SOUR CANDY | killua z. ✔

36 | thaw

tw: violence, mentions of blood & injury

GROWING UP, all Mai ever heard was how she should be more like her sister.

"You should smile more, like Sen."

"Quit it with the hair accessories. Look at your sister, she doesn't use all that stuff."

"Where did your coldness come from? Certainly not Sen."

It was ironic, considering those same people picked on Sen for everything. Her personality. Her scars. Her habits. It was impossible to win in those peoples' eyes. 

Mai even cut her own bangs, the trendy, wispy kind that city girls wore, so the aunties would stop confusing them. All they did was whine about how Mai ruined her beautiful hair.

That she looked like an outsider.

But Sen had been delighted, her calloused fingers tracing the new hairdo reverently. She said it suited her.

"I should get balayage done," Sen touched her own hair. "Then we can be rebels together, and the aunties can yell at both of us."

Siblings aren't enemies, Sen told her. Everyone else is the enemy.

Mai had taken it to heart, let it guide her interactions with others. Now that she was older, she understood it wasn't set in stone. 

Kalluto wasn't her blood sibling, but they weren't an enemy. 

Gon and Killua might've been annoying, but they weren't enemies either. 

Mai knew that, and Sen knew that.

But, despite that—

"Stay back," Sen snapped, in Japponese. "Leave us alone."

Mai, resigned, allowed Sen to try to hide her and Kalluto behind her back. It was kind of pointless, considering how small Sen was.

Sen was undoubtedly on high alert after that creepy clown man all but held them hostage. More than that, something had been eating at Sen for a while. Mai could tell by her sister's constant finger-drumming, her quietness, the intense clicking of her Rubik's cube. 

Mai thought it had something to do with Kotaro.

Sen yelling at her friends was a stress reaction more than anything, and Mai knew she'd regret it later.

Mai had to come up with a solution, fast, before Sen impulsively tried to kill those two in the middle of the street.

She was given some time when Gon smiled agreeably in the face of Sen's gnashing, stepping back to give them space. He said something about talking later, but Mai was too busy thinking. It was times like this when she wished she had Sen's brain. 

Killua refused to budge when Gon tugged his arm. In fact, it looked like he was going to try and talk Sen down. Big mistake.

Mai's ear pricked when a bell jingled nearby, reminding her of the sushi restaurant sitting behind them.

Amen.

"Can we get sushi for Kotaro's birthday tomorrow?" She asked loudly, watching as Sen stilled. "And we still need to find a bakery. For the cake."

Sen looked back at her, visibly anxious. Jarring a kitsune, even a half-human one, from a protective state had a fifty-fifty chance of success. But Mai didn't want to deal with the fallout of Sen committing public murder unrelated to a Hunt.