THREADHEART: The Bloom That Binds

Experiments

Chapter 2:

Killua left the town that night without a word. He didn’t look back. He didn’t report to Gon.
He didn’t even tell himself the truth. What was he going to say?

“I met a woman who tied a thread to my brain”?
“I think I froze during a fight for the first time in years”?
“I’m not even sure I left that building on my own”?

No. He needed time. He needed to understand.

The moment he returned to their rented room in the city, Gon lit up.“You’re back early. Did you find anything?”

“No,” Killua lied. “Just a dead end.”

He tried to sleep that night. He couldn’t.
Every time he closed his eyes, he felt a tug—not on his body, but on his thoughts.
Like his mind wanted to wander back to her. Like she was brushing something across his awareness just lightly enough to tease.

He wasn’t possessed. He wasn’t brainwashed.

He still had free will.

He just… couldn’t stop thinking.

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The next morning, he began testing.

He set up a simple training routine—climbing, running, short bursts of lightning. He watched his own reaction times, checked his heartbeat, forced his aura to flare, to shrink, to vanish.

Everything was fine.

Except when it wasn’t.

Sometimes, in the middle of movement, he would pause. Not physically—but mentally. As if something beneath the surface had to catch up. As if a second set of thoughts were echoing underneath his own.

And worse?

They weren’t hostile.

They were calm. Curious. Almost… intimate.

He started writing things down in a code only he and Gon knew. Not because he was hiding it from Gon—but because he was hiding it from himself. If he couldn’t trust his memories, at least he could trust paper.

Still, no matter how much he focused, the same name started appearing again and again in the corners of his notebooks.

> Velra.

He hadn’t written it. Not directly. But it was there.

Gon noticed something was off by the third day. “You’re too quiet,” he said over dinner.

“I’m always quiet,” Killua muttered.

“Not like this,” he countered.

He didn’t press. Gon never did unless Killua asked for it. But he watched. That was worse.

So Killua tried harder. Stayed active. Laughed a little louder. Talked about the mission.

And yet… the next time he sparred with Gon, he hesitated again.

A thread of hesitation. A real thread.

It snapped the moment Gon’s punch grazed his jaw, but Killua had seen it: purple, thin, and looped gently around his wrist—drawn from his own aura, without him even realizing.

That’s when he knew.

She wasn’t controlling him.

He was binding himself.

That night, he left without telling Gon and tried to cut off all his aura. Complete Nen suppression. Absolute silence. A full hour of cold meditation.

And then a whisper curled through his mind like smoke:

“You felt me, didn’t you?”

He opened his eyes.

He was alone.

But the air smelled faintly of ink and lilac.

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