Chapter Text
It’s not like he believes in the Hourai Elixir or born immortality.
He believes that everything has an end, somehow, and somewhere.
All he knows has met that end, and he knows he will too.
But, now that you mention it, his years are getting up there.
Throughout the forest, a nature preserve made to keep some semi-balance of greenery and sheet metal in the cold, cold chrome of everyday life, a hum sounds. It hums sweetly, punctured by a whirr or clank every once and a while, but its nothing the wildlife had not grown accustomed to; after all, it was a natural sound here. The echo would ring across the pond, through the deep wood, but never past the screen that prohibited the public from running scars through the ecosystem. It was too loud out there anyway. The being was fine with its fishing rod and little pack, it could survive on only this, so why need anything else? In its humming tune, it was simple to pick out that this being really did not need any silver plated technologies or marketed product, hovering transport or walkways based on light, expensive processors or information beamed straight into the mind. Rusted iron under rubber fake skin, both glass eyes facing the future, it hummed and clanked and whirred along, not even noticing there was a backwind.
He guesses that it could be more than not boring-
Nah. It would be boring. So boring. More boring than watching Milluki in his little loli game world roll around and smooch anything that has pink eyes and at least three ponytails. Hell, it would be less boring if Milluki introduced him to his harem, one by one, reciting cup sizes and ~magical abilities ooo~ for each one like he knew them by heart. Wait, he probably did. Hm. Dedication is a good trait in a husband he guesses- wait what the fuck. Why is he thinking that-that’s just bizarre isn't it-Milluki can’t marry and have kids with a program- ohmygollygoshnonowhecantstopthinkingaboutitewewEWWWWWWW!
“Killua? You’re flushed, is something the matter?”
He then found himself staring into his mother’s eyes, well, eye, well, computer thing. Maybe he could play Pong on it, now that he thought about it-
“Killua! Something really is wrong isn’t it!”
“No, Mom, I-” He was stopped with a shake to his shoulders by manicured hands.
“Ah Killua!~ Your coldness is intoxicating! More proof that you would be the perfect heir to the Zoldyck family business! I-”
“Mom, stop.” He had had enough of this the second it started.
She gasped, then nodded, holding back tears of joy.
He huffed and returned to looking out the tinted windows of the family limousine at the artificial starlight and moping. “Where are we even going anyway?”
“We’re meeting with Illumi for a tad, just a quick job, nothing you can’t handle Kil.” She covered her mouth with her fan, obviously ecstatic about her son actually communicating to her.
Conversation was better than boredom by just a bit, so he decided to keep the conversation train chugging. Heh. Train puns. “What’s the description?”
Her lips moved behind her fan, every breath ruffling a bit of the down lining it. “A client has suspicions that her business associate has been robbing her of her stock and selling it on the VSN to make a profit. She’s traced his tracks into the Finback Isle Nature Preserve, where she thinks he may be hiding stock and himself. Our job is to do the usual and make sure she retrieves her lost possessions.” He thinks he sees a feather stuck on her lip gloss. He stops the laughter with another question.
“Hmm, why did she call for assassination? Isn’t this more police business?”
“The ‘stock’ is organs from the black market, Kil.”
Oh. “...Ah, I see.” This might actually be less boring than it started out to seem.
A clash of alloy against alloy echoed through the surrounding silence, a fizz and a crackle of a scream soon following,
...and the humming stopped.
Only the crackle of dragging metal through dry turf and leaves alerted the earth of why.
The limousine ride turned into a ferry ride, and that ferry ride turned into a taxi ride, and by the end Killua was carsick, seasick, and just sick of transportation in general. At least he had arrived at the journey’s end, and there was no sign of getting in any other horrid vehicles until the return trip. The white haired boy pushed off the post he had been leaning on with his hands in his pockets, to saunter around the clearing of which he idly stood and kick a rock in his path. It flew into the brush that lined the border of the preserve, probably spooking a good amount of the little animals that were scampering around to look for sustenance for the season’s change. It was getting rather chilly, anyway. Hopping up on a strut of the fence he had previously been leaning on, he pondered more about the fauna for a good ten minutes, only to reach the same conclusion as he did fifteen minutes earlier, he was bored out of his mind. His mother was off on the phone talking to Miss Missing Organs; he could hear her lilting voice from where he stood, as they waited for Illumi to come back from his quick land survey. He huffed to himself. He honestly just wanted to get this mission up and going, for that at least that would be entertaining enough to keep him from falling asleep standing up.
He glanced around from atop the fence post he was perched upon, admiring the netted-in community that was the nature preserve, open at the top so that migratory birds had a place to rest during their travels, but otherwise surrounded by electric blue net, high enough that no human could ever dream of jumping it. Behind it was lush greenery, oaks, pines, willows, dogwoods, and any bark that could be dreamed of mingling with the lower tufts sprouting out from the soil. With a squint, he focused on the shade of an old spindly tree, vines twisting around its base and winding up to separate and claim branches to each their own. It was then he saw a shadow. A very tall and round shadow, a shadow with a tie and suit, a shadow that froze in shock and dropped its boxes at the sight of another human. Killua waited a second in muted disbelief, before smirking and leaping off his post to cling to the wire that made up the divider between forest and civilization. His mother and Illumi could rattle him for running off later, right now there was prey to catch.
As his fingers landed a firm grasp on the netting, he was jolted by hundreds of volts of burning static. Of course the fence was electric, why would it not be? And using the new standard too, magnificently shining blue voltage running through clear tempered metal, for a more decorative and less threatening approach of protection for the wood, and still keeping the area behind beautiful for tourists and environmentalists to admire. However, the assassin had no issues grinding through, years of shock treatment (or torture, now that he looked back) making it more easy than not to scale and dismount the tangle of wires and land on the forest floor with a cat’s balance and precision. He snapped his head up milliseconds after the soles of his shoes hit the dirt, alert and listening, searching for a trace of where the culprit had run off to. A crunch in the dried leaves of the previous autumn 50 meters southwest. Bingo. He pushed off into a sprint, lightning fast and with a certain elegance only a trained killer could perceive, and was tailing the man in no time. He certainly was faster than he expected some old white guy in a tailored suit to be, maybe because of adrenaline he was pumping into his veins, but no matter, Killua was still rapidly approaching and had no signs of stopping. The target knew this, yet in a stunning sight of willpower and stupidity, he attempted to shake off the small assassin. He bounded around thick trees, through gaps between root and ground, slid through mud, and zigzagged through the darkness from the tall leaf canopies, but the soft, nearly indiscernible crunches of leaves never ceased to stop nipping at his heels. The man took a chance, hoping for the best, and looked back to his pursuer. All he could see were the true blue iris’ of a little white haired boy, not even twenty centimeters from being right on top of him.
Ever the opportunist, Killua leapt, legs clamping around the target’s torso, knocking him off his feet and sending him tumbling to the ground. They rolled for a while, the man screaming with agony from the hard rocks and barbs creating cuts and gashes in his skin, Killua being more or less indifferent. They finally came to a halt when the forest floor evened out. He unwrapped his legs while the man was still disoriented from the rolling and blow of hitting the unsuspected, but pleasant surprise of a thick tree root, headfirst, and stood to brush himself off. Experienced fingers ran over his clothes, checking for any rips or tears. Two in the turtleneck, three in the shorts, and aw, a big nasty one on his favorite hoodie. What a shame. He turned back to his prey to see him snivelling in the pile of leaves, a nasty gash on his right temple, probably concussion worthy. Good for him. He’ll be dizzy when he dies.
He nudged him with his foot, maybe a bit too forcefully. “Hey, Sleeping Beauty, get up. I need some answers over here.”
He was silent, either out of fear or unawareness of the situation. Killua hoped it was the former, he had always liked seeing them shiver.
His knees dug into the brush near the man’s head. “Okay, let’s begin. Listen closely, mister, I’m only asking once, and I’ll be pretty upset if I don’t get answers,” He lowered his voice to a breathy whisper, “And you wouldn’t want to see me angry, now would you?”
The target shook his head vigorously. His body quaked and he was near to tears. Awesome.
“Why are you here?”
His voice was ragged and raspy, still a bit higher than the average man’s, “I...I’m in hiding.”
“From what?”
“Uh, th-that would be my colleague…”
“Hm. Why are you hiding from them?”
“I...I...I!” His voice rattled, forcing semi-words to spill out, but no answers.
Killua spat, “Snap out of it, old man. I’m on a time limit.” Not that he was, of course, he really just wanted to get home.
“I-I stole our stock, I-It’s in the cave of the willow by the pond! Look there! Believe me, its all there! I never touched the stuf-” Tears were leaking from eyes afraid to die, when sharp nails rammed through his chest, only a few fingers poking through the other side.
In less than the time it took to blink, his heart was out of his body, still bloody and beating, while a young man slowly walks away, back facing the gory mess.
With a sudden halt, he turned back, hands in his pockets and a smirk stenciled on his face. “Thanks for the answers, mister, rest in pieces.” Man, he cracks himself up.
The ‘cave of the willow’ could not be more of an accurate term. Somehow, in some way, a weeping willow had rooted itself above a cavern in the rock of a small cliff, leaves hanging down to form a natural curtain to the entrance. They brushed the rippling surface of the nearby glassy-clear pond with their tips, drawing loose circles with the wind pushing and pulling them to and fro. It was a mystical and beautiful sight, almost what you could only imagine in folk stories and paradise dreams. Wouldn’t Alluka love to see this. He snapped a quick picture. Moving forward, he pulled apart the drapery to find himself in the gaping maw of a wide, yet not deep, industrialized cavern, probably previously owned as a storage space when the preserve was not established and the area was still free. The walls, evened out and covered with steel sheet metal, still looking more new than not, were covered in papers, ranging from delivery lists to plans of a large-scale rocket lookalike that had the appearance of something majorly dangerous, almost on the apocalyptic level, the idea only enhanced by the nearby barrels of what could be explosives and gunpowder. Good thing the head of the project is lying on the forest ground, blood spouting from his chest and probably dead by now. But that was not of importance at the moment, what he needed to do was find the stolen goods. He navigated through the darkness of the cave, checking every box and case he could fumble for before reaching his hand in to a tall freezing locker and grasping the familiar fleshiness that was a lung. Fantastic, it was all there. Job done. He spun on his heel, about to go alert whoever needed to hear, when, from the very back of the cavern, a faint clanking and whirring echoed towards him, followed by a loud CLASH of metal hitting cement flooring.
He froze. In the midst of his halt, his feet had taken full control of his motion, and with a quick turn, he was facing the back of the cave.The human mind naturally seeked out answers, and his curiosity was too great to leave without at least a hint of what had happened. He found himself with slowed breathing and lightened footsteps, slowly creeping towards the source of the continuous noise. The boy was on edge, questions racing through his conscious. What if the man he had killed had an associate? Someone stronger? Someone who could actually create what had been blueprinted on the wall and cause the destruction he had joked about? His feet shuffled farther forward, back sliding along the walls until he found himself blocked by a long filing cabinet. The noise was just on the other side, the only path between cabinet and wall much too narrow for a direct route of escape. He wanted to about-face and leave whatever may be behind there for no one to see, to let Illumi handle whatever or whoever was back there. Alas, to his terror, his feet refused to move in any direction that was not rounding the corner to what could be his doom.
He stopped and opened his eyes once his feet had passed into the area behind the cabinet, and was greeted with the sight of a boy, or maybe not even just a boy, slumped on the back wall, oil leaking from the corners of his mouth, an eye and wires hanging out of their socket, spiky hair (or so he thought, it could be the texture of metal) covered in grime, an arm out of its rightful place on the body and instead a couple inches away on the hard floor, and rusted iron limbs under torn rubber skin.
A strangled noise came out of Killua’s throat, some could call it a scream, others may describe it as a retch, but either way, he was astonished. No man, no thing, no piece of foreshadowing could have prepared him to see some rusted android, just a smidge smaller than him, at the back of a murdered man’s hideout. He just wanted to puke right then and there. Deciding against that gruesome action, he instead crept his way over to the fallen figure, hands up and guarding, even though the poor wrecked thing could probably do nothing to harm him.
He was in arm’s distance when artificial lips fell open, metal jaw not yet unhinged but still weak enough to drop into a shocked ‘O’ without prompt, revealing a cavernous mouth with porcelain teeth, many of which were chipped along with some gone entirely. He avoided looking at it, it was much too nauseating. (The thought surprised him. He had seen so many mauled carcasses and a crap piece of machinery made his stomach turn. Figures.) He peered around the body before finding what he needed. Behind the ear, just on the edge dividing metal from artificial cartilage, was a small breaker, hopefully hooked up to the main drive, which would start this baby up and milk out the only juice it still had from its last charge. It was very minuscule however, probably only able to be tipped by a pin and a careful hand. Luckily, that could be arranged. He forced blood to pump into his fingers, sending the nails on his hand into a long and narrow point and leaned in towards the switch. He froze as soon as realization hit him. Why was he doing this? This little thing could very much be a dangerous watchman, only playing dead to lure trespassers into a false sense of safety before striking, faster than a fish down a stream. He pulled back, crossed and on edge, before standing and setting off towards the caves mouth, set on leaving the weak bot with it's supposed duty unfulfilled, when he heard a soft clip and the sound of virring smoothing out. It was silent.
That was when the screaming started.
Not even real screaming, honestly. Just grinding and mashing and screeches of voice banks gone wrong with data damage popping Killua's highly sensitive ears. It was nothing short of static and horror movie trills' incestuous, severely fucked-up child, and no stopping point would arrive any time soon. He was just on the verge of running straight through the cave’s entrance, ears plugged by shaking palms, when, through the gross sounds, the human, understandable, pleading, underlying message spoke,
"H...h-h-hel...llggRRRRSHHHHHp..."
Hell? Hell!? Was it a forewarning to where this thing was taking him? No, wait. Hel...p? Could the interference be destroying the poor bot's cry for relief? Was he in pain? No, wait- machines could not feel pain, right? But with the right programming…
His feet betrayed him for the second time that day and rushed him back towards the noise. He looked towards the automation again. Nothing had changed in it’s appearance, not a flinch of any limb or joint, but the lone eye, the right remaining eye, was facing him. The golden brown iris shook, glitched sideways whenever a particularly hard tremor was screeched out, but always clicked back into position to watch Killua, pleading.
“K-kk-ki-” It belted out through the blare of disastrous noise, eye never purposely moving from the boy’s. Before it could finish the word, however, the clamor rose and rose in pitch, until nothing less than a squeal with a mix of vaguely-human sounding wails of immense pain, then to cut, as if slashing the line of life-support straight down the middle, with no noise left to follow.
Silence overtook the hideout, leaving it so quiet that Killua could hear his own panic, his own fear. That, that pile of scrap had begun his name, hadn’t it? It unmistakably had, there was no doubt. His knees wobbled and weakened, legs pushing his body back against the wall of the cave, before collapsing altogether, bringing the rest of his shaking self to the floor. Little gasps and squeals escaped his throat, terrified squabbles of nails scratching iron sheet in unconscious attempt to push him away from the object of horror. How had it even known? Was it advanced enough to read minds? To pull information out of nowhere and apply it to any situation possible? He was in no state of mind to even come up with an educated guess. All he knew of was that this thing had to go, and soon. So, with all the courage he could muster, he walked over towards it, practically shaking in his shoes, put his mind on autopilot, and hoisted the figure onto his back. With the instinct of leaving no evidence embedded into his subconscious, he shoved the discarded robotic arm into his pack, stirred up the dust to cover wherever the body and his footsteps had laid, and scrambled off, looking for some place to destroy the rusty monster.
He had sprinted half the diameter of the forest, with the motionless body on his back, when the inevitable chose to come about. As he maneuvered around and over whatever was in his path, out of nowhere, or what was later revealed to be an overhanging branch, a small, pointed obscurity struck itself on the tips of Killua’s running feet, through his shoes, just barely skimming the flesh of his toes, only to be followed by the graceful and deadly descent of a familiar blur, black waterfalls of hair tied back in a tail, leaving no mask to his identity. Its feet touched upon the forest floor with intense agility, the only sign of it not floating being the crisp, though nearly silent, crunch of leaves under its shoes. It slowly straightened itself, bringing its face into view to drive dark pupil deep into his eyes, their bleak and static emotion seeming to eradicate all the warmness of light and air from anywhere in the area. They blinked, focused on what was in front of them, then curtained by recognition, the rest of the body relaxing at the sight. The being stepped forward.
“Oh, Kil, I was just heading back to see you,” It spoke with no sentiment, no rise or fall in its voice to show it. With utmost poise it circled around the white haired boy’s proximity, close enough to ensure his entrapment, but far enough to give some personal leeway. “But you’ve come to me instead, hm? What are you doing in the middle of the forest? Did you start without me?”
Killua was stock still, the tenseness pinpricking its way up his spine. His mouth moved, an excuse forming on his lips, before the pressure on his back lifted until nonexistent.
His neck quickly whirled his head to face where his captive recently lay, only to find nothing but the back of his hoodie, damp with sweat and oil spots. He spun, head and neck still frozen stiff into position, looking for what he had carried no less than a second ago. His eyes darted everywhere but in front of him, unwilling to see what he concluded to be where it had gone. With nowhere else to look, he forced himself to look ahead. And there it was, held up by the one arm it had left, in the grasp of the one he feared most.
“Illumi!-”
“And what, may I ask, is this pile of garbage you were holding on to?” His head cocked to the side in a mechanical quickness, widened eyes staring into the other’s very core, pushing and pulling his emotions with no intent of letting go, rooting in the chills of submission and drying Killua’s throat. “Tell me now, Killua.”
The words were choking him. His own terror and doubt kept the explanation in a endless hover in the short space that was his neck, and the endless spiel of his mind’s instinct that was telling the boy to run, flee, get the hell away from this man who he could not dream of beating, ironically kept his feet cemented to where he was.
Unimpressed by the lack of an answer, the taller let out a sigh, “No response, huh? I thought we had raised you better, Kil.” He pulled the bot’s face closer to his. “What a rather ugly thing, it is. A broken toy left behind once the owner had found something new? Possibly.” he murmured, careful to speak loud enough to influence his brother of what his capture was. He shook the arm holding it off the ground, listened to it rattle with loose screws and broken parts held internally, examined its torn skin, watched powdery rust escape from any open port it found. “Nothing short of a piece of garbage.”
The boy still stood motionless, watching Illumi poke and prod, spill insults from his mouth, critique what had been off his back just prior. Every touch of finger to metal sent shivers over his skin, and he found himself wishing for the man to just drop it already, just let him escape with it in his arms. The yearning possessiveness baffled him, he had been panic-stricken by the thing not even thirty minutes ago, how could he be feeling as if it needed his protection? His focus re-affixed itself to his brother, still negatively scrutinizing every defect, every detail, of his finding.
Having Killua’s attention back on him, Illumi delivered the final blow. “I guess I’ll have to destroy it, can’t have your attention on something other than your jo-”
The sentence cut, his face twisting with uncommon emotion, uncommon confusion, before snapping up to look where hand connected with artificial wrist.
Killua’s eyes followed, before he witnessed what had cut his brother off-guard.
A twitch. A flick of the wrist, a slight wiggle of the fingers.
It was awake.
And, as if to punctuate the fact, the head wobbled, creaked, and straightened itself to point directly in the direction of Illumi’s. It halted, its audience waiting in bated breath of what would happen, then let the lid of the shielded eye carefully retract itself into the skull, revealing it to be fully active and in motion. It rolled for a moment, taking in its surroundings, before shifting to look into his face. Despite the grown man’s shock, it quickly arranged its face into a wide, open mouthed smile (made to overcome the broken hanging jaw it harbored) and let out a ear splitting shriek of what was supposedly an excitement-filled greeting.
It was dropped within the next second, full of needles and pins within the next minute, stripped of limbs the following, decapitated, and left behind even after then.
Killua was still where he stood before, abandoned by his brother in the spur of the moment, head spinning. His gaze dropped to the impaled objects before him. There was no way, there was no chance, no minuscule prospect that it was ever going to be operative in the sense it was again, he knew. But, just laying there, head off and body limp, he could not, no matter how much he willed himself to, allow it to be abandoned in the leaves.
So, with a new found fearless attitude, (what was dead could not hurt him, he supposed he believed) he scooped it up and took it with him, and convinced himself it was not a deadly souvenir, but something else entirely, that he saw it as a project, a mission, a willing to devote his time into discovering what the thing could actually be.