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On October twelfth of my twenty-fourth year, I scheduled my death for January.
For three-and-a-half months, every day was the same to me: wake up, think about my death. Shower, think about my death. Paint my skin, teardrop, star, death. Exercise, meditate, drink— death. Sometimes I’d go to shows, or dance clubs; I’d talk to strangers, I’d take them home. But all the time, my mind was morbid. I died every day in my imagination, and each time, the image became more precise. And while I died, I became more and more like a moth trapped in a cellar — weakening, chasing the light. I have no idea how many memories my aura ate during that time, and I didn’t care. I was swaying beyond a veil, stuck in the fantasy that would unfold and end me.
It started with something insignificant: I didn’t feel it when the weather went cold.
On October twelfth, I was walking through the park just past my apartment, on my way to pick up groceries, as I did every Sunday. The air had taken on a smoky aroma, characteristic of early winter, but I don’t think I noticed that either. Perhaps I would have gone on for weeks more, dressing in summer clothes (that day, I believe I was wearing a t-shirt and yellow slacks), but a child ran out in front of me and I accidentally walked into him, knocked him down. When I saw the child lying there, in the split second before he started wailing, I noticed that his breath was coming out in clouds.
Huh, I thought, as I stepped over him. It has gotten cold.
And even though I was at the top of my physical condition, in the finest clothes and smoothest skin I’d ever worn, the realization was like a punch to the gut that I wouldn’t recover from. With it came an avalanche of reality that made the entire cheerful park around me into a graveyard. My fingers and my chest and my face suddenly burned with cold. I slumped over a bench, and her words rang in my head:
“I am not interested in broken things.”
The words are not my mother’s, no, nor my first love’s, but the matron’s, who took me in after my parents died. And though I don’t remember much from my childhood, when I remembered these words, it was like she had appeared to tower over me in the park.
I mean it: I don’t remember much. The matron was probably one of the most influential people in my young life, but I don’t even recall meeting her. For me, it goes: sitting on a dirty carpet, twisting the legs off toys, fiddling with a hole in my sleeve as the fourth grade dean scolds me for putting gum in my classmate’s hair, and then — I'm turning ten, and I've got dead parents, and I'm thirteen playing chess over a massive cherrywood desk, with a massive woman watching my every move. I could’ve lived a thousand horrors between these events. Well— I must have seen my parents’ bodies, and I’m sure that affected me, or, at least, how the matron received me. But, what matters is: I was the matron’s favorite, so she taught me chess in her office.
It also matters that the matron ran a state institution for orphaned boys in some North Yorbian city. I only know that now; as a child, I probably believed I was living a castle. My awe is gauze over footsteps echoing in the halls and the squeak of chalk over the deep green boards. We even had a pool, which I can remember clearly because for the longest time, though I was a natural athlete, I couldn’t swim. Aside from those sensory moments, which bloom from a boyhood of poverty, the first few years at the institution run like a looped montage: my exposed ribs, the day I could no longer see them; kicked in the head on the soccer field; the cherrywood desk, and the chessboard.
(Knowing myself now, there was probably some violence too — well, I know there was. But I’m getting ahead of myself.)
Mostly, however, I’m sitting in the matron’s office, playing chess at her desk. This part of the loop goes a little deeper, into scenes: My racing heart stuffed in my throat, my slick palms, the crevice between my brows, the smile stuck on my face. I’m happy, I think? Sneaking around the matron, setting traps and laying in them— I never won. I fooled her though, a few times, and she would smile knowingly as I flushed with triumph. “You’re bright,” she would say. “Look at me.”
And I would look at her.
“Don’t you feel bored when you play with your friends?”
She asked me this many times. And finally, I confessed, and the words became more true than when they lived only in my mind.
My lip was split that day; my mouth tasted like iron, and there was dried blood still stuck under my ear. I don’t know what from.
“Yes, I’m bored. I hate the other boys.” My fingers hesitated over a pawn, and my lips trembled. The matron’s fuse for insolence was short, but she only gave a low chuckle.
“Tell me,” she said. “How would you feel if you were to win this game?”
I pretended to be lost in the formation on the board. But, I knew exactly how I’d feel. My lip started bleeding anew and I sucked on it.
“I wouldn’t play with you anymore,” I said, smoothing my tongue over my teeth and taking a rook.
“And why’s that?” She moved a knight. “Check.”
I examined the board, a smile stretching across my face. She’s going to win, but she can't win this way again. “Because,” I said. “Because…”
Because once I beat you, you’re broken.
After I realized this, my life changed. The matron culled my feelings, I’m sure— I have several disjointed memories of her asking me to evaluate my classmates’ performances on various tasks: mathematics, essays, running. I recall lying awake one night wondering if I’d ever be broken. I thought, at least, it was years away— that it would only happen if I reached a peak, if I experienced everything I wanted to experience.
When I discovered Nen, I thought to stave it off even longer by exchanging Hatsu for memories. I figured that the less tethers I had, the freer I’d be, the newer each day would feel. But the aura eats randomly. I can’t control what I lose, and it seemed, in that moment at the park, that the technique was too precise: I’d lost too much variety, gained too much of the same.
My life had progressed rapidly. The persona I’d developed, called Hisoka Morow, was my magnum opus: a monster with a painted face, crouching in the shadows somewhere between whimsy and menace. He had a single story from an impoverished past, which he told to anyone who would listen —
“My Hatsu is Bungee Gum,” I would say in a melodramatic tone. “I named it after my favorite candy as a child, which I would chew well past the flavor…” So fitting, I would think. To make up a memory for the aura which ate all of mine.
Of course, most who got to hear the strange tale did not live long enough to hear me repeat it.
These days, I’m a fighter by trade, and by October, everyone I talked to was someone who had challenged me in battle. It was as easy for me to kill as it was to discard broken toys, as easy as knocking over an enemy queen in chess. And it wasn’t that I couldn’t remember the killings — though I’m sure there are some that evade me, if I tried I could feel the way life leaves a body many times over. But the feeling had grown dull. Indulging my desires had become a habit, and just like the change of seasons, they had passed me by.
My eyes were still as I thought through everything, fixed on a crack in the sidewalk. How many have I killed this year? I rubbed the heels of my palms into my eye sockets. Five? Ten?
“...once something’s broken, it cannot be fixed.” The end of a sentence, the last memory I have of the matron. She was shaking her head at me, ripping a page off a clipboard. My hands shake in the memory, even though I’m folded in half and gripping my knees as hard as I can.
How many have I killed? Maybe if I can remember the first —
My last year at the matron’s, the fiftieth boy arrived at the institution: he had brown hair and olive skin, a physique that rippled like sunlight over waves. A little bit older than me, a younger mind, and a very good swimmer. And because of him, I finally got to go to the pool. For a summer, he taught me how to glide through the water with ease.
“You’re a natural,” he’d say. The words made my heart burn, then. Sometimes, after we swam, we’d climb up on the roof and watch the sunset. I only have one memory left of this, but it feels as though it happened many times.
But the matron didn’t like my friend. “You can’t let him beat you in something,” she told me. She was right, of course.
And in late August of that year, we raced, and I won. I’d practically been foaming at the mouth, practicing mornings and nights, adjusting my diet, studying videotapes of professionals. The matron said my progress was prodigious. I can still feel the wet walls when my fingers — painted blue, I remember — brushed them, when I burst from the water filled with triumph to see my friend, rising up a second after me. I can see his rueful smile.
The breath leaves my lungs.
“You finally beat me,” he sinks down and blows bubbles from his nose.
I’m filled with confusion. “How do you feel?” I’m angry.
“I guess you’re just faster than me,” he mumbles, water streaming from his lip — a sight I would’ve been all over just days before. But now, I’m looking at him, and his gleaming skin is dull. His eyes are dead; his hair has lost its sheen. I’m roiling, and he’s hideous, more useless than a wingless bird.
I’d realized: there was only one thing left for him—
Oh yes, I thought, looking up from my hands. But the memory stopped there. The park was still gray. I sat still, clutching my heart, trying to force it back into my mind — his blood? Was there blood? Did he thrash beneath me? Did I drown him ? He died, I know, I killed him, I know, I think — Surely, I did. The sureness of the memory used to inspire me, fill me with warmth and flush, but then, at the park, it seemed I was yearning for something that did not exist.
Is this why I’m broken? I thought. Tears didn’t fall from my eyes, but I wanted them to.
Maybe the matron was wrong, I thought. Maybe this is just a moment I’ve experienced countless times before. Maybe my aura will eat it, and I’ll wake up tomorrow free and brand new.
But that didn’t happen. And it didn’t happen, and it didn’t happen, and it didn’t happen. The world went grayer and grayer around me. My kills during that time became more gratuitous, but even when I had intestines in my fingers, and a roaring crowd screaming my name, in this new skin, in this beautiful body, I felt nothing. There was only one thing left for me.
My death was scheduled for January eighth. I did not know anything about the opponent who would kill me besides his name, but it did not matter. Planning it at the last minute would be my final thrill; I wanted to die by a hair’s breadth, a tiny slip-up. I wanted to die slowly, I wanted to die in a spray of blood. I wanted to shock the audience, I wanted to lay still and cold. Is he sleeping? Is he— Oh. It did not matter. The more options before me, the better I felt. The plan, my natural end, was the only thing that got me out of bed.
On December eighteenth, I was considering a dismemberment. This put color in my cheeks as I sat in my usual seat at my usual bar, sipping a pink cocktail from a martini glass and chatting to a woman about some restaurant that had just opened up near the Arena. The woman thought I was coming onto her, I could tell by the way her eyes darted from my eyes to my lips to my crotch. She thought I was drunk and flushed and leaning in to take her home. She was confused, a bit, by my makeup, but my sharp jaw and sharp teeth made up for it, I suppose. Perhaps I would’ve taken her home if it hadn’t been for what happened next.
A tap on my shoulder. A voice that sounded like it belonged in a Sci-Fi horror. “You’re in my spot.”
Huh? I thought. But I’ve been sitting here every day for — As I looked around I realized I didn’t even know where I was. In my daily haze, I’d wandered into an entirely unfamiliar part of town. I registered for the first time that the music was crashing cymbals, that my forearm was stuck to the bar, and that the woman seated next to me was covered in tattoos. I smiled and then turned to look up at a man with a shock of purple hair and an angular face full of large, round piercings. Some of the jewelry even protruded from his half-bald head.
“You’re in my spot,” he said again, capturing me in a beady, red gaze. He was looking at me the way a cat might examine a fat salmon, the corner of his mouth pulled into a smirk. The tops of his teeth were white, out of place among his grotesque features. What is he?
Between us there was a thick silence. I found myself imagining him yanking a barbell from his lip and forcing my throat open with it. The thought felt oddly familiar, like I’d seen it happen before, and it made my heart jump. A lump formed in my throat. That’s new.
“Why is this your seat?” the woman next to me interrupted, swiveling and placing a possessive hand on my knee. I nudged her off.
“What happens if I don’t move?” I asked, leaning back and balancing my elbows on the bar, spreading my legs. My heart was a rabbit in my chest.
The man’s eyes narrowed and his irises flared as he considered my question. I felt my smile widen. Around us, the raucous bar had fallen silent; someone had even stopped the music. All eyes rested on us.
“It’s my seat,” he said slowly. “I always sit here.”
“Want to share?” I said, patting my knee and watching the shapes that the overhead lights made on the bulbs of his jewelry. I don’t know why I said it.
His chest jumped with what could’ve been a laugh, and he stepped closer, seeming to mull over his answer. My eyes wandered over him;, the more I looked, the more excited I became. He was wearing a dark green, sleeveless mock neck with round studs around the collar; it clung, leaving a strip of exposed skin above his low-slung belt, which glinted with the same round adornments. Though his arms had an athletic bulk, his waist was narrow, like a woman’s. I wanted to put my hands on it; I wanted to pull him close and beg him to kill me. Something — a Nen signature perhaps, the heavy musk of bloodlust — told me he would do it without hesitating, without even breaking a sweat.
But there was also an innocence about him that made my mouth whet. He fiddled with a bead on his high collar; I imagined that perhaps he was wondering if it would be worth it to kill me for the seat. After a while, he sighed and took the open stool to my right. I swiveled to face the bar; the barman had placed a highball of whiskey neat and a bowl of olives at his elbow. Fingering the rim of his glass, the man chuckled to himself, jaw clicking mechanically.
“What?” I asked, turning my head. Behind me, I heard the woman scoff and get up. The man’s eyes followed her warily before returning to mine.
“Why are you dressed like a children’s toy?” he asked, eyes widening to the extent they could under his heavy lids.
“To disarm,” I answered, too quickly. “I’m banned from most bars in the city.” I slowed my tone, sipped my drink and plucked one of the olives from his bowl.
He frowned, but didn’t make a move to stop me. “Do you live here?” I asked, looking at him as I sucked the salty flesh off the pit.
“No,” he answered, taking an olive for himself and turning it over in his hand. “I come to the city for work.”
“Mm, what do you do?”
As soon as I asked, he broke the olive pit in his teeth with a sickening crack and craned his neck to look over my head, fingers at his collar. “One moment,” he replied absently, sliding from his seat and into the crowd.
I watched him for as long as I could see the glint of the bulbs around his cranium: the dance floor behind us was deceptively large, chalky with cigarette smoke. When the man was still close, he moved with jaunty steps, like a marionette, but as he faded to black, I saw his gait go slippery, and then he was gone.
Ah, I thought, at that. I forgot to think about my death.
That night and several nights after, I had the same dream, which continued to interrupt my morbid fantasies.
In the dream, I’m smaller, on a rooftop that smells of chlorine. I’m looking out at a searing sunset over a city skyline. Behind me, children splash and shriek with joy. I feel crushed by a nameless feeling, and gentle fingers tap my back. I sigh, and turn to see a flash of brown hair, olive skin, and a sluice of hot liquid splatters onto my face. I gasp and scramble backward, hit the railing, my limbs go out everywhere, and all I can see are a pair of huge, black eyes, and the golden glint of a roundhead needle.
Each time I woke up from this, I ached for a split second before tumbling forward into a memory of the matron on that final day: looking at me with cold disdain as she signed something on a clipboard. The memory felt important. Each time, I would try to grab it in my hands, to hold it still in my mind, but each time, it would go up in smoke, and I’d be left tangled in my sheets, feeling lost like a child.
What’s happening to me? I would think. And then, I would glance at the calendar on my wall and count the days until January eighth.
On January sixth, I managed to wander to the same bar, and I saw the man again. The familiarity was a shock to me in my gray world. I noticed him first by the golden bulbs protruding from his skin, and then, I got caught again in the red stare.
I remember, I thought, smiling. He turned, and we sat together at the bar. I noticed that he had blood beneath his fingernails, and when he saw me looking he only splayed his fingers out wider. My stomach churned.
We drank until the small hours that night, two nights before my scheduled death. He was blacked out by the end, slurring his words, and he clapped me on the shoulder and stared into my eyes. “My name’s Gittarackur,” he said, and then he frowned, and twisted one of the studs on his chin. I watched it twist between his fingers, and it could have been the drink, but I swore his skin twisted with it. “Well…” Gittarackur said, grinning. “That’sss…. That’s noooot…. Hmmmmm….”
I dug my nails into my thigh watching his skin warp, and I remember it hurt. I drew blood.
“Dooo… you know the name… Zol-dyck?” Gittarackur rolled the el, popped the kay. He stopped twisting the stud, and his skin tightened up again.
I squinted at the white of his teeth. “No,” I replied. I hadn’t.
There was a long pause, and Gittarackur seemed to forget what he’d been saying. He grinned and plucked my hand off my knee. “Mmm… you cut your leg....” He bent down and ran his tongue over the beads of blood and rolled his eyes up to look at me, tongue still stuck out of his mouth. Later, I would find it odd that his tongue wasn’t pierced like the rest of him, but at that moment, I was gripping the wood of the bar staring at his tongue, his eyes, his lips as they pulled into a smile, and trying to keep myself from vomiting,
“What’s…. your name….?” Gittarackur asked, sucking his tongue back into his mouth.
“Hisoka,” I told him, shivering. “Morow.”
“Mm,” Gittarackur said, turning his head to rest his cheek on my knee. “Hiss-oooh-kah, I think I’d enjoy killing you…”
“Wh—” my voice broke. “When… are you in the city next?”
Gittarackur shifted, nuzzling my thigh. “I think…. I thiiiiink…. It should be…. February….”
At that, I did vomit. And we were kicked out of the bar. And I walked Gittarackur back to a hotel in the city center, where he was staying in a penthouse suite under the name Zoldyck. When he was safely in his elevator, repeating his room number to himself, I took a seat in the lobby and thought about how Gittarackur had hesitated after telling me his name, how his skin had twisted under his piercing, which looked so like the needles in my dreams.
I can’t die without knowing what he really is.
So, January eighth, instead of being flayed open or dropped in front of a crowd, I was watching Gittarackur kick the glass out of an apartment window and guns out of six mens’ hands, laughing as he tore them apart. He did it without even releasing his aura. My eyes were wide as I watched, imagining how it would feel to have him do the same to me.
I’d want him to do it more slowly, I thought. Yes, looking into my eyes… letting me hold onto his waist and…
The next morning, when I saw Gittarackur sit down at an empty cafe and slide an envelope across his table to a man in a brown tweed suit in exchange for a suitcase at his feet, it was easy enough to know what should come next. When I saw him again that night, he seemed to have no memory of walking home with me. And I found myself worrying — what if I forget Gittarackur?
I told myself I’d give it a few months to make sure that I wouldn’t forget. During that time, I tried to memorize every detail: every jewelry placement, every outfit he wore, everything he told me about his life. Occasionally, I would say things about myself, lies that could’ve been true, just to see how he would respond. I got very little useful information. He liked loud music, I knew, but not live shows, which struck me as odd at the time. Once he mentioned that his mother grew up in Meteor City. I stopped training my Hatsu when I realized I couldn’t be sure I was recalling everything. Straight teeth — were they always straight? High, mechanical voice that sent goosebumps down my arms — did it always do that? Long, purple nails. Those are new. Aren’t they?
But no matter what changed, or what I misremembered, I felt relief when I saw him, every few weeks, in the same seat, at the same bar. Well — occasionally, he would stand against a back wall and I’d have to plunge into the crowd to find him, but I always did. Sometimes, he’d get too drunk and I’d carry him to a booth and he’d sleep in my lap, and I would hum, running my fingers along the edges of his piercings, imagining myself bleeding out underneath him, or suffocating with his hands around my throat.
Most of the time, he slept fitfully, waking up every time I moved— likely a side effect of his profession. But the most recent time, he was out like a light, and I was strung up, hands hovering over his sleeping face. What a miserable assassin, I thought to myself, smiling. I could kill him like this.
I wonder what it would feel like. I imagined the fight — by then I’d seen Gittarackur fight many times before. He always killed intimately, in his targets’ faces; he always smiled. His body moved like water despite its bulk. I could move like that too; I would move against him, smile into his teeth. We’d bite, push and pull, get sweaty as we wore each other down. What would his face look like as he died? It seemed so uncanny, I almost laughed. Since I’d forgone strengthening my Hatsu, I’d dedicated more time to training my body, but I’d still be hard pressed to match him. I would almost have to take him by surprise or catch him on an off day.
But where would be the fun in that? I thought, absentmindedly twisting one of the studs near Gittarackur’s left eye. Perhaps I should stick around—
“Ah!” Gittarackur jumped and his eyes shot open; for a split second, his left iris was ink-black and blown wide. I gasped through my nose, watching it shrink back to its familiar red.
Gittarackur smiled when he saw my face. “I fell asleep, Hisoka,” he breathed, hanging on to the final syllable like a song.
“Yeah,” I said.
He reached up and ran a sharp nail down my cheek. My chest felt like it was burning. “What are you?” I whispered.
Gittarackur made an unintelligible sound, and shifted, brows knitting together as if he were in pain. I leaned down to hear, and made out the word ‘killed’ and ‘accident,’ before he was pushing me away and sitting up, rubbing his eyes, and sighing. “I’m tired,” he said.
On my way back that night, I shivered in the chilly air, and realized it had been a year since I’d vowed to die. The city lights were bright in my eyes, neon signs and street lights flashing purples and reds over the street, which was wet with rain. As I passed through the park in front of my apartment, I noticed a few late blooms peeking from the leaves, gathered under a thin layer of frost.
The next evening, I persuaded one of the trainers from Heavens Arena to put a hit out on me. Later, she told me that Gittarackur had gone pale when she’d given him my name.