This fic plays on some ideas that were involved in the Whiskey Dark series, although it is not part of that continuity. But like, if you wanna read more about Hisoka Ft. isolation and human contact, that's probably the series for you.

To say: "I am Lazarus, come from the dead, Come back to tell you all, I shall tell you all"—
If one, settling a pillow by her head, Should say: "That is not what I meant at all;
That is not it, at all."

By the end of the morning, on Gon's second day in York New, he finds himself walking in front of the enormous ice rink unfurled in the plaza of a massive skyscraper. There's the floor of ice, which he's seen before in other cities when he happened to pass through during winter, and then there are the beautiful spiraling pillars, frozen and translucent, supporting islands of pale ice that hover high above, like clouds above the sea. He pauses at the edge of the railing, staring up at them. He's never seen anything so delicate and inorganically pretty. The city is all nice enough, but this is the first thing he's seen that makes him forget for a moment that he's all alone.

York New in the winter is as strange as it is pretty, an alien landscape of powder and light. Sure, Gon finds it beautiful. Most things are beautiful if you look at them right. But winter is weird, it makes him want to sit side by side with someone else and watch their cloudy breaths mingle, to talk into someone's ear, to hide his ungloved hands in their pockets. Instead, he's bought himself a pair of gloves.

Figures spin on the ice, mostly in sedate winding circles but also, at the center of the rink, in quick turns and eerie backwards waltzes. His eyes follow the spiral of the supports up again to the floating ice, where he finds only one soul brave enough to make their rounds. There is a railing, also translucent, and the skater there circles it closer and closer, picking up speed with each rotation. Gon watches the elegant glide of their blades and imagines himself to be a fish underneath the surface of a pond, the only observer of a secret private moment. He feels alone again, but bearably so. The figure picks up speed, twirling faster and faster until the blades of their skates leave the ice entirely—a human body suspended for the flight of a moment between one railing and another, as Gon sucks in a startled breath, a moment that seems to last forever. Blades glitter in the weak morning sunlight. In the fraction of the second that the skater is facing him, Gon looks up into their face and meets familiar eyes.

There is the crack and skid of a landing, and the skater is gone all at once from view.

"You, sir," a security guard calls upward, shading his eyes as he peers directly up at the sky, "you're not allowed to cross the railings. Please come down."

Gon watches the skate blades go still along the ice and holds his breath. At first it seems like something is about to go terribly wrong, but then there is vague shadowy movement and the slide of blades as the skater dips into some kind of bow, and then leaves—not by the lift at the rink side which is obviously there for that reason, but by vaulting over the railing and landing at ground level in a spray of ice powder. The guard watches in bewildered silence as Hisoka drifts to a stop, running a hand through his relentlessly styled hair. He is dressed all in white and heavy dark blue, except for the startling rose gold of the locks he runs his hand through. Not a single hair is out of place, Gon notices, so the preening is really unnecessary.

"That was amazing!" Gon shouts, leaning over the edge of the rink with his whole body.

Gon likes the way Hisoka's eyes light up when they land on him again. He looks like a kid who just remembered candy tucked into a secret place for a moment just like this. It's kind of weird, because with Hisoka it's hard to know whether he's thinking about sticking his hand into your neck and pulling out your trachea or just genuinely happy to see you, but Gon has sort of gotten used to not knowing for sure. It's just one of those things, like a squeaky window or a pockmark in your bedroom wall. You get used to it. They've seen a lot of each other over the years.

"Gon," Hisoka says, gliding over the ice towards him. He effortlessly ducks between batches of oncoming skaters, drifting backwards as he narrowly dodges a preteen with serious balance issues. He says Gon's name with such delight, an amazing amount of emotion for one little word.

"I didn't know you were a skater," Gon says, although honestly he doesn't know much of anything about Hisoka. He doesn't even know the hunter's favorite color.

"I wouldn't say that," Hisoka replies, modestly. "I really only picked it up last night. I've been out here since, oh, probably eleven o'clock. It's an interesting sport."

In Gon's stomach, there's a spike of something heavy and complicated. When Hisoka does these things so effortlessly, it makes him want to do better, go faster, and the urgency of the desire chews at him like acid in his throat. He needs to surpass each impossible feat, and he wants Hisoka to watch him do it, to witness him succeeding.

"You haven't slept?" Gon asks.

"Mm, no," Hisoka says. "I'll sleep some time. Eventually, I'm sure."

Gon sets his chin on his palm, taking in the full fluid figure of Hisoka. "It must be difficult to sleep peacefully with so many enemies," he observes, "even if they're all your own fault."

Hisoka is quiet for a beat, watching him with an interest that is almost alien in its emotionless intensity. Then he smiles. "I try not to trouble myself with that," he says. "In truth, I prefer not to sleep when there are more interesting things to do."

"Well you skate beautifully," Gon says, and means it, regardless of how the acid burn to outdo the magician is burning in his throat.

"Thank you," Hisoka says. "Would you like to join me?"

Gon blinks a couple of times, looks down at the ice, and then up again at Hisoka. "No," he says, "I've never tried it before, and I don't want you to see me fall over."

A bubble of laughter pops in Hisoka's mouth, quickly hidden behind one pale hand. His eyes crinkle at the corners with real surprise and amusement. "Do you think I would laugh at you?" he asks.

"You're laughing at me now," Gon says, with a deep frown.

"I'll go with you, then," Hisoka says, leaning closer. It feels like a challenge, although it's not clear what the challenge is. "Where are you off to?"

"Nowhere really," Gon admits. "I'm just killing time. I've never been in York New this time of year, so I'm looking around some. It looks like a Holiday of some kind, but I haven't figured out which one yet. It's too early to be the New Year."

"Christmas," Hisoka says. "It's very old. In York New it goes from December first to December twenty-fifth."

"Oh." Gon looks up again, eyeing the garlands of fake pine needles over the lintel of the changing area. In the boughs, there are glittering glass balls in shades of silver and blue, the color of an electrified sky. "There's an awful lot of decorations. It must be expensive to make them every year."

"They use the same ones year to year, as it happens."

"Ah," Gon says. He guesses that makes sense—city people don't seem to have much time for anything. The closest thing to this back home is the fishing harvest, in the middle of summer, where the priest blesses the fleets of boats and Aunt Mito gets drunk and arm-wrestles sailors, and anyone with a house hangs wreaths of broken netting and the year's lucky charms over their doors. Gon has fond if fuzzy memories of scouring the island for strange stones and shells with holes in them. "That seems sad," he says, thinking of fake pine needles gathering dust all year long.

Hisoka regards him again with that old alien interest, like a lizard regarding a particularly bold insect. "Just a moment please," he says, "I'll change out of these skates."

Gon waits against the railing of the rink, watching the people come and go. He could just leave, of course. Hisoka's probably not petty enough to chase him down for it. But York New is cold and full of foreign sentiments, and Hisoka—even if only by happenstance—is the first thing here that has made him feel less alone. The isolation is weirdly hollowing, so that by the time afternoon has rolled around all of him seems to rattle uneasily inside his stomach, one thing bumping into another like pinballs.

Hisoka emerges from the rink in suede boots the same impossibly deep shade of blue as his undershirt. They fold over at his knee. Gon finds himself fascinated by them, for some reason. His eye keeps drawing back down to the sharply defined curve of the ankle, elegant and feminine. He's always been a little preoccupied with that part of Hisoka, the oddly delicate movements—that, of course, is because Gon never can tell when the hunter is about to strike, and it's much safer to watch the feet than the hands. He guesses that if you spend that much time staring at something, you have to see the beauty in it sooner or later.

"Have you seen the window displays yet?" Hisoka asks, a hand on his hip as he flips through something on his phone. The heart-shaped charm swinging on the little chain is checkered black and white. He has a hand on his cocked hip, one toe pointed aside as if he knows Gon was watching him. He glances up from his phone for a half second, just long enough to make it clear that he does know, and then returns his attention to his phone.

"No," Gon says, as he pointedly looks anywhere else. He doesn't normally care what other people think of him, but Hisoka pushes his buttons without even seeming to try.

"It's very beautiful," Hisoka says, "it's only a couple blocks up from here."

"You've seen it already?" Gon says. "Won't you be bored?"

"I'm not interested in it," Hisoka says, "I'm interested in you."

Gon eyes him again, searching for clues of some kind. Hisoka is always the first to admit that he does things often for no real reason, because the idea struck him and he allowed himself to be carried off with it. On the other hand, you can't ever really rely on that being the case, because there are always a thousand potential schemes lurking in the wings. Hisoka rides the course of events like a skater, effortlessly falling from one jump into another without apparent effort.

"Okay," Gon says, at last. "Which way?"

The streets in York New become wind tunnels under the slightest pressure from the sea. Gon likes to think he's pretty tough, even for a hunter, but Whale Island is subtropical and the barely-sleeping summer of his childhood is still in his bones. He pulls his coat tighter around himself.

"Winter is interesting, isn't it?" Hisoka remarks, a little too directly to be innocent. "The search for heat draws people together, but all the jackets and scarves prevent them from sharing it."

"It mostly seems lonely," Gon says. He watches a puff of snow blow off the back of a gargoyle, snapped up by a nosey wind.

"You probably think so because you're alone," Hisoka says. "Which is unusual for you. Normally you have a posse of one kind or another hanging off your coattails. What is so different about this trip?"

"I—" Gon starts. It's not that he minds telling Hisoka. It's just that, honestly, it's the last thing he wants to think about. "Killua was supposed to meet me here," he says. "I mean, I thought he was going to. I guess that's not what he actually meant. But I came all this way anyhow, so I might as well see the city before I leave."

Hisoka says nothing. He doesn't seem disinterested, but Gon still rushes to fill the space in the conversation where Hisoka has simply let his words echo on.

"I haven't seen him in a long time," Gon says. "He's avoiding me. And I don't blame him, I wasn't a very good friend to him. I was just hoping we could have some fun, like we used to, when things were… simpler."

The wind rises as they crest a hill, blowing through every snag and seam in his clothing like sharp nails fishing for soft organs. Gon shakes his head. "I don't blame him," he says again, burying his chin in his collar. "What was I ever good for really? We had fun, sure, but when the chips were down, I was worse than useless. I didn't do right by anybody, especially not Killua."

Hisoka tilts his head, a silent curious look on his elegant features. It's unsettling, the silent interest, but Gon rises to meet it anyways. He hasn't really talked about this with anyone, except Kite, sort of—and that was good, but as soon as he left Kite's house he felt that he had forgotten something important. There were things he just couldn't talk to Kite about, not when Kite had gotten the worst of all of them.

"I failed everybody. What good am I, if I can't do right by even one person?" Gon frowns, eyes on the sidewalk. "I'm surprised you're even still interested in me. I'll probably just disappoint you too."

At that, Hisoka's look of blank interest shifts to something like real puzzlement. It only lasts a flash, here and gone in less time than it takes for a snowflake to melt, but Gon sees it.

"You don't need to try to interest me," Hisoka says, settling back into bland inscrutable nothing. "People who try to be interesting tend to be very dull in reality."

Gon ignores him, clenching and unclenching the fist that still sometimes tingles with phantom amputation. He hears that others sometimes feel limbs after they have lost them. He feels the absence of a limb long after it was returned to him. "I'm only as good as what I can do for other people," he says.

"Oh Gon, my darling," Hisoka says, "you are worth so much more than that."

Gon pauses, in the middle of the sidewalk, watching Hisoka walk on into the face of the wind. The tail of his white coat snaps in the wind, gold band along the hem glittering in the weak winter sun. Gon's heart thuds in his chest—he swallows thickly, mouth dry and throat tight. He's never felt anything quite like this, a rush of emotion like seeing Kon grown up and happily mated, like watching the funeral boat take a cousin off into the maritime darkness, and like neither of those things.

Hisoka is not a kind person, but that was a kind thing to say. He can almost believe it when Hisoka says it.

The window displays are only another block away. Gon lags a step behind, watching Hisoka from the safety of a place Hisoka cannot possibly watch back. All over again, Gon takes apart the meticulous shape of his hair, the broadness of his shoulders, every square inch that the years have rendered familiar enough to forget. If they hadn't met under such extreme circumstances, Gon wonders what he would have thought of the hunter. Hisoka is not usually like he was during the examination.

"Ah, here we go," Hisoka says. They are at the intersection of five roads—which is honestly enough to impress Gon, who doesn't know how they ever timed the street lights in this city—the great curved windows on each cornerstone shop sparkling with a menagerie of delights. The sidewalk is crowded with tourists, flashing pictures and picking up their children for a better look.

"Chestnuts," a vendor calls, as the crowd clamors and laughs. "Chestnuts, perfect to share with someone you love!" he calls. People call back. Glass snowflakes catch the light along roofs and windows.

Gon examines the nearest one, pacing from one end to the other. The world beyond the glass is carpeted with rich silks and heavy rugs, glittering ornaments, and in the array of intricately embroidered pillows a live tiger regards them all with one paw hung lazily over the sofa, tracking the scurrying children beyond. It blinks lazy cat eyes at Gon. It yawns, baring all of its fantastic yellow teeth like cutlery.

"Wow," Gon says, itching to bury his hands in the thick fur around its chin. "It's so calm. Do you think it's a female?"

"If you don't know then I certainly don't," Hisoka remarks, somewhere behind him.

"I'm gonna go in and ask," Gon says.

He slips between the bodies of marveling tourists, leaps over a crying child, and skids through the closing door with a single clear ding from the bell over the lintel. He stands up and brushes himself off, peering around the room. He's not exactly an experienced shopper, but he's spent enough time treasure hunting to have a general sense for the rare and valuable. Most of the clothing on the racks is just clothing, but some of the things on the shelves—inkwells, books, vases—fairly glow with nen.

Gon finds an attendant helping a woman select a hat for herself, and raises a hand to get her attention. She ignores him, fluffing the iridescent feathers on another hat instead.

"Excuse me," he says, moving closer, "I'm sorry, I just have one question—"

The attendant looks him over, tip to toe, and gives him the most unwelcoming look he's ever gotten outside of a literal death match. He gives her a winning smile in return.

"What?" she says, with a round accent that reminds him of somewhere further north. He's a bit taller than her, but she still manages to act like she's the bigger one.

"Is there someone I could talk to about your tiger?" he asks.

Her expression goes dark and pinched. "No," she says, "apparently there is no one!"

On the counter a ways behind her, there is an open phone book. Her lips are twisted more deeply than just snobbery would account for. Gon says, "Are you having trouble with it?"

The attendant lets out a shriek of such primal rage that Gon half expects the tiger to answer it in kind. He jams a finger in his ear to block out the noise. The shopper reels back, practically burying herself in an antique wardrobe full of winter coats.

The attendant pants. "Yes," she hisses. "Yes, I am having trouble with it! Yesterday I am supposed to change the exhibit, but no one comes to pick up bastard cat! Do you know how much a thing that size eats? I am paying out of my own pocket!"

Most likely the store bought the cat from an unlicensed trafficker. Gon runs through what he knows of animal trafficking on this continent, which is not as much as he would like to, and concludes that the seller probably skipped town once the tiger was off their hands. Second hand wild cats are constantly flooding the black market. It's probably more cost effective to let the buyer deal with the aftermath.

"What're you gonna do with it?" Gon asks.

The bell over the door dings serenely as he asks, and he doesn't need to look back to feel Hisoka slipping inside. Hisoka distorts the air around him like a glass ball in a cotton sheet.

"I do not know," the attendant snaps. "If no one returns my calls? Police can take care of it."

Gon crosses his arms, all storm clouds and angry sharpness now. "No way," he says, "if you call the police they'll just shoot it."

"So what," she says, "what else? I am not made of kitty kibble, I cannot take care of this thing!"

"Then you shouldn't have bought it," Gon says fiercely.

She presses a hand to her chest. "You think I?" she scoffs. "They tell me nothing. Surprise! Here is a monster for you to chase!"

Gon bites his lip, fingers tapping his thigh as Hisoka sidles up behind him. "I'll take her," Gon says. "Don't call the police. I'll get him to somebody who knows what to do with her."

The attendant gives him a suspicious look. "You have a truck?"

"Nope," Gon says, already at the gate of the window display, unlatching the door with quick fingers. "But don't worry, I'm really good with animals."

The attendant lets out another shriek, this one of pure terrified panic, as Gon ducks through the gate and burrows through the layers of fine silks that separate the enclosure wall from the observer's eye. Lifting one last tasseled drape over his head, Gon emerges in the window front, to the blinking surprise of the tourist beyond the glass. He gives them a little wave before turning his attention to the tiger, who lifts its muzzle, snuffing lazily at his scent. Being primarily familiar with house cats, he thinks he might have expected thinner limbs, sleeker muscles. Instead, it is a thick rippling landscape. He hates to think of something that big and powerful spending the rest of its life in tiny windows like this one.

Behind him, the panicking attendant shouts, "I cannot allow this! I am calling police!"

Gon winces, but he can't afford to split his attention. He has his hands full managing his body language, trying to get the right amount of eye contact at the right intervals, match the right posture to fall ahead of prey but behind competition. He circles closer. The tiger flicks an ear at the sound of the attendant's increasingly hysterical screaming. Up close, she—it's definitely a she—seems less languid and more depressed, an indefinable sadness dripping morosely from her.

"Winter, huh?" Gon murmurs.

The shrieking abruptly ceases. Gon takes advantage of the lessened distraction to crawl closer, searching for permission before rubbing his cheek against the cat's forehead. He buries his face in the fur, scent marking himself sufficiently enough to communicate friendship before pulling back. Cats are interesting. There aren't any big ones on Whale Island, but he's picked up a lot in his travels the last few years. People say they're unpredictable, but that's just because people don't understand how they see the world.

Gon leads her away from the sofa and out through the gate door—still open, luckily—into the store. The customer is long gone. On a wooden display that looks like some kind of stacked treasure chest, Hisoka has seated himself primly, hands folded on top of his crossed legs. At his feet, the attendant's legs wiggle furiously from the bottom of a massive fur coat. Gon stares.

"I told her not to do that," Hisoka says, pointing his fake regretful expression at the ceiling.

The tiger at Gon's side takes an interest in the wriggling thing on the floor, unfortunately, and coils back like she's thinking of pouncing. Gon freezes. If it's just a matter of strength he knows he can pin her, but she's got killer claws and he's not steady with his nen control like he was before the incident. He'll just have to do his best.

She leaps. In the fraction of a second it takes Gon to work out the best way to roll her without challenging her for real, Hisoka is already blurred into motion. His seat is empty—he hits the tiger with the full monstrous force of his body, knocking her paw over paw across the carpet. Gon's jaw drops.

There's a flurry of limbs, dangerous rumbling. The flying claws swipe harmlessly at Hisoka's flawless white skin, leaving no mark, as he gets an elbow under her front leg and methodically works on pinning the rest of her. She snarls, revealing her wicked cutlery—she doesn't know this human, who has just bowled her over like a tenpin, and she doesn't feel like humoring him. The tiger buries her teeth in Hisoka's hand, ivory popping through flesh like a knife through plastic, tearing, dragging until the appendage cleaves in two, bloodlessly, a ruined lifeless mannequin hand.

Without seeming to notice, Hisoka neatly finishes pinning her, and looks up.

"Would you move our friend the shopkeeper?" he asks, barely a sigh in the ribcage betraying any expended effort.

Gon pries his eye away from the limp hand long enough to swing the attendant up over his shoulder and transport her to the back room where, the second he sets her down, the coat comes unfastened just like you'd expect a normal coat to do.

"Sorry for the inconvenience," Gon says, as she pats her fuzzy hair with shaking fingers. "We've got the tiger out now so you don't have to worry about anything. Happy Christmas!"

"What are you two?" she says, her voice shaking like her hands.

For a moment, Gon doesn't know how to answer that. Or, he knows a couple different ways to answer that, but he can't quite get past the question to them because it's so strange to think of him and Hisoka being two of anything, like a unit, or a team. It's hard to wrap his head around. Even when Hisoka was literally on a team with him, it still didn't feel like it. Hisoka is a team of one, a unit all his own.

Gon fumbles in his pockets for his hunter's card, and flashes it with a winning smile. "Don't worry," he says. "We're licensed."

She doesn't seem to have anything else to say—staring mutely at the door to the shop floor, instead—so Gon leaves her to it. He understands, Hisoka can be pretty unsettling. What she needs is a break to catch her breath and nice normal store, empty of both cats and Hisokas.

When he emerges from the back room, he finds things settled into a grudging state of peace. The tiger is licking her paws sullenly, and Hisoka is toying with the fingers of his ruined right hand. There is still no blood. Actually, the closer Gon gets, the more he can see that there's nothing inside the ripped digits. It's all creamy pale skin through and through, boneless and bloodless.

"Can I see that?" he asks, holding out his own hands.

Hisoka gives him a flickering look. In the blank wariness that passes through him quick as flashstep, Gon sees something of the injured wildcat there too.

"If you like," he says, at last, and he says it with such disinterest that if Gon hadn't seen that flash of calculation, he might really have believed that it was outside of the hunter's concern. He doesn't know why Hisoka hasn't already patched himself up, except maybe just to see what Gon would say about it.

Gon steps closer. He takes the strange flesh in his hands, tracing his thumbs over the ragged twirls of broken skin, stretched and left to hang like ladies' skirts. He touches the opened avenues between knuckles, deep into the center where it is even warm like flesh should be. Hisoka doesn't twitch.

"Can you feel anything with this?" Gon asks him.

"Yes," Hisoka says, "but not in the same way. It's very good at reading auras. Not as good at detecting pressure."

"So you can feel me holding it," Gon says. He strokes the minute folds over the finger joints, accurate to life down to the hairline wrinkles. He wonders how long it took Hisoka to make such a perfect reproduction.

"Mm," Hisoka says, "not exactly. I can feel your nen against mine, in the shape of you."

"It must take a lot of concentration to operate," Gon says.

"Well. Playing with a handicap is more interesting anyways."

On an impulse, Gon interlocks his fingers with Hisoka's. His digits slide deeper than they should, and he tightens his grip, trying to form the perfect seal that human hands should be able to form—the match is imperfect, the canyons of shredded flesh leaving slack gaps for air to pass through. The harder he tries the more he wants it, to hold and match and reach that single right connection that all people should be able to reach.

Hisoka watches him with insect alien eyes, blinking like the shutters of a camera taking image after image over a foreign landscape. After a moment he lifts his other hand, the whole one, and slides his sharp-tipped fingers between Gon's left. The knuckles interlock perfectly. Real to real, Gon thinks, fake to fake.

"What's that for?" he asks, nodding down to the mirrored point of contact.

"What's that for?" Hisoka echoes in reply, looking pointedly at the inelegant tangle of their two dishonest hands, trophies of death thwarted and mistakes unmade.

"I don't know," Gon answers, honestly. "Do you regret it?" he asks, not sure if he means the gesture just now or the loss long ago.

"I don't regret anything," Hisoka says. He watches Gon, click blink click blink, the shutters closing and opening again. "You learn something, you move forward."

Gon blows a puff of air over his lip. "That's what my old man said," he sighs. "At least, I think so. Everyone else seems to have such an easy time letting go of things. How can you let go of it when nothing has changed?"

"Hm," Hisoka says, a sound that's almost a laugh, "if you could rewrite history by simply willing it, it would be done and forgotten by now."

Gon does let out a laugh, sagging forward into the firm grip. Hisoka effortlessly balances him, holding him up as he leans. Some part of Gon half expected Hisoka to let him fall, just to see how he'd hit the floor, but he guesses that isn't the kind of whim that struck today. A few steps away, the tiger lets out a lazy curious noise deep in her throat, watching them both with unblinking yellow eyes. Three strange vagrants, giants trying not to accidentally crush shopkeepers under their feet. Gon finds that he doesn't want to let go, not when it's so nice to have someone else carry a fraction of his weight, just for a moment.

"I better call Knuckle," he says, still watching the puzzle piece joining of their hands, fascinated by the rag doll monstrous fit. "About the tiger."

Hisoka makes a neutral sound, but doesn't seem in a hurry to disconnect from Gon. Maybe it's been a while since he touched another person too. Hisoka is always polite, but he doesn't hang around anywhere he doesn't want to be. Gon likes that about him, both things.

Reluctantly, Gon pulls back and goes looking through his pockets for his phone, his hands growing cool in the empty air. "I didn't expect you to knock her down like that," he remarks, switching from his coat to his pants in his search.

"The shopkeeper?"

"The tiger," Gon says. He finds his phone in the left back pocket. "I guess you're really not afraid of anything!"

Hisoka hums. "Show animals are half domestic already. They submit easily enough, even when they have the strength to make a butcher's block of their handlers."

"You've been around show animals?" Gon asks, pausing over the buttons.

"There was a lion tamer," Hisoka says. "I saw him lose a hand to the star of the act in a rehearsal. I thought it was a pity they put him down—the lion, of course, not the handler, although that would have been a preferable option. You take a lion," he goes on, patiently shaping one finger after another from the raw ether of his aura, "because you want a lion. It's silly to punish the lion for being just that."

"Oh," Gon says. This is the most he's ever heard about Hisoka's life outside of the arena, and he feels a thousand follow up questions burgeoning on the tip of his tongue, but the one that makes it out of his mouth, somehow, is: "Hisoka, what's your favorite color?"

Hisoka tips his head, a curl coming loose against his ear. "Pink, of course," he says.

Gon feels surprisingly warm all through the phone call that comes next, running his fingers absently through the fur between the tiger's ears. Knuckle hems and haws, of course, but he's a softie through and through, and he's not that far from York New. He can be there by evening. Gon gets a stern lecture about exotic pets and, despite repeated attempts to explain that he knows already, has to wait out about ten minutes of it. He can hear banging and clattering in the background, as Knuckle packs up to travel.

Finally, Gon extracts himself from the call, looking up at Hisoka as he switches his phone off. "I'll need to watch her for a couple hours," he says. "It won't be very interesting. You should go back to the skating rink."

The magician seems to consider that. He looks around the room, taking in furs and baubles in quick absent sweeps. "No," he says, "I think I'll stay here."

"Really?" Gon says, surprised at how his heart brightens at the idea.

"You always seem to be doing something interesting. Tell me about it," Hisoka instructs, conjuring a deck of cards from nothing. They blur between his hands, shuffling and reshuffling. He must not be the type of person who likes to sit still.

What Hisoka's saying, obviously, is that Gon is interesting even when he's not actively doing anything. It sort of makes the younger hunter's heart hurt, and he doesn't know why it would do that, but it does. It hadn't really occurred to him that someone could want to be around him when he wasn't working on something with or for them.

Setting against the thrumming ribcage of the tiger, he tells Hisoka about various adventures he's been on, strange lands, weird encounters. He's surprised by the things that Hisoka perks up at. Fighting and scheming, of course, those are predictable, but the little anecdotes—cosmic ironies, strange coincidences, petty acts of revenges—get the funniest little wrinkle at the edge of his eyes, where there would be crow's feet if his face weren't so immaculately lineless.

Non-hunters—tv characters and hotel managers and so on—talk a lot about evil. Gon has never really understood what they mean by it. People seem to think that killing and dying are evil things, but anyone who knows anything about the world knows that killing and dying are inevitable. Every mortal thing exists in the brief blink of a jaw opening and shutting. By a lot of people's logic, Gon thinks Hisoka is probably evil. He's definitely a creature of violence. Gon doesn't really trouble himself about that, though; what he likes is the way Hisoka respects death, not because he has some moral compunction about it but because he feels it in his bones, because he was made that way.

When Knuckle arrives, a couple hours later, he spends a lot of the time that he's loading up the tiger for transport shooting Hisoka aggressive, narrow glances. Gon winces as Hisoka starts to take an interest, running a thumb over the flimsy edge of one card while he watches Knuckle back. Gon leans in, over the top of the transport cage, and says to Knuckle, "Don't try to fight him, okay?"

Knuckle shoots another look over Gon's shoulder at Hisoka, just as aggressive as before. "Hmph. He's not so tough. I could take him."

"Don't," Gon says. "I like both of you and neither of you are allowed to die."

"I wasn't gonna kill him," Knuckle sniffs.

"Then you'd definitely lose."

"Whatever," Knuckle says. He grabs the front of the cage and hauls it away, which is his way of conceding the argument. Gon rushes to get the back end, and between them they push the carrier easily out the front door and onto the sidewalk, where the crowd has largely dispersed in favor of more exciting windows.

They watch Shoot ever so carefully back the truck up into a loading zone, his expression pinched as he operates the reverse with one arm.

"Hey," Knuckle says without breaking his vigil, his hands in his pockets, "dunno if you noticed, but it's Christmas time now. You shouldn't hang around here by yourself."

"Why?" Gon says. "Is it dangerous or something?"

"No!" Knuckle stops pretending not to look at him. "No, it's just like, I dunno, it's a special holiday. Or something. You're supposed to surround yourself with people who love you."

Gon frowns, but says nothing. It seems a kind of far away concept. He guesses he could go home, but back home it's just another day in the dry season. And it's always so complicated with Aunt Mito and her over-bright rushing around. Sometimes he feels like she's been mourning him since the day he first stepped off the island.

"Christmas is the most important time of the year," Knuckle says, gaining momentum now. "It's the perfect holiday to be with someone who loves you! Thousands of years of uninterrupted tradition! You find somebody you love and you grab 'em tight, squeeze 'em till they pop! That's how you do it right."

Gon gives him an uneasy smile. "You sure have some opinions about it."

"I'm from the area," Knuckle admits, returning to his hands-in-pockets forced casualness. "The point is, don't wander around a strange city by yourself."

"Why?"

Knuckle makes a frustrated noise. "Cause you deserve better!" he says, grinding a pebble with his heel.

Gon puts his hands in his pockets too, but mostly because he's cold. He doesn't know what he deserves. Knuckle says he deserves better, Hisoka says he has value, he doesn't know what to do with all this stuff, but he's pretty sure at least that Aunt Mito would tell him to say thank you, so he says, "Um. Thanks."

Knuckle goes red. "Whatever," he says. "Hey, Shoot, for fuck's sake it's not wired to detonate, just drive it up on the curb!"

Gon watches the two of them load up the cage and settle into their seats with a weird hollow feeling like homesickness in his chest, but not for any home in particular. He waves goodbye until they're long gone, and then stands on the sidewalk a bit longer, watching the strings of lights over the intersection wink on, yellow globes against the glowing red sky. Down the hill, the blinking taillights of taxi cabs look like another string of fading holiday lights, bits of the sunset chipped off and fallen to earth. He swallows a couple of times.

There's a faint bell sound. Hisoka comes to an easy rest at his shoulder, maybe watching the same lights, Gon doesn't know because he doesn't look away.

"Thanks for waiting with me," he says.

"It's good to catch up with friends," Hisoka remarks, with a knowing lilt that probably means it's one of his obscure barbed challenges, but Gon doesn't have the energy to work out what that barb would be.

He just says, "Yeah."

He can feel the shift in Hisoka, like surprise, but he still doesn't look over. He's afraid if he moves he'll break the spell of the moment, like spooking an animal. He's been pretty low, although he's only really noticing it now, but with Hisoka standing beside him in this weird moment of peace, it's not so bad. It feels like he's got someone there with him. Not just near him, physically, but with him. They've been able to talk and stuff. It's good.

They stand there for a while, breathing out soft warm clouds, almost close enough to touch. Wouldn't it be strange to tuck his hands inside of Hisoka's pocket, where the ungloved pale fingers are blind and dumb to everything but the electric life of human skin. He wonders what Hisoka would do. And then he stops wondering, tucking his arm under Hisoka's instead and sliding past the fine wool to curl his hand inside of another one, cold false and real flesh. Hisoka gives a start, freezing still as Gon leans against him. Gon doesn't bother to worry about it. If he dies he dies, right? He's a little bit numb to the danger at this point.

The moment passes. Hisoka relaxes again, vaguely closing his fingers around Gon's. It's no good wondering what he's thinking, but it would be nice to imagine he's like Gon, surprised by how content it's possible to feel, even if it can only last a moment. Gon can count the number of times he's felt real peace on one hand.

"Where're you going after this?" Gon says.

"I have no idea," Hisoka replies. He sounds pretty cheerful about it. "Something usually turns up."

Gon thinks about holidays, and how arbitrary they seem when they're not your holidays, and how cold winter is when you're all alone in an unfamiliar place. Maybe Christmas exists because the world is cold, and everybody feels it just like he feels it.

"You wanna climb that?" he says, pointing at the blinking stacked floors of the city's tallest building, its fire-streaked glass disappearing up into the evening fog. "I bet the view is awesome, if you could get up before the fog totally swallows it."

Hisoka gives it a thoughtful look. Blink, blink go the lights along the edges of each step pyramid floor. He's not just someone, Gon thinks. He's another unstoppable monster, the only other person in the world like Gon, carrying on for no reason other than that he can. They don't know how to stop.

"Are we quick enough?" Hisoka muses, eyes sharpening as he runs the numbers quietly in his head.

"Yes," Gon says. Of course they are. And if they weren't quick enough to do it this morning, they'll make themselves quick enough now.

Hisoka is watching the red fog and the blinking lights, but Gon is watching him. It's true that if you look at anything for long enough, it becomes beautiful.

Us monsters too, he thinks. Monsters too.