SOUR CANDY | killua z. ✔

21 | chill

IT'S OFFICIAL. Leorio was never having kids. 

All he wanted was to take a nice nap as the train chugged through the countryside of the Dentora Region. 

Between Gon constantly kicking his shin to point out some natural feature ("Look at that hill!" "Gon, you already pointed out that hill."), and Sen poking him every minute to re-scramble her Rubik's cube, Leorio's nap was flying further and further out of reach.

He dozed for four minutes. Four suspiciously peaceful minutes.

A tiny, calloused finger poked Leorio's cheek.

"That last scramble gave you trouble, huh?" He grinned viciously. 

Finally.

"No," said Sen. "I solved it a while ago. I thought about letting you sleep, but I'm bored."

Kurapika quietly chuckled into their hand. Why didn't she bother them? Why did she have to pester Leorio?

It hadn't taken him long to figure out Sen was some kind of genius. If Leorio had that brain, he would've gotten a full ride to med school. But that brain was in the body of a half-human kid with the personality of a hyena.

Sen silently held the cube out to him, not breaking eye contact.

Gon suddenly smacked his hands against the window. "Guys, look! There's cows!"

Sen made a face. "Those are the same cows from before, dumbass." 

Leorio took a deep breath when the girl kept tapping him with her puzzle cube. When Killua rejoined their ranks, it was going to be a damn circus.

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ZOLDYCK ESTATE, KUKUROO MOUNTAIN

Killua's first assassination was in the city. He tracked his target all the way back to his temporary hiding place; an industrial freezer.

There had been rows and rows of raw meat dangling from racks. The large red slabs were almost obscene in their stillness, their coldness. The stark white lighting made it worse. The dead man on the floor wasn't the worst thing in the room, it was all the dead things around him.

Killua felt like one of those meat slabs now, his wrists locked into chains hanging from the ceiling.

The Zoldyck children endured their training in the bowels of Kukuroo Mountain. Thousands of years ago, it was an active volcano. Killua used to hunt around for obsidian pieces from old eruptions. 

Now it was just a mountain. In the absence of magma, a cold, damp chill moved in and never left. Like a squatter.

It even permeated Killua's bones. He doubted it would ever go away.

The metal door creaked open.

"Aniki," he greeted Milluki.

"Tch," his brother scowled, hand tightening around the whip. "The hell's with that sad look on your face? Did you leave a girl behind or something?"

"Yeah."

Milluki squinted. "Was she cute?"

Killua remembered Sen calculating the Fibonacci sequence, out loud, in the middle of the night. Gon and Kurapika kindly pretended to be asleep. He and Leorio were much more vocal about their displeasure. He remembered Sen heatedly asking a fake plant if it wanted to fight after her long hair got caught on it.