"I can still remember what his face looked like."
A black, smelly permanent marker criss-crossed lines over the next date on the calender, leaving only three days still free from that mark. Gon nodded, satisfied, and dropped the marker back into its holder on the coffee table before he plopped back to the foot of the sofa and sighed.
"Three days left."
"Three days left until we start Greed Island." Killua affirmed, repeating his words out loud while he licked his way around the strawberry flavored lollipop at hand. "Did you send that letter to Mito yet? Telling her about it and how we'll be gone for awhile on Greed Island?"
"No. Not yet." Gon said, reaching over their pitiful excuse for a table and shifting through the ransack of papers littered there. He was searching for the envelope, Killua knew, and he laughed the longer he watched Gon's face scrunch up in frustration the longer he went without finding it. "Damnit, where did it go?" grumbled Gon as he started tossing things left and right just to reduce the clutter. It didn't help. "It was here, I swear! I had it this morning!"
"Gon." Killua only said once and that was more then enough to garner Gon's honey-eyed stare his way, his smirk growing a fraction bigger then necessary. In his right hand, he waved the aforementioned envelope like a white flag, and laughed as Gon's face rose in surprise. "Keep better track of your things. Like you do with your drugs, moron."
"Hai." Gon rubbed the back of his neck in his typical sheepish gesture and took the envelope back from Killua before he dropped it on the table and picked out a stamp buried among the other trash on the floor.
"Did you even finish writing the letter yet?"
"I did." Gon flashed the sloppily hand-written letter his way before neatly folding it into smaller squares until it was tiny enough to fit into the envelope. "Last night while you were out buying out an entire store's stock of whiskey."
Killua snapped his fingers in dawning realization, completing side-swiping around Gon's accusation of Killua gorging himself on too much liquor lately. He couldn't find himself to care for some reason. "Ohhh. Right! So that's why you were so concentrated last night. I couldn't figure out what you were so invested in. I've never seen you so serious before!"
"Hey! I can be serious when it comes to Mito-san! This letter is important!"
"Right, right."
"Killua!"
The white-haired teenager laughed, buckling over on his window perch while he held his gut in a giggle fit, tears in his eyes. "Hehehe. What, Gon? It's true. You can barely focus enough as it is! It's like a miracle or something you can even sit still for a minute without going insane."
"I told you it's three minutes that's my limit, not one." Gon bit back a growl, slapping the slobber-coated stamp onto its appropriate spot and cast a playful glare Killua's way. "Killua can't even last a minute without sipping his drinks anyway. He's not any better then me."
Killua lowered the said glass filled with murky gold liquid from his mouth with his eyes narrowed in fake amusement, snorting. "Idiot. I can last more then a minute. Better then you do when smoking that stinky ass drug."
"It's not stinky. It's sweet kind of like you.." Gon magically procured a roll of it into the air, lighting it with Nen, and puffing on it just once so he can blow a cloudy breath of white air Killua's way. "Here, smell it."
"Fuck Gon, no-!"
BANG. CRASH.
Killua flailed one time, slipped off the window sill, and collapsed on top of the bent remains of a rickety old metal stool, his drink now shattered into hundreds of glass pieces beneath him. He winced as soon as he sat up, large chunks of glass lodged successfully into his hand and arm, dripping blood onto the floor.
"Ow, shit." He hissed, pulling out each one carefully so as to not deepen the wounds further. "Thanks a lot, Gon. Look what you made me do."
"I didn't make you fall. You did. Killua needs to be more careful with what he's doing when he's holding a dangerous object." Gon said matter-of-factually, but he scooted over to his friend regardless and helped take out the glass anyway before he handed Killua a rag.
"Now you sound like Mito." commented Killua and Gon still, somehow managed to grin like it was a compliment.
"Maybe a little."
As Gon helped Killua dress his bloody, scratched-up arm and hand, blue eyes eventually started to drift the longer he felt that warm, calloused touch working magic on his pale skin. They were almost firmly shut closed when something peculiar caught the corner of his eye and he blinked, pointing over at it to Gon.
"Hey, what's that?"
Noticing what Killua was seeing, Gon paused in wrapping one of Killua's bandages to grab the small photo buried beneath piles of endless discarded papers. "Oh. I was wondering where this went." He flashed the picture to Killua; showing off the happy, still-life pair of Gon and Killua's faces upon it, both holding peace signs and dreamy grins as they hugged each others shoulders and posed. "Remember when we took this a long time ago? When we were at Heaven's Arena? I was going to send this to Aunt Mito in my letters but I kept on forgetting about it."
"Let me see." Gon handed him the photo. "I remember now. You had to have Zushi take this one because Wing kept smudging the camera lens with his finger. He couldn't figure out how to use the thing even though he's a damn adult!" Killua started to laugh as Gon nodded, exuberant.
"That one turned out the best so I wanted to send it to Mito-san for keepsake. Like I did with the group photo of all of us!"
"Haha. Yeah."
Killua glanced down, absorbing the picture into his mind the longer he looked at it. He could just make out the small freckles on Gon's face; the ones that hardly shown unless enough light was cast upon his caramel skin, and the way they speckled around his nose and cheek bones like a starry night. His lips were chapped, thin, slightly dry, and Killua remembered constantly shoved endless amounts of chap stick into his face as a reminder to 'take care of yourself better' sort of thing. Gon just laughed and promised he'd try.
When he looked up, now, Gon's cheek bones were ashen and hollow; sunken and taut like he was suffering from a combination of malnutrition and dehydration. There was little meat left on his bones, little water to keep his skin slick like before. He was skinny, skinnier then Killua, and nothing like a Freecs should be. His outer layer was crusty, bits of dried skin falling off whenever Gon shifted, and no amount of chap stick, lotion, oil, and the like, would bring that shine back to his skin.
His once freckling stars were blinking out of existence right before his eyes and Killua didn't even need to guess how bad Gon's inner lay may be, to prove the case.
As he lingered on the photograph's resemblance of Gon, he could still make out the way Gon's onyx black hair carried that familiar sheen, glossy, like rocks painted with a fresh coat of moisture. Killua had been squeezing a tad too roughly then, so Gon looked to be having an inner battle between enjoying the moment between them or choking on his own breath. Now, Gon's hair was dull, tattered and disheveled because he hardly spent time to maintain it; like he couldn't care less about hygiene as long as he reeked of drugs, of death, then he'd keep right on going his merry way.
Killua didn't bother to hide the frown that curled on his lips.
Clearly, the sun shone bright on the boy in this picture; this Gon. But as Killua looked up, there was no light anymore. There wasn't dark just quite yet; not like how it shadowed Killua on his own end, but there certainly held no radiance here.
Of all the images in Killua's mind, as he watched Gon smile at him in two different times, two different versions of himself; he questioned himself if he'd ever get to see that familiar gift of perfection again light up anew.
"Yeah." Killua said, one last time, even though his words never really reached his tongue and he wasn't really speaking to anyone in all honesty.
He never, really, ever was these days.
Later on that night, as Killua laid stretched out on their make-shift temporary bed just barely fit to hold two people (in this case two growing teenage boys who wrecked havoc and war every day on who gets the bigger share of the lacking space); he felt himself drowning in the faintly glowing light cast from his Beetle cellphone. It was pitch black inside the room after all – It was only feasible he'd become instantly absorbed in the only actual light in the dark.
He'd been staring at the damned device for the past two hours. The same exact text message he'd yet to respond to but the reply just waiting patiently on the tip of his tongue, waiting to answer but Killua unable to sum up the energy to press send. All this has been transpiring since Gon; as usual, not-so-sneakily slipped out of their room to refill his quickly-used up stash of methamphetamine. His need for the drug had steadily increased to more then half the day spent immersing himself in the stuff.
And he kept track much to his own testament.
Killua shuddered at the thought, wishing they invented an air freshener strong and potent enough to outclass a highly dangerous and addictive back-alley drug. He'd consider proposing this someday to an inventor for sure.
While Killua's mind drifted, he looked to the side where Gon's own beetle phone lay abandoned on the coffee table. His childhood growing up as an assassin heightened his night vision so he could clearly see the outline of the phone from across the room, no less. And with drugs now on the foremost of Gon's consciousness, his phone and all his contacts were long forgotten. He knew this because he checked and would constantly re-add at least the important numbers and later finding them magically gone again. It was a miracle Killua even could shove the dang thing into Gon's backpack whenever they went out; he'd always seemed to 'miraculously' forget about it.
That was all total bullshit. Killua knew a blatant lie when he saw one.
After all, he's a pro now.
And Gon at least, for that matter, was still easy to ready. Mostly.
Blue eyes darted back to the bright illuminating phone screen, blinking fast to adjust to its light. He twisted and turned his wrist a little, like maybe by doing so the words on the phone might magically transform into something else. He even gave it a few experimental shakes in hopes that it might cause some unforeseen glitch and change the text message into another one or just downright delete it and allow Killua to play as if it had never happened.
Never been spoken from their friend's lips.
But, there was no avoiding it and Killua still wasn't sure how to proceed. He wanted to curse his friend off for figuring out the obvious, but at the same time knowing it'd be a useless struggle. A pointless waste of time trying to conceal what's as clear as the sky during the day; no clouds for cover or camouflage, no wind to distract you from the colorful sapphire sea up above, no rain or thundering storms to block out reality.
Was it even possible for Killua to lie himself out of this one, too?
[11:33 P.M.] Leorio Paladiknight: I know you might be mad at me and Kurapika about what we said earlier on you at the diner a few weeks ago, but, I have to ask, because it's obvious I'm not going to get an answer out of the other one who's still ignoring all my calls and texts. I'm really worried, Killua. But, is Gon using drugs?
Killua mechanically tapped at the screen a few times, watching the syllables pop into existence with every cold, numbing press of his finger tip to the flat, unforgiving device. But when the letters spelled out and reflected back into his own irises, into his mind, he couldn't bring himself to press the send button still, staring blankly ahead and past the device, into the darkness that surrounded him. Tendrils of chilling, deadly whispers and hands caressing him, touching him, talking to him nonstop and he couldn't get away. He couldn't fight it, couldn't beat it away with his Nen. He couldn't protect himself. It was everywhere and yet not anywhere at all, either. It wasn't real, but it felt like it was.
Was this what Gon's world comprised of? This nothingness. Enveloped in the embrace of addiction.
Was this their new reality?
If this is the closest Killua could get to Gon then maybe, just maybe, he could afford to wait a little longer and make better sense of this. Understand at least a little bit better, before they broke.
Sighing to himself, eyes falling shut, Killua pressed the sendbutton and dropped the beetle phone off the side of the bed; not bothering to look or care if he got a reply. His closed eyes cut off the light from the phone, leading him back into the world of darkness. Was this his new home now?Was this where he was supposed to be? Where he was fated to end up? Because he realized, somewhere deep inside, that even if Gon had indeed changed in the slightest, strayed from his Enhancer's characteristics like he'd been swayed by the irresistible taste of poison; it was Killua who had not changed.
He was exactly as a Transmuter would be.
Fickle and dishonest.
[1:47 A.M.] Killua Zoldyck to Leorio Paladiknight: No.
Yet, it seemed, no matter how much Killua kept lying to himself, fought to convince himself with all his willpower; he knew it was impossible to deny the truth of the matter.
He'll never get used to this.