Kurapika x Chrollo One-Shots

Nightmares

Summary: ---

Warning(s): Minor suicidal thoughts.

Extra: ---

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Kurapika never had a good night's sleep.

The screams that plagued his mind, the harsh and unforgiving pants that left his throats as he ran and ran as fast as he could. Bodies laid, disheveled, lifeless, torn apart. He'd drop to his knees as he gazed at the expression of his mother. The smile she wore was torn in two with warmth and pain-stricken across her features. The bright blues that once glistened in the light sun, her own small pocket of the gentle afternoon sky. The first thing he'd see before he'd jumped into the safeness of her arms. There was nothing now. Just an empty vast crater where they once sat, streams of thick blood flowing from her torn tear ducts. He could feel the fading warmth of her hand, the cold realization that she was losing her heat biting into his skin unforgivingly. That she was dying.

That she was already dead.

The clink was subtle. It was so soft, so quiet, almost non-existent. But his ears picked it up. They always had no matter where he was, no matter what he did. The chains were bound to him, locked and ingrained into his mind. It was his first sense of awareness that he was alive, that he was awake, that he was no longer in the realm of his dreams but in reality with no reoccurring nightmares to escape to.

He had to live a life he didn't want.

But it was different. There was no soft cushion underneath his frame, no wall bitting into his back. Carefully his eyelids peeled back revealing the greys swirling with a slow and muddled awareness as if he really had just woken up. And the first thing his vision constructed were his hands. Pale, nimble fingers, skin harsh in some areas yet soft in others. He clenched his hand watching and listening as the chains clinked under his touch. And that was when he saw the first sign. Across his fingernails laid splotches of crimson red. It was thick, the wetness of it gleaming as it dripped down onto his palm. Slowly the limb shook, began to tremble as he examined the back of his hand his eyes gazing at red stricken across it. And in his peripheral, he saw more, more of that crimson red in blotches across the floor.

"You did it." His mind told him like another voice mimicking his own was floating in his thoughts.

"You killed them...you killed them all."

The boy took a moment to register the words, to understand them, to comprehend them. To let them fly through his brain and rack every neuron stretching and branching to others for an answer. "I-...I..." Was the only faint response he could give, his voice barely there.

"Be happy. We did it. You're happy aren't you?"

Wasn't he? The boy let his arm drop to the side, his head lifting from the floor to gaze forward. But forward no longer seemed like such a simple direction. He turned to his left, to his right, behind himself, his head moving frantically to find some source of direction but nothing. Nothing in this--in the void of space, he stood in. There was nothing, there was--nothing.

Only an emptiness. An emptiness that flooded his entire being. The burning rage, the ambition, the desire. It had all been farse. All this time he'd felt like he'd been working towards something--no, he knew. He knew what this deadly ambition had been doing to him and yet he still went, he still lusted after sick revenge. He still wanted to upkeep the pride of his tribe, to allow them and himself to live in peace knowing that their killers wouldn't go unharmed. And it'd consumed him. This anger had completely compelled it. It kept him going, made his feet continue their stride on the endless road he'd ventured ON. The emptiness--this emptiness had always been there. Had always threatened to slip into his already fragile mind.