Hunter Star for her work in discovering the Sandloch Chain, she went on to open a practice in Yorknew City along with a Shingen-ryū dojo, the exploits of her student Natsuo Mica eventually netting her another Star. Now at the age of fifty-three, she still lives in a cozy Yorknew flat.

Everyone on the east wing's fourth floor paused in confusion at the sound of someone shouting, "Fifty-three?!"

Mimi felt along the cell wall in search of a light, but her small hand found the hard bicep of the sheriff instead. "Seems like the power's been cut," he gruffly said. "I knew those bastards were gonna try it eventually."

"But what about the blizzard?" she whispered in the dark.

"I guess we'll have to share

"Get a load of this, Gon—'I guess we'll have to share body heat if we want to survive,'" he quoted to the unhearing boy. "Didn't I call this, like, two chapters ago? Next, they're gonna find out there's only one bed or something, for Christ's sake."

It was an exceptionally trashy romance series, the sex scenes so theatrically explicit he could hardly stand to look at the page, much less verbally relate them to Gon.

Kite still read every word.

"Come in," he said to the knock on the door.

"Hey," Knov whispered, respectful of it being one in the morning. "You should come over to Morel's room; we're drinking to Knuckle and Shoot, tonight."

It went without saying that they'd take the liberty of ignoring the hospital's rules on alcohol, because what exactly could a nurse do to stop them if they got caught? As Hunters, most regulations in the public sector didn't apply to them, and those in the private were usually bought out with the average Hunter's financial abilities. So Kite simply said, "Alright."

Left arm slung in a cast, Morel sat at a small folding table with a bottle of whiskey and three small cups. The face exposed below his sunglasses shone with tears and snot; Kite said nothing as he sat down across of him.

"They were damn good men," Morel began, his voice surprisingly steady and strong. "The only students I've ever taken and the only ones I'd ever want to take."

A thin crack ran up the side of the cup clenched tightly in his hand.

"When I saw that Youpi had gotten away from them, I knew they'd been done in. 'Cause as long as they drew breath, there was no way they wouldn't be on that thing's ass and giving it hell," he declared. "'Cause they were fighters, through and through. No matter the obstacle, they stuck to their guns and got the job done."

"Hear, hear," Knov attested. "Despite everything else that went wrong, they kept their part of the deal and stopped Youpi from getting to the King on time. We have them to thank that the mission was successful."

Kite nodded along. "I didn't know them for very long," he said. "But I could tell that they were good people, once we got to talk a little. And they also got along well with Gon, which I know wasn't always the… easiest thing to do. Shoot even expressed some concern for him on occasion, which I, uh… really appreciated, at the time."

"My only regret is that I couldn't finish off that ant bastard," Morel muttered. "God knows I tried. But I guess it's good that you lifted me from the battle before I bled out, Knov."

Knov smiled and took another drink.

"But I didn't call you two here just to reminisce," Morel then announced. "I wanted to let you guys know that after I'm done recovering here, I'm going to hunt down and kill Illumi."

Kite choked a little in surprise.

"That coward betrayed our cause and ran when we needed him most," he continued. "I refuse to let stand such an insult to Knuckle and Shoot's sacrifice. Not only that, but if he'd fought Pouf as intended, Gon might not have ended up in his current condition; I have to avenge that possibility as well—for him and for you, Kite."

He actually felt a little touched.

"Er, small problem with that—the fourth Bylaw, remember?" Knov pointed out. "We're not allowed to hunt other Hunters unless they've inflicted 'atrocities,' and I don't even want to think of the hoops we'd have to jump through to get a formal condemnation."

Kite realized something about Knov in that moment: he almost always said we instead of you when discussing the future. In a single word, he implicitly committed himself to helping other people face their challenges.

"Then I'll keep this off the record," Morel decided. "I've got no problem with vigilante justice."

And by virtue of them inviting him to this exchange, it was clear that they… trusted Kite.

"What about you, Kite? Do you want in?" Knov asked.

He wasn't sure what to do. Because as much as he wasn't opposed to the idea of a dead Illumi (in spite of his general rule of pacifism), the task would no doubt be dangerous, and if he went down, then what would become of Gon?

Nothing at all, something inside him whispered.

… If they all went down, then. That's the case wherein something might happen.

When Kite awoke the next day, the first thing that occurred to him was that his hangover wasn't as bad as he'd expected it to be. As migraines go, this was fairly tolerable. As drinking parties go, it hadn't been too uncomfortable. Socializing was always easier with people who actually wanted him there, even more so when they didn't mind his general silence. And then it dawned on him that there was someone sitting in front of him.

"Gon…?"

And then he remembered: after they'd finished drinking, he had stumbled into Gon's room by mistake and decided to crash there instead of trying to make it back to his own. But why wasn't he in one of the chairs? Had he really just fallen face-first onto the bed…?

Maybe so.

… He must've been pretty drunk.

"Hello," came an unfamiliar voice. Kite jerked his head around to find a woman standing in the doorway.

"Who—"

"The Nen exorcist," she revealed.

"O-oh… oh," he stammered. "Sorry! I was just… uh…"

"Asleep. I could tell."

He jumped off of the bed. "Yeah. I didn't know you were coming."

"Well, I'm here a day early, so that's understandable," she said. "I suppose I should've sent a message to warn you. But if you'd step aside for a moment, I'd like to do my job."

So Kite eagerly stepped aside and watched with bated breath as the woman approached the boy. She wore a gold-trimmed purple robe alongside a sash, headband, and bronze medallion; he recognized it as the traditional chieftain garb of the native Japponites.

Her gaze slowly shifting from Gon to Pouf, she turned around and shook her head.

"The hatred that sustains this bond is too much for my power to remove."

He felt the room get a little smaller, tighter, colder.

"But I—I didn't think that exorcism worked like that," he hastily objected. "Doesn't the burden come from the curse itself, not the thing that caused it?"

"It does when the Nen and hatred are so intertwined," she countered. "… Listen. In the village where I come from, Nen is called 'the blood of the soul.' We see it as God's gift to living creatures and His acknowledgement of our thoughts, our feelings; with Nen, the concepts of 'purpose' and 'sacrifice' gain physical presence and power. Personal values, emotional charge, good or evil intentions—all things that only exist in the mind, all made tangible, traceable, in our use of Nen. And it is in this way that we might truly manifest our will."

She looked back at Gon, a bit of pity in her eyes.

"He put all of his mind into forging that bond, and the condition set for its release is that he stops actively hating the head, over there," the Nen exorcist explained. "It was triggered with the expectation that he'd never come back out of it, and that is a powerful will, indeed."

Kite walked back to his room, the way forward crystal clear. He would leave the hospital and scour the globe for a way to save Gon from his animosity, to make him want to stop fighting—maybe a high dose of some kind of opiate? If morphine didn't do the trick, they could go for something a little stronger; he had the numbers to a few dealers saved on his phone, but calling them would require Kite having his phone to begin with, which he didn't, because all of his shit was gone—

"Why don't you ever look at your phone?"

Palm was in his room.

… Palm was in his room?

"… I lost it," he tentatively replied. "Why do you ask?"

"Why do I ask?" she repeated. "WHY DO I ASK?"

He took a few steps back. "Y-yeah?"

"OVER THE PAST FOUR DAYS, I HAVE SENT YOU TWO HUNDRED TWELVE CALLS AND FOUR HUNDRED SIXTY-TWO TEXTS."

"And you did that because…?"

She closed the distance between them, grabbed him by his collar, and yanked his face down to her level. "BECAUSE KILLUA'S ALIVE!"