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I was giddy. My brain was a king sat before a royal banquet of sensation-- or something. My torso felt incredibly full, not the pleasant tightness of a full stomach but rather a sort of cognizance of all my organs and their placement within me. My slowing pulse in my ears was explosive and left me with a ringing sound after each beat-- it wasn't exertion, by this point, nor was it hypovolemia. It was the immense pleasure of battle, wracking my shitty little body with a vertiginous high that was probably a poor use of its rapidly dwindling resources.
My belly was lacerated through the abdominal wall, and my gut had fallen out and coiled in my lap like a bird's nest. Some of it was still writhing, some of it chapped and brittle in the absence of moisture, all of it swollen-- relieved of the pressure to which it was subjected inside of my body. The viscera itself had no sensation. I took some of it in my hand and squeezed it, to test. The external epithelium had dried out, and it cracked and bled as I applied pressure, but I felt no pain. Disappointing, maybe, but it's not good to get greedy.
I left (as best I could) my unspooled gut behind me in the grass and pulled myself over to the other combatant, laying prone where I had felled him. His eyes were closed, but his breathing was rapid and a sheen of sweat was visible on his skin. Illumi-- whenever I saw him I had this nagging urge to squeeze him like a stuffed toy, to crack his ribs. Sadly, judging by the outward rotation of his legs and the mottled purple sliver of abdomen visible under his shirt I had already delivered him enough skeletal trauma. Instead I threw a length of my own intestine over his throat and played at garroting him.
He didn't react except to admonish me: "Not very funny."
"Oh, I apologize." Maybe he didn't understand my humor. I was chuckling-- a painful, spastic movement that sent spears of delicious pain shooting through my gut. "My crisp purple kush," I crooned.
"What."
"Are you dying?"
"Almost certainly, thank you."
"Really?!" I couldn't help but feel a little self-congratulatory. Overall, it had been a satisfying fight, and I felt quite accomplished.
"Yes." Illumi put a tremulous hand to my exposed intestine and frowned, ever so slightly. "You should cover this with something moist so it doesn't dry out." Finally, he opened his eyes, and met my gaze with just a little more earnestness than was characteristic. "Oh, well. You'll know that. Next time."
There was a silence. I had to stop laughing-- something caught in my chest.
"Next time. Hisoka."
"The next time I'm disemboweled?" I wanted to ask. Instead, a terrible mix of blood and chyme found its bitter, scalding way up my throat and out onto Illumi's shirtfront.
"Thanks," he sighed, "Really."
Guiltily, I removed my errant GI tract from around his neck.
"Do you understand what I'm saying, you horrible man? I'm giving you a next time. Even though you've-- pissed me off so--" He trailed off, apparently winded.
"Yeah, yeah. Sure." I was starting to feel winded, myself. I suspected most of Illumi's blood was pooling loose in his ventral cavity-- most of mine was likely on the ground. "Hm... I wonder..."
"What?"
I went to slide my hand under Illumi's shoulders and-- gently! gingerly!-- his shattered pelvis. His show of gratitude was to produce a pin from somewhere and drive it firmly through my dainty little wrist and into the ground.
"Hey! I'm trying to help you out, here."
Illumi gestured to his crushed, almost formless lower extremities. "Don't jostle this, you fool. It hurts enough already." He took a deep breath, and I freed my wrist from where it was pinned, retracting it to my chest. "What do you want to carry me away for, anyway? You can finish me off here-- and you don't even need to. I'll die on my own." He spoke slowly and deliberately, pausing for breath every few words.
"Oh, that's right..."
"What am I right about, this time?"
"It does benefit me if you die, doesn't it? Hey, m... my bulging... dimebag... don't you want me to die as well? Want to make some kind of, I don't know, final attempt on my life?" While I spoke, I scooped Illumi up in my arms, very quickly but very, very carefully. His brow wrinkled just a little as i lifted him off the ground.
"I told you not to do that."
"I'm sorry!" I took a few steps, and it immediately became clear that presently I did not have the strength to carry the both of us any great distance. I fully planned to try, though, until I stepped on something that was still attached to me. Another section of my gut found itself liberated from my body wall with a satisfying snap. I landed face-first on the ground and Illumi, released into the air when, reflexively, I threw up my hands, traveled another few feet.
From a distance, his whole sprawled length-- his overpronated feet, his thinly hidden grimace of pain, his hands laying limp and still at his sides, his hair fanned out behind him-- had a pathetic sort of gesture that was almost painful to look at. I approached him again, seeing as there was plenty of pain to go around, and I knelt at his side, as before.
"Don't do that again."
"OK."
"Let me die."
"Are you angry, Illumi? Maybe enough to try to kill me?"
Illumi lifted two fingers to my neck and, after some probing, found the pulse there. "You're much better off than I am," he said, finally. "I couldn't hurt you in this state."
"That's very defeatist of you." I threw myself down next to him, careful not to crush my exposed viscera into his side, and cast an arm over his shoulders, careful not to contact my own emesis. "Come on, you never know until you try."
Illumi turned his head towards me, so our faces were only a few inches apart. "Are you going to torment me, even unto my dying hour?"
"Yes."
"May I have a final request, then?"
It was a surprising question, but I took in in stride. "Of course!" I filled my voice with enthusiasm. It wasn't really artificial, but Illumi wasn't a sentimental person, especially not about death, so the that the concept of a last request had even occurred to him startled me.
"If I say something ridiculous, ple-- don't laugh at me."
I wasn't sure what I had expected, but it wasn't that. "I won't laugh. If I threw up into your hair..." I stopped, suddenly aware (in a blinding epiphany) that it was not the time to make threats involving vomitus. Illumi turned his face back up to the sky, away from me. There was a tragedy unfolding here, and somehow it wanted to share the stage with the lighthearted magic show that had been my life. I held very still, so as not to distract the cast with the sound of my dying viscera moving against itself. I was very uncomfortable.
Illumi took my hand where it rested at the side of his face. "Also, I will probably have a seizure immediately before I die, so you should be careful."
Where my arm contacted Illumi's neck, I could feel his pulse, faint and rapid. I felt him swallow convulsively. He was cooler than he should have been, but I suppose that was part of the process of transitioning from a living human to so much meat. If I had listened to him earlier when he told me to leave, I might have been able to seek help and survive. At this point, it was probably too late. Regardless, I considered leaving now-- if only to die somewhere else, somewhere I wouldn't have to be a comforting, respectful presence to anyone-- but it seemed like most of my obligation had been met already.
"You would have been... Hisoka, it's a shame you became a criminal, because you would have been a good cancer ward clown."
My experience of extreme blood loss was a good one-- a giddy, vertiginous, almost heady drowsiness that lead my mind through daydreams and tangents uninhibited by such frivolities as the ability to concentrate. With no small amount of satisfaction, I imagined in vivid detail Illumi finding himself at the gates of the afterlife and having to confront the fact that his last act on Earth was to wrongfully describe me as a clown.
"That kind of thing isn't funny, Illumi. I'm a magician, OK?"
"I'm grateful to you," he said, and immediately my sadistic little dream was shattered. "Thank you for staying with me."
"OK."
"You're... warm." He gestured-- slightly, with his chin-- to my arm where it lay across his shoulders.
"OK."
"This is why I asked you not to laugh."
"I figured."
"Well-- and thank you for not being a little brother, if you know what I mean. ...I'm done now."
"Thanks." By which I meant, "Thank you for being done now. Thanks for keeping it short and to the point." On the other hand, I had no clue what he meant about little brothers. I didn't want to ask him to elaborate, partly because he seemed to be having increasing difficulty speaking, but mostly because I wasn't interested. My hearing about his past, or whatever, would just be uncomfortable for both of us, and it wouldn't accomplish anything.
Illumi had stopped sweating, and I couldn't feel his pulse any longer. His breathing was slowing, becoming labored. Laying so still, on the ground, with his eyes wide open, he could almost have been sleeping. If it was so very difficult for him simply to move air in and out, I didn't have high hopes for this seizure I had been promised.
I considered picking Illumi's nose or tugging on his hair. I used to tie it to the frame of the bed while he slept, to cut it off, and to deposit chewed gum in it. At this point, however, such antics were unlikely to produce any amusing result. More than that-- whatever the result, no matter how amusing, they were unlikely to be worth disturbing him. It occurred to me that the bulk of my obligation had not been fulfilled-- that I would simply have to be a cancer ward clown until I was sure Illumi was completely dead, at which point I would be alone and more than halfway dead myself. I had to restrain my urge to misbehave because, unnatural and horrific as it was, Illumi needed me to.
Was that what he meant by little brothers? Someone who forced you to regulate your own behavior for their sake? Likely, Illumi had a great deal of people who needed him to behave a certain way. On the other hand, the scenario was totally new to me. I had spent my life behaving wildly inappropriately in all manner of environments, around children and the elderly, without regard for anything but my own amusement. It was a wonderful lifestyle and I was in some strange way glad to have been able to give Illumi a taste of it.
However, I didn't feel any remorse for the horrific impression I must have made on every single human I blighted with my disgusting presence, at least, not the way I would if I had stuck a finger up the nose of my dying friend.
Which must have meant that I cared about Illumi, in some meaningful capacity. And I did-- that much was implicit every time I called him my friend. I just hadn't understood the magnitude of that relationship until now, or made the comparison to the relationship between siblings. So, ultimately, I was dying in the midst of an act of self-sacrifice, performed out of pure, earnest friendship (for someone I had essentially murdered). I barely had enough breath in my lungs to laugh.
At this point, I began to wonder if it would be necessary to close Illumi's eyes. He was breathing with a sort of feeble, despairing character, with long periods of apnea. After each exhalation I would wait, and, after some time, just as I had decided that he had almost certainly breathed his last, he would take another ragged, shallow gasp. This would leave his body slowly, as though he was unwilling to relax his diaphragm for fear that it would never contract again.
This was rather tedious to watch, so I was grateful when he delivered on his promise to have a seizure.
It was, as I predicted, a disappointing one. It couldn't have lasted more than two minutes. It began with a halfhearted jerking of the limbs and head-- violent, spastic, but not enough to give me pause. I didn't have to move from my position, I didn't even need to remove my arm from where it was draped over Illumi's chest. It tapered off into barely-noticeable muscular tremors before stopping entirely. Illumi did not breathe during this period of movement, nor did he breathe afterwards. Two fingers on his carotid, just as he had done for me, told me that it was not long at all before his heart stopped as well. He was cooler than a live human should be, but still warmer than the ambient temperature. A faint aura clung to his body, but these things took a while to disperse.
I had no obligation now. And in all honesty, callous as it was, I only found it relaxing that I could finally vomit with impunity. Though I had planned to before, I suddenly felt that it would be wrong to close Illumi's eyes-- it simply seemed more natural that they should be open. Anyway, though it was only a short distance from the side of his face where my hand lay to his eyelids, it wasn't a trip I had any desire to make.
Instead, after rallying my strength, I turned Illumi's face towards me, and pressed it into my chest. With another herculean effort I slid my other arm under his shoulders and pulled him into a hug. Even under his clothes I could see his pelvis sagging as if he had sandbags instead of bone. From his sacrum nearly to his knees his back was soaked with blood, blood that I could only presume had, by virtue of its sheer unbelievable volume, seeped through his skin.
I was at a strange and unfamiliar stage of shock that was at once drowsy and alert. The muscles in my chest were beginning to ache from the effort of compensating for my poor perfusion while being starved of oxygen themselves. I marveled at how long Illumi was able to move and speak to me.
The odd thing was, I still had that urge to squeeze him. I allowed myself to succumb, but, although my arms shook with the effort, I no longer had the strength to crack his ribs in my arms. But it's not good to get greedy.