"They're assassins." Killua tried to say it like it was nothing at all. "My parents get paid to kill people." Matter-of-fact, that was the way to go. There. He had said it.

Killua watched Gon weave through trees, navigating the topography of the forest with grace and ease. Speckled light and shadows passed over him while gnarled, irregular roots passed under him. A fishing rod bounced behind, dipping with the momentum of Gon's running. The canopy of leaves above them shielded them from the midafternoon sky.

Killua had woken that morning, disoriented to his surroundings, wondering why he was on a couch with a black cat sleeping on his belly. He remembered the previous night as soon as he looked to the side and saw Gon, spread out across his bed, having kicked off the covers completely in his sleep. Killua, having been trained to be undetectable even in slumber, found his blankets on him exactly as they had been when Killua crawled in them. Despite golden stripes of morning light coming in through the shutters, the air outside the covers felt chilly, and Killua wondered, with simultaneous wonder and envy, how Gon could sleep so comfortably in the open, his arms and legs splayed everywhere, tank top scrunched up so his belly was open.

Gon began to stir not long after Killua, and within minutes they were both downstairs for breakfast. Killua offered a helping hand, reluctant to otherwise intrude on a family's everyday life, but Mito would not allow a guest to do housework. That was, until Gon burnt the pancakes.

Killua took pride in his pancakes. In his everything, in fact, when it came to cooking. He could make a mean shrimp cocktail. And trout marinated with mustard sauce on rice. He called it Sushi Bourgogne—

…Anyway, the pancakes were a success. Killua recalled a story in which he purposefully put rat droppings in his mother's and second oldest brother's pancakes as a young child. Upon hearing this story, Aunt Mito paled, but Gon laughed and kept eating. These pancakes were definitely blueberry.

It was a good start to the day.

As promised, Gon was going to take him fishing on his day off.

For Killua, responding to the changing ground of the forest floor was from quick-mindedness rather than Gon's familiarity with the landscape, but Gon grinned at him, impressed.

"You're doing a good job of keeping up, Killua!"

There it was again, Gon saying his name. Killua tried to remember the last time he had been addressed by name, before he met Gon. Even in his home, his mother and siblings referred to him with the diminutive "Kil." This felt different.

"Tch, you're not so bad yourself," Killua replied, hardly out of breath. It was an understatement, but Gon beamed.

"I can go even faster."

Before Killua could say anything, Gon dashed ahead.

"O-oi!"

In a rare moment of clumsiness, Killua saw the world tilt towards him, and felt the grain of bark against his face.

Soon they reached the shore of the island, a patch of grass before cliff's end acting as transition between forest and water and light streaming through leaves changing into a blanket of sunshine. Killua felt the ocean breeze sweep through his hair, uninterrupted by curtains of trees. Seagulls seemed to float overhead, as if they were sunbathing kites.

Gon shuffled the backpack down from his shoulders, finding the straps ever so slightly sticky from sweat. They had reached one of the island's fishing spots, and if weather permitted today, they could camp out until late at night.

Killua anticipated a day of relaxation. Nothing too different from the past few months. But having a companion seemed to make it different. He watched with contentment as Gon filled a bucket with water and set it aside before proceeding to removing and opening the kit from his backpack.

That contentment dissipated when he saw the pink wriggling tube-like thing in Gon's fingers. When Gon asked him if he had fished before, Killua could only stare, flabbergasted.

"This is a worm, Killua," Gon started, a bit teasingly. The grimace remained on Killua's face as hook entered worm, and none of Killua's in-depth knowledge of how to best exterminate a human life with a blade did him any good with squeamishness right now. Seeing his face, Gon laughed and pressed the kit into his hands. "We should catch a fish first, and then I can watch you try hooking the bait." Oh boy!

With less apprehension Killua joined Gon at the edge of the cliff, the former freely dangling his feet over what must've been a 20-foot drop while the other stood and cast, sending the red bobber into a vast blue. Impressed, Killua couldn't help but whistle. His friend had a good arm.

The lure and hook silently disappeared into the ocean, remaining connected by fishing line. Killua stared at the tip, wondering where all that line was coming from. He then felt Gon press the rod into his hands and looked to his right. "Gon?"

Gon reached forward, brushing his arm past Killua's bare shoulder to hold Killua's hand in his. With that sensation Killua was instantly aware of the body against his left side, not his right, where he had looked, and the breath near his ear. Before he could ask anything, he watched tanned hands adjust his own pales ones so that they gripped the rod more comfortably.

"I usually hold it like this," Gon explained. "I'll show you how to tell when you've got a fish, and how to pull it in."

Killua could feel the tips of his ears growing warm. It had better be the sunlight that was making him flush a bit. "D-do you always show people like this?" He turned to look at Gon, bringing their faces a bit too close for comfort.

Gon's expression was completely normal, and all Killua could detect in his voice was innocent concern. "What's wrong?"

"Um," Killua stuttered. He felt something like slight panic. There was this heightened awareness of his limbs, and not the kind that he felt when approaching a target, but one accompanied by a racing heart. He wondered how Gon was comfortable enough to maintain this much physical proximity without feeling as embarrassed as he did. Only one other person in this world ever came this close to his body, as far as he could care to remember, and it was a long time since Killua had seen her. And it wasn't quite like this. "N…nothing."

"Ok! Pull in your legs, and put the rod… right here." The end of the rod rested between his folded legs, guided by Gon's hands. Killua swallowed. Not sure how he felt about Gon leaning against him and feeling his hands that close to… yeah.

Only after that did Gon sit up and withdraw his hands, leaving Killua feeling like a whirlwind had just scattered leaves from the trees behind them into his brain. Gon told him to mind the rod and he grunted noncommittally, a bit dazed. He had definitely felt something very un-innocent, and he could tell it had nothing to do with killing.

When the tug came he actually almost missed it, but Gon had been alert, and now the physical contact resumed as Gon placed his hands on Killua's once again to pull. Killua too, in this moment, was now preoccupied with the living, moving thing on the other end of the fishing line. With their combined strength, the fish gave easily, and Killua was in for a gross-out 2.0 as Gon unhooked the fish's lip and the fish's vacant eyes stared back at him, unmoving even as its body flailed in Gon's hands, vacant still even as it reached the temporary refuge of the bucket.

Hooking the bait the second time wasn't much easier than the first. Killua could barely stand the sensation of wriggling annelid intact in his hand, let alone the way the hook punctured it as if it were corkboard. Even gruesome intestines didn't move on their own like worms did. He was more than ready to cast this debacle out to sea, and was glad to see that his hasty cast lived up to Gon's precedent.

It was Gon's turn to whistle. "I've been fishing my whole life, but you cast almost as good as I do." Killua beamed at the praise. "Did you really never fish before?" Killua shook his head. Nope! He was a natural. "Wow… what kind of things did you do then?"

Anything resembling a blanket of security in Killua's perception of the atmosphere was torn away with that sentence.

"All sorts of stuff."

"That's not an answer," Gon pouted.

"I'm the leader of an international drug ring."

"Killua…"

"You know that stuff? D2? I invented that. It's all in the rat poop, you see."

Gon frowned at him.

Fine, he'd make something less obviously unbelievable up. He opened his mouth to answer, not sure what was going to come out next, when the rod tried to launch itself out of his hands to join the force pulling its other end in the ocean.

"Shit!"

Anyone could tell that the catch was likely to be at least heavier than a human being, at least as much as a lean seventeen-year-old teenage boy, maybe even two. He barely noticed Gon running up behind him and grabbing the pole, vaguely pressing against his body. Their eyes were on the prize now, and with their combined strength they were only able to stop Killua from skidding forward.

"What kind of fish do you have on this island?!" Killua yelled, voice strained from effort. Gon was too focused on dealing with the immediate concern of hauling it in to think of an answer, and yelled something in reply, which Killua couldn't hear over the wind, which was picking up now and drowning out Gon's voice. He asked Gon to repeat.

"Hold on tight!"

"Wh—" and with that, Gon moved his hands from the rod to allow his arms to circle Killua's waist. In that instant Killua almost let everything go, his arms and legs both, from surprise, but he felt a powerful tug from his midsection and suddenly needed to focus on his core as he felt Gon lift him off the ground. "Holy-!"

Gon started to move back, holding Killua against him, while Killua remained as stiff as a totem pole, arms hanging onto the rod for dear life, feeling like his midsection would snap or crush if it wasn't for his trained abdominals and back, and feet above the ground. He definitely had to be a little taller than Gon, if he subtracted Gon's spiky hair, but Gon was definitely a more robust build, and Killua could feel it in the arms wrapped around his waist.

The rod bent and danced wildly with all the forces acting upon it—wind, fish (?), and Killua's grip, growing sweatier and riskier by the second.

"On the count of 3," Gon said, and instantly Killua knew what to do. "1, 2… 3!"

Simultaneously they moved back and Killua used the last of his endurance to yank the rod, and in that moment the tugging on the other side came loose. They both fell back, Killua landing on Gon, but looked forward to any sign of their catch at the other end of the line.

That was when they saw the mass flying towards them.

Ducking, the mass flew over their heads to crash into the trees, sending birds scattering in all directions, but they had witnessed it long enough to know that it wasn't a fish. Rather, it had looked like a mass of wood.

Scrambling to their feet now, they rushed towards the collision site and stumbled upon the wreck as if they had been chasing a falling star. The mass had cleared through two trees, toppling them and opening a new patch of the forest floor to interrupted sunlight.

It was a boat.

"Do you usually catch boats while fishing?" Killua asked sardonically.

Gon gave him a sheepish look, rubbing the back of his head. "I've never fished up something like this, because I didn't have you around to help me."

It was Killua's turn to rub the back of his head. Who said things like that? "Well, what can we do with this? We certainly can't eat it." And Killua certainly couldn't make Sushi Bourgogne.

Gon was quiet as he examined the boat, intact in some places and piles of splintered wood in others. The wood was heavily damped with decay.

"Oi!" Killua rushed up to him as he reached down to move some debris aside. "Careful!"

The wind picked up again, and Gon stood up before Killua could reach for his wrist, sniffing the air and pressing against the bridge of his nose with his fingers.

"There's a storm approaching. We should hurry back."

They collected their things, and Killua followed him without a word, scrambling up and down over gnarled roots, the speckled light filtering through the canopy fading into cloudiness, a cloudiness rapidly tumbling from over the horizon.

Soon raindrops fell where sunlight once did and they moved with urgency now, feeling cold, wet jabs on their bodies. By the time they reached home, the rain had transformed into torrential downpour, and they dripped onto the kitchen floor as they rushed upstairs. The lights were off, and the house empty. Mito was out running errands, visiting the elderly of the island, among them Gon's grandmother. The house was virtually silent, save for the constant shower hitting the roof, as he watched Gon remove his tank top and noticed the sheen of tan skin in the dim light from the window blinds.

Killua bit his lip. Should he make something up? He would just have to maintain the act, and it wasn't as if lying or acting wasn't one of his best skills. But Gon didn't seem to fall for his tricks, and he didn't want to lie about himself anymore, not if he was making a friend. He didn't want to have to approach everything in his life as if he needed to put on endless façade after façade, so as to best remain invulnerable, so as to best assassinate. He was aware now, of the blood he had on his hands, even from when he was a small child, like traces of iron dust on his skin and steel in his heart. Things he couldn't make up for with stories about rat poop pancakes or jokes about being a drug lord.

They were tumbling through another section of the forest, the roots slippery and the ground damp from yesterday's downpour. The boat was gone. Gon had told Mito about the boat at dinner, and Killua had Gon's towel draped around his shoulders, smelling like Gon's soap. Mito phoned the fishermen by the piers and the storekeeper by the docks, and they had taken it away, presumably to see what could be salvaged.

They had a tree-climbing contest. Only then did Killua discover how tall these trees were, how high the canopy was, that it may as well have been the sky. The higher they went, the drier the bark was. Gon climbed with all fours while Killua ran up, his body parallel to the ground. To their shared amazement, they tied.

"What are you, a squirrel?" How Gon had kept up with him while he was running as upright, he did not know.

"What about you, Killua? You ran up here like you were going for a jog!"

"This is nothing," Killua beamed. "I've scaled sides of buildings like this." It sounded too ridiculous to be true, but Gon knew what he saw.

Gon leaped to another branch, and Killua copied him. They raced about, tapping against boughs and weighing down the limbs of the forest as they pleased. Speckled light and shadow, sliding over Gon's body, blurred silhouettes of leaves tracing themselves on him like a film reel.

"Wanna see something cool?"

"Sure."

Gon leapt over to another branch and dropped down so that he could feel his hair pull towards the ground, catching himself on the branch with the pits of his knees. Killua stood watching with his hands in his pockets, not very impressed.

"So… you can hang upside from a tree." Sure, they were really high up, and one glance down induced vertigo that could make a thousand men nauseated to the point of fainting, not that either of them seemed to be phased. "Are you a bat now?"

"Look over here, Killua," and then Killua saw what Gon was pointing at. A bird's nest, with eggs. The mother sat, watching the two of them carefully.

Killua had the impulse to make a joke about sunny-side up for breakfast tomorrow, but the childlike wonder of seeing a nest in person, up close, took over instead. He moved next to Gon and too hung upside down, like a bat.

They hung very still for a while, waiting. Killua swore he could feel an ant crawling up his calf, but did nothing. He'd been trained to remain undetected, unmoving, in far more unpleasant situations. And here at least, he could feel a breeze rustling through his hair. If he looked to his side, he could see the angle of Gon's jawline, and the muscular curve of his neck.

It was barely audible over the quiet whisper of the wind, but the flutter of wings came to the nest and a second bird, appearing nearly identical to the first, came to the edge of the nest and briefly preened his partner. They looked quite the pair, both with brilliant plumage.

"They're both fathers."

Killua gave the pair a second look. It was true. A bird of this kind was one where only the males had bright colors and patterns, and sure enough, both of them were male.

"It's the first pair I found like that in the forest," Gon said. "In all my life. I discovered them, actually, the day before you came."

He was seventeen.

Killua had only planned to stay a few days, maybe a week. But something was different now, about him, or about this place. The first sign that that was when he had the impulse to name the cat. "Nanika," he had decided.

Gon looked at Nanika. "Nanika?"

"Nanika."

It meant "something." It sounded like Killua was too lazy to think of any other name. But the way this cat came after him so affectionately and persistently, he didn't understand. What's with this cat? Something.

By then it had been a week. Killua went fishing with Gon several more times, although never willing to hook the bait. They brought fish home to Nanika, and Killua fell deeper in love with the cat. So much that when Nanika was nowhere to be found when he woke on the eighth morning, Killua paced about the house, unable to mask his distress.

Aunt Mito was downstairs, wiping down the table as congee was bubbling on the stovetop. "Killua? What's wrong?"

Where's Nanika? Wasn't she usually asleep on Killua's belly until he got up in the morning? Did she leave the house? Killua mentally ran a list of most likely locations that a cat would wander to, or worse, be stuck in.

When Nanika was found soon after, stuck in the bathroom after someone had accidentally closed the door, Killua realized his attachment.

The second sign was in the second week, when he had fallen into the routine of helping Mito and Gon with the house between outdoor adventures, and had even met Gon's grandmother, in the senior home in town. It was when he and Gon were helping Mito fold laundry that Killua noticed a photo that stood out among others on a bookshelf.

"Who's that?"

"That's Ging."

"Who's Ging?"

"My dad," Gon answered.

Killua had noticed the absence of Gon's birth parents from the beginning, but never bothered to ask until that photo, frame and dust and all, caught his eye. He didn't know how he had overlooked that detail, that bookshelf.

Gon told him. How he never knew his mother, and his father had left him when he was two, traveling the world as an archaeologist. "Aunt Mito raised me." He had said all of this without a hint of sadness. "When I try to picture my mother, I just think of Aunt Mito every time."

Killua wanted to ask. Wasn't Gon sad that his father never came to see him, didn't pay any attention to him at all growing up? Wasn't he lonely? But he looked at Gon's bright eyes, and already had the answer.

By the end of the second week, Killua was starting to feel a strange itch. Not the kind that one would scratch, but a strange need to run, to fly. To leave. But he didn't. Gon sensed that Killua was troubled, and proposed something new. After a day of exploring the island, they set up camp by a starlit cliff, their small campfire unable to drown out the light of the constellations. In all of Killua's travels, he hadn't seen stars as clear as this, not even at "home."

"Have you been on this island your whole life?" Killua asked. Neither of them looked at each other. Eyes watching twinkling lights.

"More or less." Gon swung his feet back and forth, hanging them over the edge of the cliff. "I traveled a bit, but this island has always been home."

"Wow, don't you ever want to leave?" Seventeen years of the same old place. Granted, it was a nice place. But Killua was ready to go see the world.

Gon looked down, now at the sea. "Mm." His feet kept swinging. "I want to travel the world."

Why didn't he?

"What about you, Killua? Where are you from?"

Ah. "Not really anywhere," Killua shrugged. "I've traveled a lot."

Gon gasped. "What kind of places have you been to?"

Killua recounted tales of bright bustling metropolises with urban lights, vast stretches of sand, cities half modern, half ruins, jungles and swamps and mountains galore. In truth, he had never been to these sorts of places. He had wandered around from vague town to town, just not wanting to be home, and this island had been the biggest leap he took. But he really did want to see these places, and Gon's receptive listening only fueled this desire.

They both looked at the stars with the realization now, that other places of the world saw other stars. For a while, the silence let them contemplate this.

"Hey, Killua."

"Hnn?"

"Where are your parents?"

There it was.

"They're assassins." Killua tried to say it like it was nothing at all. "My parents get paid to kill people." Matter-of-fact, that was the way to go. There. He had said it.

"Both of them?!" Gon asked, amazed.

Killua stared, almost blankly. "That's the first thing you ask?"

"Is that a strange thing to ask?"

Killua waved his hands to say no, laughing a little. It was time for Gon's heart to flutter a bit. Killua's laugh was airy, hearty, and like bells all at once. "No, it's just, whenever I've told people this before, they usually thought I was joking."

"But you're not joking, right?"

Killua stared at the boy in front of him. Gon wasn't completely saying that as a question. "How can you tell?"

"It's a hunch."

A hunch, huh.

"Don't be so trusting of me. I've been raised to be like them." He anticipated the pause, then nervous questions, or physical distancing, or the coldness to return.

But without missing a beat, Gon shrugged again. "That's fine."

"I could've been lying just now. Before even," Killua insisted.

Gon still looked at him. "No, you're not lying. Although I know you were lying about the places you had been to."

"How do you know?"

"Just a hunch."

"You and your damn hunches," Killua grumbled, and Gon laughed apologetically.

They were looking at each other now. "I'm glad I met you, Killua."

Huh?

"I'm glad we're friends."

Killua's heart swelled. "What are you saying, so suddenly…" He looked away, rubbing the back of his head. Gon laughed again, and Killua wanted to keep that laugh forever.

When they came home that night, Mito was waiting for them. She held something green and small out to Gon, and Killua saw the stunned look on Gon's face.

"This is Ging's ring," Mito explained. It went into Gon's hands. "The fishermen who were cleaning up the boat found it in the wreckage."

Killua watched Gon's face carefully.

"How did this ring end up here? Honestly! What does that man think he's doing?" Mito grumbled.

"Has Ging been here?" Gon asked.

Mito's arms were crossed, her mind preoccupied with her long term frustration with her dysfunctional relative, but she softened as she spoke to Gon. "Not that I know of."

When they went to bed later that night, Gon slept with the covers on.

"There's a letter for you, Killua?" Mito had said.

Killua understood the itch now.

He had been there 17 days total the morning he slipped out without a word, silently burning the letter out of sight and waiting for dawn. Smiling a bit more than usual, petting Nanika with a sort of forlorn resignation. Running through the forest, catching fish, even playfully wrestling with Gon. When Gon pinned him down and he looked at Gon with the speckled sunlight falling all around them, he thought his heart would shatter. How ironic it was, then, that his heart was as rigid as stone when he stepped out of the house, twilight watercoloring the sky, so that he could catch the next boat off this island and never return.