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Illumi decides he’s going to treat this next job like a holiday.
It should be a few days, he’s been told, trailing a target across long roads surrounded by empty space and air. The air alone should be enough to clear his head, to settle back into simplicity as his brain falls into autopilot. The brief was as vague as always – better not to be filled with useless information like names and motives and feelings, none of which Illumi can bring himself to care about. It did mention a partner, of some sort, to ‘ease’ the whole affair. Illumi had thrown the file into the bin without reading the name printed at the top. As he’s said, he’s on vacation.
The starting point is a dense little building in the middle of a stretch of sand and brown grass. The sign looks like it was green, once, before the bulbs had died and left the glass stained and dull. Petrol, it says, and Illumi huffs as he sees webs spread all spindly across the pipes. He had arrived early, he made sure of it, and as such is mildly putout when he finds Hisoka bent in odd angles against a shiny black car. He spins the keys around one long finger, and Illumi squints against the light.
“Hisoka,” he says, somewhat light, somewhat surprised, and stops before him. Hisoka grins, and Illumi feels the corpse of his holiday crumble at his feet, gone before he had a chance to kill it himself. “I hope you’re being paid to be here.” He does not want to think about the alternative.
“I am. I would assume you are too?” Illumi has always hated his attempts at small talk. He peers around Hisoka and into the car. It’s clean, new, but not so much as to draw attention. Adequate, he notes, unlike his assigned partner.
“Can you drive?” he asks in lieu of having to think, and Hisoka’s eyes flash in that way they always do when he lies and wants you to know about it.
“We can find out?”
Illumi snatches the keys from his hand and drops into the driver’s seat. He hadn’t noticed how humid the desert air was until he shuts the door behind himself.
-
Illumi manages a couple of hours of silence and warm wind sweeping through his hair before Hisoka becomes bored, and decides to make it someone else’s problem. He’s been looking Illumi up and down for the last few minutes, eyes lidded as though he’s actually thinking, or pretending to. Illumi doesn’t know which, doesn’t particularly care, but definitely shouldn’t be so disappointed, then, when Hisoka begins to speak.
“Who hired us for this job? My brief was a little vague in that department.”
“So was mine.”
“Ah. I would have assumed they told you, at least.” Illumi frowns slightly, but Hisoka is speaking again before he can parse the potential dig. “So, how important are we talking?”
Illumi shrugs. “Important enough to want to stay anonymous.”
“Even to a Zoldyck.”
“Yes.” Illumi could say how this is common, really, in his line of work, and how he’s not surprised that Hisoka’s relative lack of professional experience means that he doesn’t know this already. He doesn’t.
Hisoka hums and turns to look out of the window. Illumi lets his shoulders fall. He hadn’t realised they were raised. He rolls his window up in something resembling a strop, and yanks at his hair until it tears where it gets stuck between hot plastic and glass. Hisoka does the same, and Illumi tries to pretend that the heat in the car hasn’t just become unbearable, tapping once at the now raw spot on his scalp.
Hisoka clicks his tongue against his teeth, and Illumi can hear the smile in his voice. “You already know who it is, don’t you?”
He turns to Hisoka, looks at his eyes bleeding into all the sand surrounding them, just as sharp, too. All that crushed glass. “Yes.”
Hisoka shakes his head as his eyes fall shut and his arms bend up against the roof of the car, speaking through a yawn. “Thought so.”
He sounds satisfied, and Illumi pretends, again, that he doesn’t want to know why.
-
The sun has begun to set when they first reach their target, or at least the sleek silver car that they’d seen prior in grainy pictures. It’s parked carefully outside a small diner, busy enough inside to provide the anonymity that Illumi sticks to on jobs like this. At least for now.
Illumi pulls in across the car park and turns the headlights off so that they’re sat, silent, in the dark. He allows himself a moment of stillness, and then he’s undoing his seatbelt and spreads his fingers with a flash of metal. “I’ll go in.”
Hisoka hums, a little distracted, and Illumi looks up to see eyes locked onto the needles resting lightly between Illumi’s fingers. He spins them once, maybe twice, for indulgence’s sake, and then sticks them between his teeth before he begins to smile. He cracks his shoulders, audible in the quiet of the car, and feels that familiar melting, like there’s something molten beneath his skin and bending his bones into an ache.
He feels himself lose a few inches, eyes briefly burning until he opens them anew. He hears Hisoka’s breathing deepen in that way it does in a fight, all low and achy and almost a moan. Illumi sweeps his fingers through his hair and decides on a whim. His hair falls back down around his shoulders in a flash of red, and Hisoka makes another low noise in his throat, as if in pain.
“Oh, Illumi. For me?” he teases, and Illumi’s eyes flick up to the review mirror. Illumi gives Hisoka a little more credit than he ought to, he thinks, when Hisoka pauses.
“Everything okay?”
Illumi pulls the needles from between his teeth and mutters a ‘yes’. The fabric of his seat creaks where Hisoka holds onto it. Illumi doesn’t know when his hand got there.
He ties his hair up behind his head, and Hisoka leans over and zips up his jacket. He’s being helpful, his eyes seem to imply, and only Illumi’s impatience to confirm the target keeps his hands in his hair rather than against Hisoka’s throat.
“This should suffice,” he says eventually, and Hisoka’s eyes go wry.
“That’s one way of putting it,” he laughs, always, and Illumi ignores the edge to his voice. He’s done with this charade, for now, so he winds down the window and flicks a needle out into the air. It pierces glass a few cars back, through a man’s neck and out through the other side in an arc of blood that has Illumi itching. The body falls forward, head against the wheel and blaring sound until Illumi tuts and throws a second needle. More force, this time, until the body droops sideways and out of sight. The noise stops.
Hisoka sucks in air between his teeth, breath hot against his shoulder. “Sloppy.”
“Hardly,” he says, ignoring that it was, slightly. He turns his frustration to Hisoka, grows more annoyed when Hisoka’s eyes brighten at the sight of it. “Did you even know he was tailing us?”
“Would you believe me if I said yes?”
A pause for thought. “Maybe.”
“And if I said no?”
“Definitely.”
Hisoka laughs as though he’s barking, and Illumi jerks back to his side of the car. The door aches at his back. He remembers who he is, then, and where, and his body falls calm. “You’ll clean that up?”
“Of course. I’m not sure the waitresses here are paid for that.”
Illumi hums acknowledgement and reaches into the backseat. He throws a heavy bag onto Hisoka’s lap, pleased at the heavy clunk of metal and Hisoka’s brief wince.
“Change the plates too.”
Illumi’s satisfaction is short-lived. Hisoka is grinning again. “Yes, sir.”
Illumi swings out of the car, and maybe when he slams the door behind him it’s a little too loud, and maybe his steps are a little too fast, just until he can’t feel the too familiar burn of eyes on his back.
-
Illumi had sat cradling something amber in a chipped mug, playing at a wince with every sip. The diner had emptied until only a few remained, and Illumi allowed himself a trip to the bathroom, eyes tracking a map scored with thick red marker as he’d weaved through the tables.
“He’s heading north still,” he tells Hisoka once he’s back in the car, hair falling around his shoulders in a wave of black. There’s a spot of blood, dry now, on the gear stick, and Illumi shuts his eyes against a sharp flash of annoyance. When he opens them again it’s gone, and Hisoka’s finger is in his mouth.
They drive for a few more hours until Illumi’s eyes begin to stray on the spread of nothing around them, and his head aches with all the headlights. After another hour or so he pulls over and hands the keys to Hisoka without a word. His hands are hot.
“Do you know how to drive?” he asks again over the top of the car, blinking hard as the metal begins to wave.
“I’m sure I’ll figure it out.” Hisoka’s whistling now, and Illumi pulls his legs up against himself in the passenger seat, head tipped against glass.
“I’m sleeping.”
“Sweet dreams.”
-
Illumi wakes to a soft breeze against his face. Hisoka is crouching in front of him in the open door, eyes all gold and too curious. He tips his head in the direction of the motel behind them, and Illumi stretches as the sign flashes red at a wrong angle.
“Mr. Lead stopped here.”
Illumi is upright now, twisting around the building and looking at all the doors and windows, number plates searing bold into his head. Hisoka saunters over to the front desk in all that practiced ease he favours, and then they’re walking into a shared room that Illumi decidedly does not react to. He may blink, once.
Hisoka throws himself upon the bed with his arms behind his head, and Illumi turns away from the stretch of skin at his waist.
“One of us will have to keep watch. We can’t miss him leaving.”
“Or we could spend the night cradled in each other’s arms.” Illumi lets his lip curl upwards in that way that made Hisoka smile, once, and then he walks to the window before he can see a flash of teeth. He clenches his hands on the windowsill until the paint crumbles, eyes narrowing in on the silver car and that same set of numbers. Sloppy. “You look good from this angle.”
Illumi is on the edge of the bed in an instant, eyes brightening at the way Hisoka bounces once, then dips with his weight. Illumi feels his hands sink into the sheets, down down down. Hisoka pushes himself to his elbows, and his eyes look cruel.
“Why do you keep flirting with me?” He says the words slowly, finally sees that flash of white teeth.
Hisoka makes a sound low in his throat, says, “oh, I’m sure you know that,” and his head tilts just so, and Illumi pictures bones sticking through skin. “Do you find me attractive?” He says it with a smile as though it’s hardly even a question at all, and Illumi feels the rough sheets against his skin, thinks briefly of transparency, and supposes that it isn’t.
“You know that I do,” he says, and it must be something about the way he says it, so simple, or maybe something in his eyes, because Hisoka laughs and lets himself fall back against the bed. Illumi’s hair sways at the motion, and he smiles only once his back is turned, and he’s by the window again.
The glass is frosty with dirt more than chill, and Illumi lets his eyes blur against the ugly patterns of it. The lights are off, so only the cheap red of the welcome sign illuminates them, throwing shadows all wonky across the room. A few minutes of silence, then a rustle and a deep sigh.
“Aren’t you going to wish me a good night’s sleep?”
“No,” Illumi says lightly, and then Hisoka is laughing again, and the glass shines briefly gold.
-
Illumi remains still until the sun rises and then some, until hands settle on the windowsill either side of him and Hisoka presses warmth up against his back. He props his chin on Illumi’s head and looks over, out of the window, and Illumi resists the urge to snap. There’s the brief heat of a yawn against the lightest hairs at the top of his head.
“Morning, love,” Hisoka murmurs, and Illumi stretches his shoulders out, feels them brush against Hisoka’s chest. He does not comment on the pet name. “How’s our target doing?”
Our. “His curtains are still shut.” Illumi stifles a yawn of his own, but Hisoka hears, of course he does, and laughs softly way up high, up above his head. “His car hasn’t moved. Unless he’s given us the slip.”
Hisoka sounds unconcerned. “He’ll be sleeping like a baby.”
“You would know.”
“I would!” he laughs, “you should have joined me.”
Illumi does not reply to this, listens instead to the rumble of engines outside and inhales petrol and cheap washing powder. Hisoka digs his chin, hard, against the top of his head after a short while, and Illumi sighs.
“What?” The chin digs further in what Illumi knows is a grin. He feels the ache of it fall through his body to his fucking toes.
“Nothing. Coffee?”
“Yes.” He turns to face Hisoka now. He’s as bright as ever. “Please. There’s money in my bag,” he says, but Hisoka is already heading to the door.
“Ah. It’s my treat. It’s almost pay day.” His eyebrows wiggle in a way Illumi has never seen before – he frowns, briefly, at the newness of it – and Hisoka falls backwards through the door.
Illumi breathes again once the door clicks shut, on his feet for as long as it takes him to flop against the bed, sliding on all that rough fabric. His arms spread at his sides and he lets his legs dangle from the edge, toes just scraping the floor and pleasant discomfort running in waves up his spine. He shuts his eyes and breathes deeply.
The bed is still warm from where Hisoka had been, and there’s a little less cheap powder and a little more of something else. Illumi stops himself from breathing again. He remains, bent in all these odd angles, until the door opens again, and Hisoka places the key card on the bedside table. He takes Illumi’s previous seat against the window, but his back is to both it and the target beyond. Illumi would chide him for not focussing on the mission, but he finds he’s enjoying basking in the attention, and all that soft, yellow sun.
He sips the coffee from the cup in his hand, hot enough to burn against his tongue until it tingles. It’s sour in the way he’s started to like, recently. Hisoka takes a sip too, and Illumi hides a smirk at the way he winces at the heat.
“How much longer are we going to follow him like this?” Hisoka asks eventually, and Illumi really should have known this was coming. His usual efficiency has been lost somewhere out on the empty stretches of road, Hisoka quietly singing along to the radio, and Illumi feels dizzy in this want of something immaterial. It makes him want to tear his skin off.
“Not much longer,” he says, instead of this, and takes another sip of shit, burning hot coffee.
“How unfortunate,” is all Hisoka says, after a pause, and it has Illumi’s head shooting up to look at him, at how he has no shame, as always, at how he makes Illumi feel as though he can do the same. As though he cares little about how he presents to others, even though Illumi knows presentation has always meant everything.
“Just for today,” Illumi corrects, as if Hisoka hasn’t said anything at all.
Hisoka raises his styrofoam cup as though in cheers, and Illumi’s teeth clench at the insanity of it all.
“Just for today, then.”
-
Hisoka blows out a low whistle when their lead pulls into a nightclub after the sun has set, and Illumi’s head tips to the side. The place looks cheap in the way Illumi has learnt to hate, and just a little seedy in that way he knows Hisoka loves. The light is a blur of neon in a language Illumi doesn’t know, but it makes Hisoka laugh as he ducks out of the car.
“Something funny?”
“Always.”
Illumi huffs once, scuffs his shoe hard against the wet cement until the rubber creaks and shreds. He’ll regret it later, but for now it keeps himself from that need to make something bleed, red like Hisoka’s hair.
“After you.” Hisoka holds the door open with a bow, oblivious to how Illumi wants to hurt, or at least pretending to be. Illumi would do a better job at pretending himself if Hisoka didn’t have that fucking smirk on his face, so he walks straight into a wave of heat and noise so intense that he can barely think at all.
Hisoka follows him until they stand at the edge of a sweating crowd. Illumi feigns disgust when Hisoka licks his lips.
We’re working, he wants to say, but he can’t stand how it sounds like a nag, somehow, like he has any form of ownership on Hisoka’s time that isn’t monetary. Hisoka cracks his back and leans in to murmur something lazy into Illumi’s ear, but Illumi’s eyes are already on the flashing red exit signs, the people, faces, smells, and Hisoka has to sigh and repeat himself before Illumi loses himself in the madness of it.
“Shall we split up?”
“Yes,” Illumi says absently, the words curling slightly at the end when he feels a sharp tug on his hair, but when he turns Hisoka is already swimming away into the crowd and Illumi is left drowning.
-
He lurks around the edge of the room for a few minutes, fingers flexing at his side every time he takes a step and it sticks.
He spots the target, then, and pushes his way into all the bodies before he can prepare himself for the feeling of all this sweat on his skin, and he’s dancing a little now, just to blend in, and then he sees a flash of red hair to his left and then to his right, and he falls to stillness. It’s just another man, woman, person Illumi doesn’t need to care about right now, isn’t being paid to be. He imagines what it would be like to scream, clenches his fingers white around his needles instead.
He only realises that he’s lost in his head when it’s too late, because there’s a hand against his lower back and their lead in his face, smiling sweetly, the way Illumi should be smiling.
“Excuse me,” he says, and Illumi lets himself be moved aside. The passivity of it sickens him to his stomach so he shuts his eyes momentarily – opens them, and the man is gone.
His phone is in his hand before he realises how much he’s shaking. He demands stillness and gets it, but his body still betrays him to write neat little digits into his phone. He hadn’t been given a contact number for this mission, but Illumi knows it anyway.
“He knows,” he says, tight into his phone when the receiver clicks, and hangs up.
-
Illumi is pushing his way through the crowd when he’s pulled back against someone, hands on his arms tight enough that he feels the bones rub together. His shoulders lower at the horrible ache.
“We’re going to lose him,” he says, in a monotone, a little too like himself and a little too different, and feels Hisoka’s fingers flex against his skin.
He turns around and Hisoka looks relaxed, and Illumi goes to snap, for the first time he can remember allowing himself. Hisoka shakes his head once, and Illumi feels too heavy for the floor.
“Illumi, god, we don’t lose,” he says, more earnest than Illumi has ever seen anyone, and the shock of it sends him stumbling when someone shoves lightly against his back. Hisoka falls into the motion too, slides his arms up and around Illumi’s shoulders and tugs him in closer. He keeps talking, hot in Illumi’s ear now, lips damp against his hair and sticking to it, like to a lollipop. Illumi’s mouth tastes sickly sweet. “He’s still here. He’s in a room in the back.”
Illumi shakes off the rush of calm that falls over him. He’s only ever felt this way when he was much smaller and much more careful, warm in his mother’s arms before she’d handed him over to the world. “You’re sure?”
“Yes.” Hisoka says the word as though he would never lie to him, like this, and Illumi supposes that he hasn’t yet. “I sweettalked some of the staff-” Illumi frowns, Hisoka smiles, “-we need to be careful from now on. He’s probably going to switch cars.”
“I was-” Illumi tries, feeling giddy in the power of someone allowing him to defend himself, and Hisoka just squeezes him tighter.
“I know. I trust you.”
Illumi can’t allow this, escapes all at once from the cage of Hisoka’s arms and shoves him, hard, as though he means it. He stares at him, and watches Hisoka grin pink, green, blue under the flashing lights.
-
Illumi hasn’t fidgeted since he was small, but there’s no other word for the way his fingers tap, all erratic, against the steering wheel. He crosses his arms and rests his chin atop them to quell the motion, and then his foot is tapping against the floor and wearing away the cheap carpet. Ants in his pants, he knows Hisoka would tease, if he wasn’t looking out of the window as though he’s on the holiday Illumi wishes he was. His legs are kicked up on the dashboard, and Illumi is glad, not for the first time, that this isn’t his car.
“You said he was still in there,” Illumi starts, looking for a fight that he knows Hisoka won’t give him. He’s right, Hisoka simply shrugs and picks at his teeth with one long nail. Illumi grimaces.
“He is. It hasn’t been that long, relax.”
Relax. “Or your intel was fucked,” he spits, and Hisoka sighs.
“If you keep bitching at me, you’ll miss him coming out.”
Illumi is pretty confident in his ability to do both, but he has that nagging feeling he’s being petty, like his mother always was, and he snaps his teeth together. Hisoka winces at the sound, and Illumi flicks at the keys in the ignition until they rattle. Patience is something he knows well, but there’s something about the lights and the cars and the man next to him that makes his skin crawl. It’s not unpleasant, he’s had worse, but it’s more than numb, feels like metal grating against metal.
The back door swings open then, and bright light spills out onto the pavement. A man falls out after it, into a car and out onto the road. Illumi blinks, and pulls out of the space fast enough that Hisoka hisses as his feet fall off the dashboard.
“There.”
Hisoka snorts, “I told you so,” but holds onto the handhold as Illumi swings out of the carpark and after a little black car. He thinks he smells rust, or maybe that’s blood, and goes faster.
-
Illumi doesn’t stop until the little pin spins way past 90mph, and Hisoka has the back of his hand pressed against his mouth. The car ahead is elusive but not reckless, not like this Illumi, the one that’s eyes are starting to burn and every blink reminds him of smashed glass. They’re in the city now, amongst all those tall, shiny buildings that used to make him dizzy. Tree-like, but never quite enough, too cold and new. He’s come to appreciate them as he has most things, but that doesn’t mean that they don’t still make his head spin.
“Any faster and you’ll go through the back of them,” Hisoka says, then sighs when Illumi simply stares back at him. “Dead people don’t tend to give the best information.”
“Most car crashes aren’t fatal.”
“Most cars aren’t going at nearly 100 miles per hour.”
“Shh,” he mutters then, as though Hisoka is much younger than he is, his hair a shock of white. “Nearly.”
The little black car stops all at once, screeching up onto the pavement as Illumi and Hisoka fly past. Illumi is bent in all wrong angles now, leaning, looking, out of the back window as two men get out of the car and scatter. He thinks he feels Hisoka’s hand steadying the bottom of the wheel and lifts his foot from the gas.
They stop, eventually, and Hisoka is over the console and breathing fire, but Illumi’s hand is already fisted tight in his shirt. “The other guy. Find out where the target is,” and then he’s out of the door and in the building, running so fast that his legs should ache.
-
The man is stood on the edge of the roof, shaking, once Illumi finds him. Illumi wonders briefly if he’ll jump, and wonders if he’ll follow just to swim in all that hot blood on the concrete. He wonders where Hisoka is, and whether he should have taken this job at all.
Eventually the man folds; he stumbles drunkenly to his knees and begins to sob. Illumi is across the roof in a heartbeat, bending the man’s head back until it crunches, and then he’s panting against a corpse with the city lights in his eyes. Only once the body falls with a wet thud at his feet does Illumi realise he left his needles in the car.
His hair whips his eyes until they sting, but his hands are limp at his sides when he hears the fire escape open behind him. Hisoka’s voice is raised slightly to carry over the wind, and Illumi supresses a shiver.
“You know, you look good from this angle.” Illumi wonders if he’s talking about this body, his, or the one dead at his feet. Also his, just no longer useful. Fun though, in Hisoka’s eyes, so maybe that’s what this is all about. He turns to face Hisoka and thinks that he looks better like this, with too-old hair gel and stars in his eyes.
“You know where the target is?”
Hisoka grins, paper between two fingers, flicks. Illumi catches, recognises it as one of Hisoka’s playing cards, an address scribbled on the back in biro and something red. “They’ll never see us coming.”
Hisoka is before him then, and Illumi inhales softly through his nose. Hisoka tilts his head at the response, like a puppy, and Illumi places wet fingers against his shoulder, light and only once. He can feel Hisoka’s breath against his lips, could taste it if he wanted to, and then Hisoka’s tongue is against his cheeks, lips, his jaw. A hand sweeps over his head and down into his hair, and Illumi feels it like an itch.
“Don’t pull my hair,” he murmurs, looking over Hisoka’s shoulder at the big red door behind them. Then he tucks his face in against his neck and sniffs, and Hisoka slams him back against the railing so hard his spine aches. He presses into him, further, as though through him and off the side of the building, and Illumi waits, lets him, tightens his fingers against his neck and pulls.
Hisoka pulls back though, and Illumi’s fingers clench against warm skin. His mouth is red, somehow, teeth sharp and biting. “I don’t get you,” he grits, but he’s smiling. Illumi tips his head until his hair falls over his shoulder in a wave, and Hisoka follows the motion with hot eyes.
“Let’s go.”
-
They spend the first hour of the drive silent. Hisoka had turned the radio on to something electronic and painful, so Illumi had turned it off. He had drummed his fingers against his knee, fiddled with the gear stick until Illumi cleared his throat, and then he stopped that too. Hisoka sighs after a while, and Illumi pushes the car up a gear when it starts to groan.
“Am I being punished?”
“No,” Illumi replies instantly, eyes on the road as his hand brushes dust from the stereo. Hisoka laughs to himself and leans over the controls.
He lifts Illumi’s chin with the tip of one long finger, tipping his head towards him. Illumi allows the motion, eyes finally leaving the endless white lines. Hisoka’s finger presses hard against Illumi’s lips, as though to cut them on his teeth, and then he’s back in his seat with those sharp nails in his lap.
“You’re not going to let me kiss you again, are you?”
“We should be there soon.” He tips his head and hums negation. “Actually, maybe another hour or so.”
He doesn’t really feel like answering so his indifference is only half feigned. He wonders what he would say if he did answer, and then that this must be what Hisoka feels, when he’s normal, like everyone else – clueless.
-
The driveway up to the house is crowded and green. The leaves look sticky under the headlights, so Illumi turns off the ignition and turns to stare at Hisoka.
“Sorry.”
“For?”
“You’ve been silent for the past hour.” And some. Illumi has been counting.
“I thought you preferred me that way.” Hisoka rolls his shoulders back against the car seat, Illumi eying the way the muscles stretch.
“I prefer you interesting. Not-” he thinks of what will cause the most offence, smiles at Hisoka with a twisted little grin that makes his lips purse, “pissy. Boring.” The lips purse tighter. Illumi imagines what they’d look like bruised.
“I see.” Hisoka begins to say something else but Illumi decides to get out of the car. He slips ahead up the path until he knows Hisoka is following him, hears the door slam, echoing like a shout.
They walk quietly for a few minutes until Hisoka sighs and runs a clawed hand down over his face. When he looks up he’s smiling, and Illumi feels a little thrill in his stomach.
“I don’t know why I let you piss me off,” Hisoka says, then, “I don’t know why you try to.”
“Maybe I’m just like that,” Illumi hums, feels a sudden burst of exhilaration that he can’t quite place so doesn’t try to, just skips further in front of Hisoka until he can turn back and face him, footsteps steady and backwards. Hisoka raises his eyebrows briefly at the motion, but Illumi is always able to catch that moment when his eyes start to shine.
He seems lost in thought for a moment, so Illumi looks up up up into the trees. Then, “do you remember when we first met?”
“Hm?”
“I thought you were pretty back then, too,” Illumi would love a chance to act coy, as if he hadn’t always known this, but Hisoka keeps talking, “your hair was a little shorter though.” Hisoka tugs at a strand when he reaches touching distance, and Illumi holds the hand and twists it until the skin groans, skips ahead again, kicks at pebbles until they crack.
He remembers Hisoka, too close next to him at a bar, hair blue then and brighter, until Illumi tore the curls apart with his hands. “You attacked me when we first met,” he reminds.
Hisoka shrugs. “You fought back.” He’d had blood pouring into his eyes after a while, on his hands and Hisoka’s. He never could remember whose it was.
“You made me pay the damages, too,” Illumi sighs, stepping on a crack in the ground and spinning onto the next. “Who knew alcohol was so expensive.”
“Ah, but I did buy you a drink first.”
“I don’t make a habit of drinking cyanide.” Illumi expects the laugh before he hears it, but when it comes it’s rawer than he expected – like bells, only harsher. He likes it.
“Now we both know that’s a lie.” Hisoka veers off the path then, tread softened by moss and that lightness to his step that Illumi has always copied. There’s a fountain to their left, water tall and crystal clear, the sound like wind, but wetter, like rain.
Hisoka pulls a coin from his pocket and runs a thumb over the surface of it. It flashes gold in the light.
“Here’s to winning,” Hisoka says, then the coin arches up through the air and towards the deep, but Illumi snatches it before the ripples start. He holds it in his palm, presses its warmth against his lips. Watches Hisoka watch him.
“I don’t need luck.”
Hisoka catches the coin when it’s thrown back to him, mutters heads under his breath, and Illumi runs up the path and away from the grin he knows is behind him.
“No disguises this time?” Hisoka always manages to keep up.
“No. They’ll know we’re coming.”
-
When the front door opens yellow light spills out onto the pavement, and Illumi stares into the eyes of a butler like one of his own. Hisoka tilts his head curiously at the black and white lines of the suit and the strict curve of his spine. It’s a display of wealth, Illumi knows, meant to unnerve those unused to it. It’s unfortunate, then, that Hisoka has no interest in money that isn’t his own.
They’re let in at once, lead through corridors with ceilings as high as the sky, except gold and littered in paintings. It’s tacky, something Hisoka would like, and it’s the repetition of that particular thought that reminds Illumi he has been here before. It’s then that they enter a large reception room, low lit, but not low enough to stop Illumi from seeing the faces he should have expected the second he walked up to the door.
Illumi stops in the centre of the room, Hisoka beside him, waits. Hisoka’s smart enough to pick up on the tension and also smart enough not to comment on it. He’s also stupid, though, and intense, and alive, so Illumi doesn’t react when he clicks his tongue against his teeth once, then laughs.
“Well. Which one of you were we sent here to kill? I really hope we haven’t come to the wrong address.”
The couple sat before them smile at Hisoka in a way Illumi doesn’t like, like how his mother always smiled before he was hurt, and again when she coddled him afterwards. Then they turn to Illumi and the smile melts into something genuine, and Illumi trusts them even less.
“Illumi!” the woman says. Her hair is grey and curled, styled better than when he last saw it, more carefully. “It’s been a while.”
“Yes,” Illumi replies, only because it has.
Then the husband is across the room and in Illumi’s face, his hand wet and slimy against his own, shaking up down up down until Illumi feels the urge to break something, to drown. They should sit, he insists, make themselves comfortable, and Illumi has to stop his eyes from rolling back into his head, just white.
Illumi sits first, letting himself slump heavily into a seat that isn’t that of a car. He flicks his hair out over the back of the chair, hears old blood hit white leather. He’s playful, or pretending to be, in the way he knows he’s liked best; nice, docile, light like a balloon. Hisoka throws himself down next to Illumi, feet kicked up on the coffee table and hands folded over his stomach, and Illumi watches – with interest, always interest – the ease at which he takes up space.
“So,” Hisoka drawls around a yawn, “by this lovely greeting, I’m assuming the three of you are already acquainted.”
The wife rushes to speak, hands clenching in the soft purple skirt over her knees. “Oh, yes! We met at a gala years ago, when Illumi was only young. He was the first of the Zoldyck’s we had a chance to meet.”
“Ah,” Hisoka chirps, “family friends, then!” Illumi tips his head to one side when the woman’s smile twists, just so.
“Oh, not so much. Illumi, though, we’ve always been very fond of.”
Illumi lets his head fall further at an angle, lets it creak. “They used to hire me to do the jobs their own staff couldn’t.”
The man’s smile goes sharp. “You could put it that way, but-” Illumi raises an eyebrow, rights his head so the room stops spinning and he can return to cool focus, and the man simpers, “look – I’m sure you know why we’ve brought you here.”
“Yes,” Illumi replies, and the woman tuts the way his mother does.
“And?”
And – Illumi blinks, just once, then again, muscles coiled to an ache. He can feel Hisoka watching him, enjoys the heat, wants to watch in turn, but he’s mildly concerned that if he does this whole room will crumble. Then there’s a glance of Hisoka’s knee against his own, hard and intentional, and the contact sizzles through Illumi’s entire body.
“Ah, I see,” Hisoka exclaims, in the way he usually does before he fucks everything up. This time, Illumi is happy to watch the fallout, and to look at the tight arch of his body as he stretches his arms high up over his head. “Who wouldn’t want their own personal Zoldyck?” All eyes are on Hisoka now, so Illumi stares harder, as though his are the only ones that can count. “I don’t know how many people would want one so badly that they’d spend a small fortune to drag one of them in a wild goose chase across the country, though. Myself excluded, of course,” he finishes, with a flash of teeth that makes Illumi want to shiver.
This time the man winces, and Illumi wants to feel something warm between his teeth. “You wouldn’t have come if you’d have known!”
“I wouldn’t have,” Illumi confirms, light enough for it to sting, and feels a little thrill of satisfaction when the woman frowns.
Hisoka sighs again, saying something that sounds like “well, that answers the question of why Illumi is here. But me, however-”, but Illumi speaks over him with a smile.
“Did you expect my answer to change?”
“We know, you’re a family business. But,” she shrugs, and Illumi’s eyes narrow, “loyalties can change.” And with that, Illumi stills as the final piece falls into place.
“We could hire him, too,” she continues, “or we could kill him.”
Hisoka starts to laugh over the ringing in Illumi’s ears. Illumi rises from his slouch and shoves Hisoka’s legs off the coffee table. He’s on his feet then, leaning up and over and into a freefall before his reflexes catch him.
“Could you?”
Across from him there’s moment of uncertainty, except Illumi had that beaten out of him years ago, so now he’s up over the table with his needles in his hand, and then the butler is back, before him with a frown and a knife that Illumi shatters into dust. The butler’s blood starts to warm his hands, and it’s then that the lights go out. Illumi lets the body slump at his feet, looks for Hisoka, finds nothing, so wipes his needles off on that ugly white sofa instead.
-
Illumi’s skin has started to itch by the time he reaches the second floor. He tiptoes past empty rooms, so silently, more than once imagining a shock of white hair against the pillow. He kills quieter still, everyone he sees and everyone he doesn’t, alone in the dark that was never allowed to scare him.
He thinks of Hisoka and which part of the dark he’s hiding in. He must be excited, must be revelling in all that thrill of violence that Illumi plays off as professionalism. Disinterest has never suited Hisoka, but Illumi likes the way his own face falls when it’s flat. Tricky, Hisoka had called it, but Illumi knows he has always enjoyed the intrigue. There’s a body beneath his feet then, too much blood to be a kill of his own. He still lets it soak into his shoes, though.
The body is mangled, all the limbs red-raw and at wrong angles. Illumi’s eyes trace the bruises up his spine until they disappear under a black shirt, and then he’s wrinkling his nose and tipping the weight over with his foot. It makes a wet sound as it shifts. Illumi stares into the same eyes of the man from before, only emptier now, and prettier. He doesn’t feel anything and didn’t expect to, just continues down the hallway, thinks vaguely, again, of Hisoka.
He feels as though he’s walking through clouds, and it’s only once he turns the corner that he sees another butler ahead. He’s dragging a body with him, and a quick glance tells Illumi that it’s the woman, hair red now, and long dead. He debates telling him, but assumes he already knows. His skin is dead white and wet.
The man drops the body when he realises he’s not alone. It thuds, and Illumi bares his teeth in a smile, quickly, once, just to watch the way the man’s eyes flash.
“What the fuck is happening here?” His voice is shaky. Illumi walks towards him, slowly, watching his body shake too.
“You invited us,” Illumi reminds, and the man rakes blood through his hair.
“Us, yeah, of course. That other freak has cleared out the entire house. They’re all dead – everyone.”
Illumi stops at this, struck in and out of motion like a bell.
“They’re all dead?” he echoes, and the man huffs something a little despairing and a little useless as Illumi starts to frown.
“Yeah,” he says, and then continues saying, when all Illumi wants him to do is stop speaking over the loud buzzing in his head, “he was just meant to be leverage, we didn’t know he’d do all – this. Or, at least, not for you.”
“What?” Illumi snaps, too weakly, and now the man is frowning too.
“He could’ve left, by now. Could’ve left you days ago.” There’s a sick little swoop in Illumi’s stomach when he realises what the man is about to say. He knows he’ll kill him once he says it, knows that he won’t stop him from saying it, either. The man spreads his arms at the blood dripping down the walls around them.
“This is all for you, isn’t it?”
The man is silent now. Illumi shoves him into a room at his side, is turning before the body falls, down the too-long hallway as breath rushes too-fast from his lungs. He’s angry, he realises – properly, entirely – more than he has been in years. He would hurt something, if there was anything left to kill. He feels as though something has been taken from him, all those bodies that were his and now never will be; feels out of his body and himself, head spinning round and round and round on his shoulders.
He turns another corner without realising, and then there’s a body pinning him to the wall in the dark, and his breath comes back to him all at once. There’s a hand covering his mouth, wide and firm. Illumi stabs a needle into the forearm until his mouth is free again and Hisoka is hissing into the air between them.
“I would’ve killed them myself,” Illumi bites. Could have, wanted to, can’t now.
Hisoka laughs and Illumi realises that he’s breathless too.
“I know. That’s why I did.”
Illumi frowns. “I thought you weren’t angry at me anymore.”
“Remind me of when I was angry at you?”
Illumi feels a little thrill, twists his words just so, in the way he knows they’ll hurt. “When you kissed me. And I didn’t kiss you back.”
Hisoka squints, “oh yeah, that.” He seems off balance, and then suddenly he’s not, he’s grinning again, and Illumi almost smiles at his composure. “If you want an apology for that, you’re never going to get it.” He’s looking at Illumi’s lips now, as though he’s not here, before him, can’t see everything he does and everything he thinks.
“I don’t want an apology.” He feels the frustration seep out of him and into the hands against his sides. Looks into Hisoka’s horrible gold eyes, remembers he’s here because he wants to be, and because Illumi has let him. “I thought with the way you always look at me that you’d beg for it.”
Hisoka huffs in disbelief, and Illumi lets himself slump back against the wall when the hands on his sides loosen. “Beg?”
One hand cuts through the air, flippant. It burns where Hisoka’s eyes follow it. “Ask, then.” Hisoka’s eyes on his own, sharp and bad. “I don’t let anyone take anything from me.”
Hisoka starts to grin, now, and those hands squeeze ache into his sides and all the way up his spine.
“Oh but sweetheart, all I ever want is to take,” Hisoka moans, his lips are curling, then, “but you can have all of me, too.”
Hisoka leans closer, impossibly, and Illumi bites at his lips until blood bursts onto his tongue. Hisoka can taste it too, the sourness, and he loves it, and Illumi thinks he might hate it, but he can’t stop so he bites harder. A hand sweeps over his hair, lightly, and Illumi tugs at Hisoka’s until he groans. This sound, too, he eats.
Illumi tucks a leg behind Hisoka’s, scraping raw against his calf as he lends his entire weight to the space behind them. Hisoka trips, falls, backwards and down until his head cracks against the opposite wall, and Illumi is there to soak up the pain against his tongue. Illumi kisses him until he can’t breathe and Hisoka tilts back against the wall, a little limply, eyes dazed but still so bright.
“I’ve wanted you so badly,” he groans, so Illumi licks a stripe up his cheek and pulls the needle from his arm so that the blood burns his skin, growls, “then have me,” so urgently that the room starts to spin as Hisoka pushes him through a door and into somewhere new.
Illumi trips over something warm and heavy, but Hisoka rights him with an arm around his waist, kicks at something with a wet thud, kisses him again. They fall back onto a bed, soft and made, only not now, covered in blood and scratching hands. Illumi’s head is spinning so fast he might fly.
He feels hands on his legs, stomach, skull. Lips against his own. He blinks up at the ceiling, gasps, blinks up at Hisoka who’s laughing from deep within his chest.
“What,” he hums, pressing his knuckles hard against Hisoka’s back.
“Nothing,” Hisoka says, then, as though it doesn’t matter, probably doesn’t, “but I think I might fucking love you.”
Illumi tips his head to the side to give Hisoka access to his neck, and partly to feel the cold sheets against his cheek. He lets his hands fall to the sheets beside him, revels in his weight sinking down into the bed. “I know.”
“I know you do. Don’t try to say those words back, though,” hot lips against his ear, “I’ve already taken them,” Hisoka says, and Illumi laughs until he can’t anymore, just because he can.
-
The next day, they stand under the sun at the side of an empty road.
They had stopped once they were hours from the house and Hisoka had complained of a cramp Illumi knew he didn’t have. Hisoka is bent over the bonnet of the black car now, flicking at the keys with long nails. Illumi watches him, watches the keys flash. Throws a rock at the empty neon lights of the petrol station until they crumble onto the floor. Hisoka whistles a low note, and Illumi squints at his thick red hair.
“So, what next?”
Illumi breathes in the wavy desert heat before he answers, and when his eyes search for Hisoka’s they’re already waiting for him.
“I think I’m going to drive this car into the sea,” he hums, and Hisoka is laughing and walking towards him and laughing, more.
“Can I come?”
Illumi wants to kiss him, so he does. He frees the keys from Hisoka’s grasp only to clench them tightly in his own, until he feels the promise of blood dripping down his wrist.
“No,” he says, but Hisoka is kissing him again even though his back is burning against the metal of the car now, and Illumi can almost feel the heat against his own skin.
“I’m driving,” he murmurs when they part, and Hisoka’s lips split into a grin so sharp it looks like it hurts.
“Suits me.”
“Shame.”
“I know,” Hisoka grins, pressing a short kiss to Illumi’s cheek. He slides into car before Illumi can retaliate, so Illumi is left alone, looking at the shiny black car, Hisoka in the passenger seat and all that stupid, golden sand.