—Moscato

To begin with, Hisoka was vain. He had never made any attempt to hide this. There was always time to present precisely the self you liked to the world—if there wasn't, he would make time. Friends, if you could call them that, disparaged his fastidiousness on a fairly regular basis. Seated primly on the sofa of a hotel room Hisoka had lived in for a short while, Illumi Zoldyck had once commented that it was remarkable to see anything as delicate as Hisoka's fashion sense survive in the wake of so much carnage and bloodlust. Illumi's bland surprise had amused him for a long time afterwards.

Illumi, the dear utilitarian, had never quite grasped the true nature of beauty. If you couldn't find elegance in death and suffering, well then, where could you find it?

Hisoka had never sat down and meditated on his own preferences before, and had no plans to in the future. What he liked, he simply liked—what he was, he simply was. If pressed he could have explained any number of things on instinct alone, but no one ever seemed to press him. He wouldn't have minded if they had, although he might have lied on principal. This was why, when it was Gon who asked him, he was rather interested to find himself answering honestly.

They had been in York Shin—everything in the world passed through York Shin periodically, and hunters were no exception. He had been bored. Gon had been alone. Hisoka had corrected this unusual turn of events with a quiet resolve.

"You've worn that before," Gon said.

Gon was only just beginning to warm up again, his hackles at last lowering, after the initial shock of Hisoka's first appearance. The fish on a stick was doing wonders in that regard. Hisoka supposed there was something to the old adages about sharing food: the laws of hospitality, the unspoken armistice of meals. It struck him as almost animal in nature, and entirely natural to a creature like Gon. Quite deliberately, telegraphing the movement broadly, Hisoka plucked a segment of fish from the stick and licked the meat from his fingers.

"The outfit," Gon clarified, after a moment. "With the weird… ball thing. In the middle."

"Ah," Hisoka said, removing his finger from his lips with an obscene pop. "Do you remember all my outfits with such clarity, Gon?"

"No," Gon replied, honestly. "Just that one. The ball is really strange, isn't it? I've never seen anything like it before. Do you wear it for a reason? Does it have advantages in combat?"

Hisoka smiled. He had been smiling before, of course, but now the expression was genuine. "No, I'm afraid it has nothing to do with fighting in any real regard. I simply like it."

Gon pursed his lips. "Why?"

Hisoka stopped, waiting until Gon also paused in his tracks, before spreading his palms. He cocked a hip, turned his head slightly, posing fluidly in the middle of the busy sidewalk. There were any number of other people walking the same way, but somehow when Hisoka spread his arms, they all found somewhere else to be.

"Tell me, Gon," he said, "what do I look like to you?"

Gon tapped the wooden stick, now picked clean, against his lips. He was a joy to watch, so serious and thoughtful. Most people, Hisoka knew very well, would have treated the whimsical question to a scathing and thoughtless answer. Gon, by contrast, seemed to be considering it with a single-minded intensity. Gon did not believe anything was beneath his notice.

"A doll," the boy said at last. "Or maybe an insect? It segments you so you don't seem quite human."

"Well done," Hisoka said, placing a hand on his jutting hip. He took a small thrum of pleasure from watching Gon's eyes track his hand's movement down, still quite ready for anything. If he were to strike now, he would not likely catch the boy off guard.

"Is that important to you?" Gon said, after a moment. "Not looking like a person?"

"Hmm," Hisoka answered, returning once more to the flow of traffic. Gon fell into step beside him. Above them the highrises glittered blue with reflections of the cloudless sky. It was a warm day, but wind from the north was roaring down the tunnels of the side streets, channeled into an endless river by York Shin's endless gridded sprawl.

"No," Gon said. He seemed to be half talking to himself now. "That's not it. You're always trying to draw attention away from something."

"That is the nature of magic," Hisoka remarked.

"Magic is something you do," Gon pointed out. "Not something you are."

Hisoka hummed. "Many people would agree with you."

"But not you," Gon said. His expression was not shrewd, but there was a disarmingly penetrating quality to it that seemed to lay bare the fact and function of anything it fell on. Gon understood quite a lot more than people expected him to.

"All things are performance," Hisoka said. His vision narrowed under the press of a sly smile. "You simply need to know your audience."

With the world around him a crescent of light and color, Hisoka observed Gon turning over that particular gem of wisdom. He was particularly attractive in the fuzzy brightness of a world through half-closed eyes. Many things were.

"You're a strange man," Gon said, at last.

"Strange yes," Hisoka agreed. "Man, no."

Gon paused, one booted foot suspended comically over the pavement. "You're a girl?"

Hisoka watched his foot waver for a moment before finally settling on the ground. What a surprising combination of natural grace and an absolute lack of poise in a single person. There was nothing elegant about Gon Freecs. All the smooth, deliberate finish of poise seemed to fly right past him.

"No," Hisoka said, smiling his secretive smile. "I'm nothing. Neither."

"So... then you're not like Kurapika," Gon said slowly, sounding slightly disappointed.

"In a sense, I suppose I am rather like our darling Kurapika," Hisoka mused. "People used to tell me I was something, but as it turns out, I wasn't."

"Kurapika says the Kurta were pretty understanding when he told them he was a boy," Gon informed him. "Not like some people out here in the rest of the world can be. He also said some rude things about those guys, but he asked me not to repeat them so I won't."

Hisoka took a moment to remember one particular look of sublime and exquisite murder on Kurapika's face, the last time he had seen him. The fabled eyes were lovely, certainly, but the hardness of the mouth, the pull of the lips—ah, for one second of such perfection. "He is sweet, isn't he?"

Gon held onto a block of wary silence after that, until it was clear that Hisoka had said everything he intended to say on the subject. If the boy had asked then Hisoka would have happily shared, but some pleasures are best savored in secret.

"So," Gon said, at last, "what do you want to be called?"

"Hmm?"

Gon took a couple broad steps forward and settled into a backwards trot only a foot or so in front of Hisoka. The lack of visibility didn't seem to perturb him– he dodged elbows and swinging packages effortlessly. "I mean do you want me to still call you 'he'?" Gon asked, tilting his head. "Or maybe she? Something else?"

Hisoka blinked down at the boy, pressed one finger delicately to his lip. "No one has ever bothered to ask," he said, intrigued. "I don't mind being 'he', and I've been called 'she' a couple of times. That was nice. But…" Hisoka gestured smoothly at himself, as if he were presenting a surprise to an audience, flourish and all, "I quite like "they". Very mysterious, don't you think?"

"I don't know much about mysterious," Gon said, shrugging, "but if that's what you like best then that's what I'll use."

Hisoka said nothing for a moment. Gon was unperturbed by the silence, observing Hisoka keenly for confirmation or disagreement. They—yes, they was quite nice—rolled the idea around, like a wine over the tongue. Not the pronoun, which was a simple thing Hisoka had decided easily on in the very moment they had said it. The thoughtfulness. The gesture. The taste of kindness, moscato and pink, sweet like sunshine, a gift unasked for. Gon, who was wary and forever on the defensive with a creature like Hisoka, who even at this very moment would likely not have been unduly surprised by a sudden and vicious attack, extended the courtesy as simply and easily as breathing. Hisoka shivered, which had little to do with the endless push of wind. When was the last time someone had been kind to them?

Ah, more to the heart of the matter, when was the last time they had allowed someone the opportunity to be kind?

"How generous of you," Hisoka said.

Apparently satisfied, Gon dropped out of his remarkable backwards trot and returned to walk beside Hisoka. "Not really," he said, quite serious. "People should be whatever they are."

"Well said," Hisoka murmured. "And yet, so many disagree."

No one else had ever bothered to ask. They would probably not bother to tell anyone else, although Gon would be certain to tell his friends, and in time his friends might tell their acquaintances. Hisoka was not particularly fussed about any of it, but there was a certain appeal to telling no one but Gon. This shard of truth, bright and secret, shared only once. A connection. An intimacy. They made a small, low noise, like a purr, in the back of their throat.

They could feel Gon watching, from the corners of his eyes.

"Will you tell me something?" Gon asked, folding his arms behind his head. "I mean, will you tell me the truth, if I ask?"

Hisoka pressed one elegant hand to their chest. "Of course," they said. "You wound me."

Gon tipped his chin up to look at his companion, which was still a long way up despite his slowly accumulating growth. "You don't seem to have many friends," he said. "Hisoka, are you lonely?"

Hisoka returned their gaze to the jigsaw of blue above the city, bites taken out of it by the towering corners of skyscrapers. All around them, the world was alive with a bustle as distant as it was glitteringly bright. Hisoka could feel Gon's eyes on them, not shrewd—never shrewd—but still piercing, too simple to be fooled by much.

"Of course not," they said.