Hello everyone! I am back with the hopes that you still like me enough to read my story. You see, every few months, I am plagued by the inability to go to bed at a normal hour. This is happening right now. Ergo, chapter finished. Huzzah!

This chapter explores more aspects of Ayaka's personality. You've only seen her as a hot-tempered wanna-be kung-fu fighter, and this chapter... has more of that. BUT. There is a BUT. BUT, you will see more of her vulnerabilities and her somewhat manipulative tendencies. Yes.

Spotlight

Chapter Ten: She's Thirty Years Old

And just like that, Hisoka was gone.

Seven months and counting.

Ayaka coughed into the receiver of her cellphone. "Wing? Can you…augh… come pick me up?"

She could hear him sigh deeply through the speaker, sounding very hesitant and a bit annoyed. This wasn't the first or second time that this has happened after all. "Fine, Aya. Where are you?"

She looked up from her spot on the pavement, which was conveniently next to the intersecting street signs that said "SPOOL ROAD" and "COPPEROPOLIS AVE" in big white letters, which she promptly read to him while holding back a cough. "And Wing?" She cleared her throat, tasting more blood in her mouth as she sat up and leaned against the pavement. Her left eye was swollen enough that she couldn't see through it anymore. "Can you hurry? I think they're coming back for me."

Hisoka was definitely gone. He didn't have a lot of belongings to begin with, but all his closets and his personal security deposit box had been emptied out, and not a single trace of him was left. How could he just leave after he kissed her like that? She was so angry. So, so angry. She understood that he was a pathological liar, a psychopath, an outlier of society, and she knew, even before Wing had issued his warning against the man, that she was supposed to stay away, beyond the detection of his radar.

But she knew. She knew. From the day that their eyes met, a clash of sky against sun, that he was the peanut butter to her jelly. She absolutely abhorred cheesy lines like that, lines recited only by Romeos in those sappy romantic comedies, and she swore to herself, after she had gotten her heart broken the first time as a young teenager, that she would never even so much as think about words that she would most likely regret, much less say them out loud. Not to herself, not to her family, and not to any man.

But Hisoka wasn't just any man. It was true that she had some difficulty believing that he was a human being at all, but she finally understood the whimsical dance that was his volatile life. She had understood it that day on the elevator.

She saw firsthand exactly what it was that he could do to a person who crossed paths with him, and the result was inescapable death - like a thick coat of bitter cold snow over a busy city, stopping cars and trains and people and killing them one by one until it melted away, murdered by the sun.

The guy he killed didn't even know what hit him. Just like that, he was no longer part of this world.

And... the thought fueled her. It energized her. Twisted as it may be, it made her insides burn and yearn for another game of Russian Roulette with the dealer himself. Who was going to die? The college football player. Who was going to live? Ayaka. If life itself was to be stripped naked of its superficial layers – take away jobs, money, fancy cars and technology – it was only just about survival, wasn't it? And that's exactly what Hisoka was all about. His appeal. His entire existence. He just wanted to see where he could go, fight with those who were worthy, so that he could discover his ranking in this world.

It was admirable. He knew what he wanted and he pursued it. While Ayaka lived her life by doing things for other people - for Ryuu, for the parents whose children she babysat, even for her own parents - Hisoka was living his life for himself. She was so jealous of him.

After he had kissed her, she called him crazy out of anger and confusion and happiness and more confusion. "But crazy is relative," he had said to her. Back then, she didn't know that those were the last words he was ever going to say to her.

She needed him. She felt so alive whenever she was with him. She couldn't grasp the reasons for loving him before, but she definitely acknowledged them now.

It was all about relativity.

How Wing was much stronger than Zushi, but weaker than Hisoka.

How Ayaka's feelings for Hisoka were competing with her familial love of Ryuu.

It wasn't like she was going to start killing people. It was still wrong, but she couldn't deny the intrigue that surrounded the concept of death. This whole game of kill or be killed, the game of survival, she just found it to be such a thrill!

I long to sing

Songs of love

Songs of hope

Songs of sadness

But I don't really know

What music sounds like

Because I just can't

I can't hear at all

Ayaka's eyes fluttered wide open. Huh. So she had gotten some sleep after all. How many days has it been since she had slept so well? Her face and whole body was drenched with sweat, her hair sticking uncomfortably on her bruised and bandaged face. She felt somebody watching her. "Morning, delinquent. Here, drink this." Wing appeared by her bed and pressed a warm mug of ginger ale in her hands. She hated ginger ale. "Thanks," she said as she put her lips on the pretty china and pretended to sip the herbal concoction. "Mmm…"

Wing cleared his throat. She rolled her eyes and took a real sip.

Satisfied that she was drinking, he leaned back on the desk chair and crossed his arms over his blood-spattered shirt. She stared at it for a while and wondered whether the blood was hers. "How many of my shirts do you plan to ruin?" he asked, sensing her inquiry. So it was hers. She pretended to drink again instead of answering.

"Ayaka…" Wing pulled his glasses away from his face and pressed his palm against his tired-looking eyes, shaking his head to further illustrate whatever negative feelings he was currently harboring. "You can't keep doing this. Picking fights with random strangers isn't the right way to get stronger and you know it. If you need blood to practice your nen, I'll give you some of mine."

"They weren't random strangers," she said in her defense, ignoring his proposal. "Those girls were playing hooky. Do they even understand how lucky they are to be in high school? If I had the opportunity, I'd never leave the campus and I'd ask, no, demand that we have homework everyday."

Wing rolled his eyes and shook his head. "You need to get over it, Ayaka."

"Get over what?" She knew exactly what.

"It's been seven months since he left. Snap out of it. If you don't quit torturing yourself, you're just gonna end up dead in a ditch somewhere. Is that what you want?"

Ayaka muted him out and instead focused her attention on the black and blue bruises that were scattered along the surface of her skin like tiny constellations. She couldn't ignore that deep Wolverine-like scratches too, courtesy of that Edward Scissorhands chick. There should be a law against fake nails.

Wing continued to talk. First, she was getting more destructive each day. Second, Hisoka didn't really care about whether she was getting stronger or not, he just didn't care about her at all. And third, she was being a bad influence to Zushi. Out of pure habit - a recently acquired one - she lunged at her teacher and pinned him down to the ground, raising her fist high behind her to punch him square in the face. He waited for the blow that they both knew was never going to come. "Call in sick today," he suggested, knowing fully well that Ayaka wasn't going to listen. "If you get into another street fight, I will forbid you from seeing Zushi. You hear me?"

If there's no you,

There's no me

If there's no me,

There's no you

What kind

Of misery

Is that?

It stung. Wing didn't have to say it like that, even though he was undoubtedly correct. Zushi was like a little brother to her, and yet here she was, acting like a lunatic because she wanted to be a lot stronger, sooner rather than later. Setting a bad example to the only person who saw her with untainted, unbiased eyes.

Seven months without Hisoka didn't go by as quickly as people like Wing thought. For her, every single morning was a struggle to get out of bed, an uphill climb, a trek in the Alps, and the only way to distract herself from the painful hatred festering like mold in the forefront of her mind was to bury, no, torture herself with work, which was the exact word Wing used to describe what she was doing. It was fairly accurate. She needed to retaliate against every single physical barrier in order to rise above the caste of normality that she was obviously wrongfully assigned to...

Because Hisoka was a beast and there was no taming him, she needed to become a beast herself.

So she made some drastic changes.

Using the elevator to get around was now forbidden. She forced herself to take the stairs. Two floors, ten, a hundred, she refused to complain. And it wasn't a matter of walking up or down either. She sprinted. Sure, she was often late for deliveries and she even passed out in a puddle of her own vomit in between floors a couple of times, but she was getting better. Faster. Stronger. Two months in and she could run to the fiftieth floor in two and a half minutes, stopping only twice to catch her breath. When people said it wasn't a big deal, she dared them to try it. They usually left her alone after they did.

Kitchen inventory duty was now a test of strength. She carried two at a time instead of the usual single sack of rice. It took her three whole months to build up enough strength to do it, really slow progress compared to Zushi's bench pressing, but it was getting easier. She could probably do three soon, two on her back and one in her arms.

What else?

Oh.

Sleeping was now an event of the past.

This, however, was not by choice.

The reasons that she came up with for her extreme lethargic lifestyle were lackluster at best. It wasn't that she didn't want to sleep, she just physically couldn't do so anymore. She tried sleeping pills, chamomile tea, even hypnotism, but these resulted in an even more unshakeable restlessness from the fatigue, making her more antsy, more irritated. And what else could she do to relieve herself of the all-consuming anxiety but to push herself beyond what she was safely capable of doing until her body finally gave out and forced her brain to shut off for a few hours at a time? Unhealthy, yes, but it was better than dying from a bad case of insomnia.

Zushi rested his head on Ayaka's lap. She absentmindedly caressed his short brown hair as she silently counted the number of people currently moving about animatedly in the lobby, arriving and leaving, a game they had devised to challenge and measure their visual acuity. Two minutes on the timer remained. This was originally Wing's game, but they had improvised from counting migrating flocks of birds in the sky, which was monumentally difficult for Ayaka at least, to counting people's heads instead. Her stopwatch beeped.

"Okay, I counted...forty-three?" she asked indecisively, then quickly she changed her mind. "No... I think it's forty-four."

Zushi giggled. "Which one is it, Aya?"

She pinched his cheek playfully. "Fine, smartypants." She looked around and chewed on her lip. "Hmm...forty-four."

Zushi jumped up and smiled. "There were actually forty-seven. But you're a lot closer than last time! You're getting better."

When she wasn't at work or training with Wing and Zushi, she spent most of her time discovering more about nen. Wing said it was odd that she and Ryuu had similar abilities, but they couldn't discount the fact that her close relationship with him and the fact that nearly all of her encounters with nen – with Hisoka it had been very bloody indeed – had molded her nodes to be very receptive to blood. In fact, he mentioned that one of his other students had a very special bond with electricity, being tortured with it as a child, which gave him the natural affinity to master it in a matter of hours.

But she had easily found the key to the strength of her manipulations. By accident, of course, just as her first weapon – the failed Lego piece – had been a fluke. It happened the week after Hisoka had left.

Zushi had tripped while running in the building, slamming his nose flat against the hardwood floor and resulting in a very massive nosebleed from a torn cartilage. It was Wing's idea to use the small puddle of blood, to which Ayaka was very much opposed in the beginning, but eventually agreed in doing.

Focusing her energy and sending out a big burst of nen through her palm, through the blood, and finally through the floor, she had created something absolutely astounding. A long chunk of wood shot up from the ground – similar to how the metallic Lego block had shot like a bullet through the wall of the elevator – and fell into Ayaka's receiving arms. A kendo shinai. A beautiful wooden sword reminiscent of Zushi's fighting spirit and Ayaka's protective love for the little boy. But the constitution was weak – it broke in half as soon as she tried hitting the ground with it.

Since then, she knew that there was something missing.

A week later, she asked for Wing's blood, and the resulting weapon was even more refreshingly stunning. She used glass this time, sneaking into the ladies' bathroom in the basement and thoughtlessly smearing blood on the large mirror above the assembly of sinks, and then shooting nen through it. The entire 8-by-6 thin sheet of reflective glass shattered into tiny thumbnail pieces, first dropping to the countertop in large chunks and then, as if each shard had a life of its own, they all collected towards the center of the bathroom floor, growing like a seed into a small tree and then finally… formed a very glamorous sniper rifle.

It was like a disco ball, Ayaka mused, the way the little pieces of mirror had pasted themselves together around a perfect mosaic puzzle, reflecting all rays of light that happened to run upon it. She carefully picked it up and straddled it across her arms when a few mirror bullets fell to the floor. She had never used a gun before, but she knew how to put one together and how to load it. Guns were her father's only hobby.

But the bullets were the wrong size and didn't fit in the canister.

She was definitely doing something wrong, not that she was surprised that she came to this conclusion. She wasn't a natural like Zushi, so by those odds, she should be working ten times as hard and a hundred times as long.

So she practiced. And practiced. And practiced some more. She learned a few things.

The material she used to create these weapons didn't matter – whether wood or glass or metal or cement, Wing's blood would always make a sniper rifle and Zushi's would always make a sword. The football player must have really been a sad person if his personality resembled a broken piece of Lego.

The key was the very core, the very soul of the nectar itself, the worth of the person whose blood had been spilt. It was alchemy.

They say that we are made of stardust.

That we are made of tiny sprinkles from the cosmos.

Older than ourselves, than our ancestors.

Then, isn't it fate how you and I,

Though made entirely of different sprinkles

From the infinite expanse of the cosmos,

Happened to travel through space and time

And meet here as flesh and blood?

Ayaka sat on an old tree stump in the center of the park. Tomorrow would mark the eighth month of Hisoka's disappearance. She convinced herself to stop counting the days because doing so only resulted in depression. She was being whiny and rebellious, and if she had been any other person watching her self-destructive acts of violence, she would be pretty annoyed at herself too.

It was getting better though. Her anger came in waves that eventually dissipated once she gave it time or found something else to distract her thoughts.

She angrily grabbed the file box that was perched next to her and flipped it upside down, spilling all of its contents onto the grassy ground. It was full of unclaimed weapons from the lost-and-found bin at work, and it wasn't like Ayaka to miss a free ticket like that.

"Knife, knife, ice pick… a spinning top? What's a toy doing here?"

She sifted through the bag and made two piles: one for weapons she could actually practice with and another one for items to be returned to the bin. She started throwing the knives first since there were quite a number of them, even though she wasn't very good at the sport. Her target was Hisoka's playing card, the Joker that Wing had confiscated from her back when everything started. He eventually gave it back as a sign of trust.

The card was firmly tacked onto a tree trunk a distance of five meters away from her stump, already torn and beat up from her previous escapades. She started throwing.

Four out of ten knives had hit the card, but zero had hit the very center.

When she raised the eleventh knife next to her head, a warm hand wrapped around her small fist and before she could react, powerfully propelled it forward towards the target. It skewered the Joker's head. It wasn't exactly in the center and there was no evidence that it had been deliberately done, but it was obviously the intention behind the maneuver. "I think that would be five out of eleven?"

Ayaka stiffened. The voice was familiar, but she couldn't quite place it. She pulled away and turned.

It was Bryce Copperopolis, the recently crowned floor master of the Arena, the new tenant of the penthouse suite on Floor 251. He was the only son and heir to the Copperopolis Corporation, which was located in the long stretch of road that they also owned, where she had been beaten up by those school-skipping dirtbags, Copperopolis Avenue.

"Uhh…hi." She smiled. "That was some awesome throwing. I'm gonna pretend that you didn't help me out."

He was also quite the sight to behold. He had messy coal-black hair, long enough that he coolly tucked one side behind his ear, where a single black diamond stud rested expensively on his earlobe. "You were doing it wrong," he said unflinchingly as he stared at her with his sharp olive green eyes, hands now inside the center pocket of his plain gray hoodie. He seemed pretty spry for a floor master. "You also need heavier knives. These are crap factory-manufactured ones."

She nodded in response, her eyes tracing the features of his manly geometrically shaped face.

He had another piercing, a small silver hoop on the side of his bottom lip, which moved along with his mouth as he spoke. He was a very, very large individual, larger than even Hisoka and Ryuu, both of whom were the biggest people in her immediate circle. She wouldn't be surprised if the saying "built like an ox" was inspired by this guy's image.

What was a bit off-putting was his voice, deep as it should be but soft and reserved, and it was confusing the hell out of the information-collecting system in her brain.

They stared at each other for a while longer.

"I'm Ayaka," she introduced herself, grabbing another knife from the pile by her feet and handing it to him. "You're Bryce Copperopolis, right?"

From the look that he gave her, she realized that he didn't recognize who she was, even though she was one of only two people who frequently delivered room service to the top floor. Boy, this man could eat like a lion. He took the knife and threw it a split second later. Right at the Joker's crotch.

"You know me?"

She shrugged, completely enthralled by his deadly accurate aim. "Half the city knows who you are, but I've also been to your room lots of times." She lifted her dirty blond hair as if to tie it up, showing him what she looked like whenever she was at work. "Room service."

A spark of recognition flashed momentarily in his deep eyes. "Oh. Sorry," he muttered, picking up another knife and handing it over to her. "I'm bad with faces and names. I meet too many people."

Ayaka chuckled. He was quite curt for a celebrated person.

"I'm the opposite. It's actually one of my skills. After working this long, I've come to realize that by recognizing customers, I get fatter tips." She threw the knife but it failed to even reach the target. She needed to concentrate some more. "Oh, but let me teach you a trick. If you pretend to know a group of people, they're most likely just gonna go along with it. Human nature. Either way, that means more money. Ahh, but I guess you don't need to know that since you probably don't have to work and stuff."

It was uncharacteristic but not unusual for her to be blabbering in this manner. She was pretty talkative when it came to dealing with people who weren't Hisoka, but she was also extra friendly to rich customers who had a lot of loose change in their deep-pocketed cargo shorts. There was no downside to be friends with a floor master. She was no longer in need of money, but saving for a rainy day – or severe injuries, as was probably soon going to be the case with the way she was picking fights lately – was always a good idea.

"Oh," he suddenly blurted out. "You're the girl who runs up and down the stairs, aren't you? Honmei said you were a hard worker and that you were in love with the previous floor master."

Her jaw dropped to the earth's core.

"SHE SAID WHAT?!" She yelled at the top of her lungs, scaring a few birds nesting in the nearby trees. She started collecting the knives in confused panic and packed them back into the file box, stumbling on a tree root as she retrieved Hisoka's Joker from the trunk. "Honmei doesn't know what she's talking about. You know what? I actually hate that floor master! And so what if I do love him anyway? It's nobody's business!"

She placed the box on her shoulder and stormed off, thoroughly embarrassed. Her face was red. Very, very red. She had never even said such sappy things out loud to herself – and she talked to herself a lot – and here was this guy, big as a freaking truck, who just went ahead and said it like he was a reporter from the freaking Yorknew Times!

Ayaka burst into the break room where Honmei was taking a nap. Good, this wayward boss of hers deserved a rude awakening! "I can't believe you!" She slammed her fists against the table, the loud vibrations detonating in Honmei's sleeping ears. The chatty girl shrieked. "What the hell Ayaka! Whoa, what happened to your face?"

Ayaka realized that not only was she cherry-colored, but the bandages that Wing had painstakingly wrapped around her face were beginning to come off, revealing the mildly infected scratch wounds by her eyes. Did she look like this when she was talking to Bryce Copperopolis?

"You… you told people that I was in love with Hisoka!"

Honmei giggled as she rubbed the sleepiness from her eyes. "Well, aren't you?"

"Why? Why… why would you even tell people that? I don't go around telling people that you're actually thirty when you tell them you're twenty-three!"

This seemed to horrify her. "You wouldn't! I'm sorry, okay! I only told one person, a certain Mister Bryce 'I'm-super-cool-and-macho-and-perfect' Copperopolis. I tried flirting with him, but he wasn't responsive sooooooo I'm giving him to you! He's your age anyway!"

"What? So you told him I like someone else? Have you ever heard of this thing called logic?"

"Duh! Mister Copperopolis is definitely an alpha male. See how he didn't even bother with me when I was totally drooling after him? Guys like him want girls that are totally not into them. It's a pride thing. You'll thank me one day when he asks you out."

Ayaka wasn't sure what to say. It was just so... so stupid. "And so you casually slipped in the fact that I'm in love with the old floor master to… to toy with his pride? So that… he'll like me? Are you on drugs?"

Honmei snorted. "Come on, don't pretend you weren't working your charms on him every time you delivered him food. He actually asked me about the 'room service girl.'"

Ayaka sat down and placed her hands over her face, exhausted from the non-stop outpouring of nonsense from her manager's mouth. "How about Machi, the other 'room service girl?' She just started working here last week, but did you stop and think that maybe he was talking about her? I mean, she's beautiful and he didn't even recognize me when I met him at the park. He must be talking about her."

"Yeah, he didn't recognize you because you're like a decomposing mummy right now." She giggled again, stripping away the bandages around Ayaka's face. "Besides, he was asking for 'the one who keeps running up and down the stairs.'"

End of Chapter Ten!

I had fun writing this one. I hope you had fun reading it. Let me know if you had any favorite lines! My favorite was "There should be a law against fake nails."