Kurapika/Reader: Twelve Steps

Epilogue: In Articulo Mortis

Drowsing in dusk, ivory statues lined in colonnades stood beneath blue shivering stars, watching with no sight and speaking with no voice. Atop their heads rested a frieze, carved ornately into stone with clear religious conviction. He had chosen one of the most beautiful basilicas in Yorknew, the Church of Saint George. Its traditional entablature radiated ethereal in the echoes of its chiming evening vespers. The heavy royal doors creaked open, and you stepped into a realm where verse falls to soul like dew to the pasture. Twilight scattered colors through the stained glass windows, spectrums glistening off the sets of crimson irises. Lavenders, periwinkles and oranges, all overshadowed by the glowing orbs, watchful in their haunting post-mortem redness.

At the end of the long passage was a semicircular apse, where Kurapika sat before the altar, facing the seven? no, ten jars upon it. Candles flickered on both sides of him, casting his silhouette in a fiery gold hue as the subtle aroma of burning frankincense rendered you docile. To an outsider this might look like a strange cult ritual, the veneration of his own icons, but it was truly a testament of will, a bounty to quell the screaming dead.

Upon hearing you enter, he rose to his feet without turning to face you, awaiting your arrival at the end of the aisle. An incandescent force within surged you forward at the sight, but then you stopped. Kurapika tensed at your pause, but you didn't see it amidst the tiny rainbows and contrasting murk strewn across the marble floor.

This was a procession, plain and simple; unceremonious by societal standards, but you knew what it meant to take that next step. You were standing at a crossroads in this avowed space, a critical choice laid before you.

Would you run to the man who bewitched you under the moon and kissed you quite insane? Or did you secretly long for a release from his chains?

It wouldn't be difficult to turn back now. There was no exorbitant alabaster dress that needed returning, no peers in those dark pews to pressure your compliance, save for ten– soon to be eleven- pairs of scarlet eyes staring.

Was it worth the bitter cost to be flushed in love's light, and equally its shadow's deep? It was a youth forever lost, a world narrowing at your feet, and something about it felt very wrong. Even though he'd been nothing but gentle to you since that fateful night, he hadn't been entirely himself either, almost as if the incident had broken him the way he feared he had broken you.

In truth, his suspicions were not unfounded. Part of you had indeed died in that cavernous fragmented room, a core remnant of your vitality flaking away, though you could no longer be sure exactly which part it was. 'Corrupted' would have been the word Kurapika chose to describe it, your undue attachment to him, but that accusation rang unfair to you. Corruption implies a vector, an agent of pathogenic transmission that spurs one's downfall, but you couldn't recall a time where Kurapika had ever outright exploited you. Despite believing himself to be the fox in your henhouse he had always gone to great lengths to keep you out of harms way, even refusing to let you take part in the burial- and probable dismemberment- of Vito.

So who was truly the catalyst of your eclipsing conscience, you contemplated? You had also become a Hunter to hunt, and despite what the name would suggest Beast Hunters' prey were traditionally not the beasts themselves...

Would you not have stumbled upon this path regardless, even in Kurapika's absence? After all, when it came right down to it, it was your  Machiavellian tendencies and egotistical need to prove yourself that nearly got you both killed that night. That, and Kurapika wasn't the amoral tyrant he insisted himself to be either. The Spider had disbanded because of him, and in the end he had shown them much more mercy than even you expected.

Granted, it was a delicate situation with Gon and Killua as their hostages, but once they were safely returned nothing could stop him from killing their leader after he was rendered Nen-less and vulnerable. Nothing, that is, except the decency in Kurapika's heart... and that stirring revelation must have been why your feet continued to move forward, approaching the pinnacle of the nave.