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Last time Leorio absentmindedly asked for more coffee, Nanika made a full steaming Moka pot appear on his stove. According to Killua, at the same time an entire small galaxy died somewhere in the great cold distance of the universe—the causal relation is still to be proven, but today Leorio doesn’t feel like shouldering the destiny of entire alien civilizations, not even for his much-needed fix of caffeine. After all, this won’t be the first time he survives a Kurapika-related headache without the assistance of his favorite stimulating drink.
He’s made plain old tea instead, enough for himself, Kurapika, and the two-headed, very pregnant alien queen that’s sitting on the couch beside him.
Kurapika has also nestled a very mysterious cylindrical box right at his side. It’s wrapped inside a flowery pillowcase and isn’t much bigger than a rice cooker.
Leorio has consciously chosen to ignore it for the sake of his sanity: knowing Kurapika, it’s probably a deadly weapon, and Leorio will deal with it when it shows signs of exploding in his face. One just has to be patient with these things and lets the impending disaster run its course like the stomach flu.
“So, your Majesty, is the baby going to have two heads, too?”
Your Majesty is actually called Oito, and she’s sitting orderly on the couch, hands on her giant belly.
“If she takes after me. I’d really like for her to not take after her father.”
Must be a touchy topic, so Leorio burns his tongue with his tea and waits for Kurapika to make things even more awkward—he never disappoints.
“Leorio is very fond of this Brownian motion producer concoction. It’s typical of this planet.”
“It’s pretty comforting,” Oito says, polite.
“It’s called tea—Kurapika, can I help you?”
Killua is usually the one who doesn’t hold any qualms about rummaging around Leorio’s house without asking for permission; Kurapika tends to be more courteous, sometimes even too much—not today, apparently. He’s abandoned his tea, and his box, to go stick his head inside the fridge in a clatter of half-empty Tupperwares that haunt Leorio’s life as a very single, very busy resident doctor.
“Any chance you’re keeping a Bambleweeny submeson brain laying around somewhere?”
Leorio frowns at Kurapika’s butt, which he wasn’t looking at because he’s actually annoyed, not smitten.
“If that isn’t a fancy way to call olives like last time, I’ll have to say no.”
The news sends Kurapika into brooding despair. A brooding Kurapika is a terrible creature to be around, so Leorio leaves him to mumble something absolutely alarming about electromagnetic fields and concerted detonations.
Leorio has just paid his rent and isn’t ready to leave this apartment, in one piece or otherwise.
Since reasoning with Kurapika about this kind of earthling concern usually just earns him a patronizing glance and a tension headache, Leorio decides to smile at Oito and help her leave the room to recline more comfortably in his bed.
He owns the exact amount of three pillows, one of which is older than he is. Oito accepts the arrangement like she’s been offered a throne; Leorio is starting to like her a lot.
“How much ‘till you’re due?”
She discharged her pretty complicated kimono-robe-thingy to change into Leorio’s bathrobe. It’s big enough to fit her prominent belly, and she pats it with a fondness that must be somewhat universal, much like her terrified expression.
“Oh, almost due. First one.”
Figured. Leorio isn’t an obstetrician: of course he would end up having to help out an alien primigravida right after his second night shift in a row. If he survives until tomorrow, he’s going to be so out of it he’ll end up intubating a patient with a multicolor pen. Then Cheadle will rightfully report him to the authorities for attempted murder and maybe while in jail he’ll finally find time to sleep without interruption from outer space creatures.
“I’m really sorry about imposing.”
Leorio gapes like a dumbass; the sunrise is starting to spread out of the window, soft tendrils of pink over the abandoned construction site and the parking lot.
“It’s okay, really. The couch is actually extremely comfortable, and since Kurapika hasn’t slept since the day he was born, I’ll have plenty of space for myself. Say, how come you know Kurapika?”
Her eyes light up.
“Oh, I hired him to protect us—he has a bit of a reputation.”
“A bad one?”
“I need protection from bad people.”
Makes sense. Leorio’s headache is growing bigger by the minute.
He fusses a bit with his drawers, searching for clean clothes.
“Well, you’re safe here. As one of my most insufferable friends likes to say, Earth is basically a pimple on the left ass cheek of the galaxy. No one really comes here if they don’t have a very good reason.”
This seems to put her both at ease and worry her even more; since she has double the faces to make expressions, it’s actually difficult to gauge.
“Why the left one, though?”
Leorio shrugs and smiles at her furrowed brows. When he asked Killua, he just laughed at him and kept on munching on his KitKat.
He leaves the door slightly ajar and walks back to the living room with a big, wide yawn. Kurapika has set the cylindrical box between the armrest and a pillow like he’s afraid it might feel uncomfortable.
Leorio asks if he’s planning to sleep with it and receives a flaming red-hot glare of doom.
“Just kidding, Jesus. Here, maybe if you get out of your stuffy clothes you’ll be able to relax for five minutes.”
Kurapika blinks at the heap of pink-ish cloth, suspicioun flooding out of him in thick waves. He’s still wearing one of his Men In Black suits, just more crumpled than usual. Leorio hasn’t asked why space-people seem to appreciate Western formal wear instead of more suitable Star Trek pajamas.
“These aren’t your clothes,” Kurapika says, unfolding the pink scrubs and sizing them up with a critical eye.
“I grabbed some smaller scrubs from the hospital—what’s with the face! You’re always crashing here! You can ignore it if you don’t like it, I was just trying to be—”
“Kind.” It comes out soft between clipped lips. “I know. I am grateful for your hospitality. I was running out of options.” He side-eyes the bedroom; Oito’s belly is so big they can see a slice of it from the living room.
Leorio needs another tea; and maybe a tranquilizer, as well, to inject into Kurapika’s neck as you're supposed to do with a very distressed horse. He crosses his arms instead.
“So. What’s the deal this time? Interplanetary accident? Do you have to bury someone again? Zepile still hasn’t let me live down that story with the big gorilla guy and the shovel—”
“I could have easily taken care of the body myself, but you insisted.”
Why is he even trying? Leorio plops himself on one side of the couch, yawning. And waiting.
Kurapika deadpans at him, scrubs still folded in his lap.
“She’s the eighth wife of Emperor Nasubi Hui Guo Rou, ruler of Kakin.”
Leorio wasn’t especially good at geography when he was at school, and it was just Earth stuff.
“Would that be, like, a continent, a planet…”
“A group of planets. It’s a very big empire.”
Leorio presses the bridge of his nose hard between his fingers, glasses falling low on the tip.
“Don’t make that face, that’s actually the reasonable part. The unreasonable part is that the Emperor decreed for his thirteen—well, almost fourteen children, to fight each other to death to decide who’s going to be his heir.”
“Maybe this is stupidly ethnocentric of me, especially coming from a blue pimple at the furthest end of this galaxy, but it sounds stupidly brutal.” He frowns back toward the bedroom; Oito must be asleep already, her belly rising and falling softly. “So what, they’re going to battle-royale it out with a pregnant woman?”
Kurapika starts unbuttoning his jacket, expression dark.
“Tserriednich Hui Guo Rou, the fourth child, has already battle-royale it out with adults and children alike. He killed everybody else, at least that I know of. He’s dangerous.”
“More dangerous than you?” Leorio asks, and the silence that follows chills his bones. “Great. Just great. Do we call Gon and Killua? They could—”
“I don’t want to drag them into this mess. No, I—it’s okay. I have something he wants back.” Mysterious cylindrical object intensifies: it almost feels like it’s watching them, but that might be the exhaustion from waking up so early. Kurapika, too, looks completely out of it, eyes unfocused for a long second.
“Oito isn’t interested in being queen. She just wants for Woble to come out of this mess unscathed.”
“Woble, huh?”
There’s a small smile on Kurapika’s face. It’s a sight so rare Leorio internally freaks out for the biggest part of one minute until of course Kurapika blinks and diverts his gaze, self-aware and blushing. Leorio clears his throat.
“Okay, well. He won’t come here, right? The evil step-brother.”
Kurapika shakes his head.
“That was the idea—I covered our tracks as best as I could. He’s resourceful, but I’m resourceful, too… It’s going to be fine. Now turn around, I’m going to change.”
“Like I haven’t seen you naked before—for medical reasons! Medical!” he yelps, but Nanika’s voice is already asking, curious, about this weird body-equipped people habit. Kurapika makes a point of throwing his shirt on Leorio’s face, even if he had already closed his eyes.
He’s pretty sure Kurapika was blushing, but he doesn’t point it out because, despite the struggles, he actually likes being alive.
*
Leorio’s first encounter with space oddities happened on a Tuesday night, notably the most useless day of the week, and therefore the most spiteful.
He remembers falling asleep in his bed with an anatomic pathology manual weighing on his stomach, and he decided to attribute to it the first twelve seconds of what he readily assumed was a nightmare.
Instead, he was very much awake and very much strapped on a metal table, a collection of all the scariest, sharpest scalpels and pointy, prodding tools looming from above.
From the uncomfortable position of a frog ready to be dissected, Leorio could see a magenta-eyed girl spit a bunch of glinting thread from her very vertical mouth, mold it into a sticky clump and shove it inside his mouth.
That was disgusting, but also effective, since it calmed the screaming down to a soft squeal. Nice, considering that Leorio’s throat was starting to burn from the exertion.
Apart from the spider-girl, the room was filled with the lively teenage-actor voice coming from a sci-fi contraption reminiscent of a Dalek and a McDonald’s kiosk.
Leorio couldn’t understand a single word, but in all likelihood the two were discussing all the ways they’d like to cut Leorio up like a piece of dry-cured ham.
From that point on, Leorio wasn’t mentally present enough to actually recall the correct sequence of events.
At some point he might have closed his eyes and started praying, which would have made his grandma real happy; she would have been less happy about him thrashing around stark naked and wielding some furry animal that looked a lot like Cousin Itt from the Addams Family.
He remembers using it to knock out the McDonald’s kiosk before it tried to run him over with its caterpillar track.
That happened after the red-eyed guy had barged in and started to thrash the spider-girl with telekinetic superpowers that blazed in flaming red flares from around his body.
Never once, in his twenty-three years of looking like at least a thirty-five-year-old Italian mafia boss, had Leorio been picked up bridal style and carried out of peril by a brave, violent, hot guy in a suit.
“Are you going to cancel my memory like in MIB?” he asked as son as they had shoved themselves inside a tall, blank room that looked like a multiple shower unit with wiring hanging from the ceiling.
He didn’t expect for the guy to actually understand him; sometimes, Leorio talked aloud for comfort, and he sure needed some. But then the guy turned, red eyes wild under a messy fringe of blond hair, and thrust a handful of peanuts in his hand.
Leorio blinked.
The red-eyed guy pointed at his mouth.
“You want me to eat peanuts.”
He wanted him to eat peanuts and also probably to shut his mouth: that was in fact the soundest explanation for the peanuts themselves.
Since evidently Leorio wasn’t the one in charge there, he just munched on peanuts while the Man In Black fumbled with wiring what looked like a giant coffee maker.
The room’s door, which had politely welcomed them inside in a distinct, posh British accent even though Leorio didn’t exactly understand what it said, opened up to reveal a furious spider-girl and a pretty pissed small furry guy that Leorio recognized as the one he used as an impromptu weapon.
“Belgium,” Red-eyed Guy said, and grabbed Leorio’s hand right in time for the whole room to light up blinding green and suck them both inside a bucatini hole.
Choked by the pain of the worst migraine of his life, knees and elbows materialized on the solid ground of a parking lot, Leorio found himself considering that, in fact, the peanuts kinda helped with his nausea.
He blinked away the residual glimmering green light behind his eyelids and touched around his body to be actually sure that he was still there.
Since neither Doctor Who nor UFO unclassified had ever exactly prepared him for an alien encounter, he completely failed to follow the most basic rules for a first alien encounter and cleared his throat to ask “what’s your name?”
The alien blinked at him, face pale and haunted.
“Kurapika,” he said, almost surprised, and it could as well have been a curse, because the next thing he did was fall on top of Leorio, unconscious.
*
After that, Leorio’s routine took what a psychiatrist would call a sharp turn for the worse.
Kurapika woke up, scared the shit out of him by talking like Leorio had always imagined the Kraken would, and then scared him even more by pinning him down and sticking an orange-fish-leech-thing inside his left ear.
“It’s called Babel-fish. It will translate any language—stop fighting back!”
Leorio didn’t stop fighting back—that just wasn’t him. He did treat Kurapika’s black-eye afterward, while Kurapika explained to him that the Universe was supposed to be not only infinite, but way more crowded than Leorio had ever dared to think.
“And the spider-girl?”
“Those were a group of bandits that collect and sell rare items, such as body parts from endangered species. Like humans, for example, so you better stay away from them.”
Leorio choked on his tea.
“Endangered? Last time I checked we were around seven billion people.”
“Yes, and you spend all the time exhausting the limited resources of your small planet instead of figuring out space travel like everybody else. As I said: endangered.”
Well, that was a cheerful thought.
Since then, their relationship didn’t exactly improve—Leorio isn’t sure where he stands, honestly. The only thing he knows: Kurapika keeps coming back with increasingly disconcerting problems to solve, and Leorio likes attending to them a bit too much for his own good. Even when they suck up all his precious sleeping time.
Still—he doesn’t mind sharing the couch with Kurapika: it’s been a while since the last time he stopped by with a head wound and a very worried Melody in tow.
Leorio is both sad and relieved that she isn’t here, since having an empath around means that he gets a comically large amount of gleeful glances every time he dares to ponder about the way the light hit Kurapika’s blond hair, or the nervous tendons in his wrists when he gesticulates, or the way his irises set into undisturbed charcoal when he actually sits down long enough to drink some hot beverage instead of contemplating felonies like a gremlin.
Kurapika’s breathing is a bit ragged as he curls closer to his mysterious box, blanket draped around him.
“More tea?” Nanika’s disembodied voice is coming from the toaster today—Leorio has stopped asking at the fifth very evasive, and a bit murderous, answer from Killua.
“Don’t worry, kiddo. Tell them they can get what they want from the fridge when they wake up, alright?” He’s already putting his shoes on; he looks at Kurapika’s slouched form, the way the bags under his eyes don’t recede in the slightest even while he’s sleeping. He doesn’t look like a match for any kind of murderous interstellar stepbrother, to be honest.
Leorio leans back on the counter, brows furrowed.
“Listen, Nanika—do you know where Killua and Gon are right now?”
“Yes! I can call?” She sounds already a bit too excited.
“Not right now, but—if things go south, it would be great if they aren’t too far away. Kurapika was looking way more worried than usual about this Tserdanovich guy or whatever he’s called.” Tetsworry? If he’s lucky for once, he won’t even have to learn it. “I’m off to work now. You’ll keep an eye on the guests for me, right?”
“I will!”
She’s just too cute. If she ever gets a body, Leorio is going to ruffle her hair so much they’re both going to burst with happiness.
He arrives at work a solid ten minutes late, but his face must tell a tale of its own because Cheadle’s reaction is to push her own coffee in his hand and ask him not to kill anybody.
She does keep throwing him glances as they go for their first round of visits.
“What do you know about delivering babies?” Leorio asks hours later, when they’ve stepped on the elevator to go grab something to eat.
Cheadle sizes him up, inquiring eyebrow raised.
“You want to get into gynecology? I must warn you, reliable sources tell me that after the nine thousandth vagina, you start to get pretty bored.”
Leorio’s brain has a minor collapse.
“What—I—what? It’s not for—I’m bi, by the way.”
Cheadle nods.
“So am I, I was talking about being horny.”
“Forget it, I’m going to look it up in a book.”
The elevator rings and Cheadle sighs.
“Don’t be silly, I’m just teasing you. What’s the matter?”
Ah, yes. Leorio didn’t exactly go as far as to imagine the direction of this conversation. The canteen is crawling with people; Leorio is really in the mood for a very big sandwich.
“Just… a friend of mine. She’s pregnant, and she’s really anxious about the whole, you know, mechanics of it. She asked for advice but I’m no gynecologist, and I thought that maybe if I knew a bit more about it I could reassure her.”
“It’s going to hurt a lot,” Cheadle tells him, straight face and no-nonsense manners just like usual. “Is she going to deliver here?”
“Ah—no, I don’t think so. She’s not from around here. She’s—”
Thank god it’s their turn to get a sandwich and a Coke, because Leorio needs more caffeine. Sleeping on the couch isn’t the best if you’re not as tiny as Kurapika. And Leorio thought they had made some kind of progress in their friendship, but maybe he just hallucinated that they share something more than a weird arrangement in which Kurapika throws punches and Leorio patches him up.
“Is it just that? The pregnant friend?”
Leorio blinks at his turkey sandwich like he’s suddenly found himself with the control stick of a spaceship between his hands. When did they sit down? Gosh, this is bad. He hides a yawn behind his wrist, but Cheadle is still dissecting him with sharp eyes. She sighs.
“You know the rumors—they say you have a very demanding lover who comes as they please.”
“Ah—what?”
“I’m not sure if it’s even remotely true. But you are constantly moping, and when you aren’t moping you’re worrying, and when you aren’t worrying—”
“I don’t—I’m not moping!”
“Then whatever it is you’re doing, stop it. You’re a good doctor, Leorio. I taught you myself,” she adds, quieter, and with a bit of pride that makes Leorio’s bite of turkey suddenly weigh a ton on his tongue. “Whatever it is that’s going on, solve it before it destroys you.”
Leorio swallows the biggest bite; it hurts his throat.
“It’s not that bad, I—it’s just a bit of a complicated situation. If I abandon a friend in trouble, then what kind of person am I? What kind of doctor?”
“Well, the same applies to me, you know?” She takes a long sip of her iced tea and Leorio is floored for a long, confused second. “Take the rest of the day off. On Monday, I’ll have you work like you’ve never worked in your whole miserable life, are we understood?”
Leorio is just gaping at this point, neck crooked as she stands up.
“Yes, ma'am.”
Cheadle smiles, but the way she crumples the napkin is just a bit short of terrifying.
*
The smell of tandoori chicken starts in the middle of the second flight of stairs and Leorio is sure he’s experiencing some rare symptom of a stroke—phantosmia, his medical brain supplies—until he steps on the landing and topples one of old man Netero’s ornamental bonsais to avoid toppling the delivery kid instead.
She looks only moderately impressed while Killua is squinting at his hand and failing at picking up coins with his extremely sharp claws. This probably says more about her usual job conditions than the level of oddity that Killua encapsulates.
Leorio places the bonsai upright and fishes a bill from his pocket.
“Please, keep the change,” he says. He doesn’t add “and don’t report us to law enforcement”, but she seems cool.
“Thanks, man, have a nice… party?” It’s a question aimed at Killua’s fluffy white hair, his slit pupils. “Furries are dope.”
Killua answers with a thumb up before Leorio proceeds to whine something unintelligible. He pushes him back inside with the overwhelming smell of Indian cuisine and groceries.
“You don’t—you can’t—I told you not to—”
“Leorio! Welcome back!”
That should probably be his line. Gon’s hugs are the best, though, even though technically none of the components of his body are supposed to be huggable material.
He frees Leorio’s hands from the groceries and Killua’s from takeaway boxes, all of it while smiling so big that Leorio forgets about scolding him—about what? Ah, yes, the multiple alien inmates that are for sure going to get him evicted one of these days.
The landlord still hasn't evicted old man Netero, though, and he usually walks around naked asking the other tenants if they like to join him for a yoga session. Aliens sound way less troublesome.
Leorio's eyes bounce from Gon’s smile to Killua's head, already stuck inside the bags to search for food.
“What are you two—”
Killua re-emerges with a prize of canned soup; he sniffs at it, eyes squinted.
“Nanika can’t really keep secrets.”
“I can!” she rebuts, indignant, before a low hum buzzes around, making the fan blades swirl. “What’s secret, Killua?”
He opens both palms and Gon giggles.
“It’s because she’s a good girl! She wouldn’t lie.”
They look at each other and nod like very proud parents. Leorio feels entitled, and tired enough, to leave them to their own devices and go padding around the couch instead, one finger wriggling to loosen his necktie.
Kurapika is still solidly asleep amidst the chaos, curled up around his mysterious box of doom. Leorio isn’t as naïve as to not know that’s clearly a Chekhov’s gun ready to blow his head off, but he’s more than willing to ignore it until it explodes.
“How are you feeling, your Majesty?” he asks, stepping inside the bedroom.
“Oito is fine.” She’s propped up on the pillows, both faces looking a bit less pale and a bit more rested. The TV is tuned to an advertising channel that’s trying to convince her of the incredible properties held by an otherwise unassuming lemon squeezer.
Leorio grabs the desk chair and plops himself on it, back popping like that of an old man.
“I hope the kids didn’t scare you. They’re mostly harmless—I guess Gon is. Killua is supposed to be one of the top ten most dangerous creatures of the galaxy, but he’s basically a tamed kitten when Gon’s around.”
“They fed me some kind of sweet concoction,” Oito says, and points at the empty mug on the nightstand. “I think it was from a place called ‘Chocoland’.”
Leorio can easily smell the remnants of hot cocoa. He doesn’t facepalm—he’s pretty sure that trying out alien food while pregnant is inadvisable no matter how many heads you have.
“I wanted you to know that I’m extremely grateful for what you’re doing, and sorry for the inconvenience I’m causing.” Oito looks somewhat regal even while wearing Leorio’s bathrobe, hands intertwined over her giant belly, blanket covering her feet. “Kurapika must trust you immensely. He was absolutely sure you would have helped us without questioning, and now I can see why. You’re a kind person, Leorio.”
Jeez. Getting compliments from space queens is one of the perks of having your apartment turned into an intergalactic outpost for weirdos, probably.
“It’s honestly no trouble—you’ve seen the kind of people that come around here. Killua has a habit of ravaging my fridge when Gon isn’t busy dismantling it because he got curious. You’re the most polite guest I’ve ever had and… wait, you think Kurapika trusts me?”
Oito looks genuinely surprised while all Leorio can feel is a weird tingle on his tongue, like biting into unexpectedly spicy food.
“Well, sure. Besides the fact that he brought me here… I must say I’ve never seen him sleep so peacefully before. Or sleep at all. I just assumed he didn’t need to,” she adds, a worried glance at the back of the couch visible from there. “He’s extremely resourceful, he’s saved us multiple times already.”
He’s also a dumbass, is what Leorio would like to say, but since Oito is technically Kurapika’s employer, he abstains and scratches at the nape of his neck instead.
“So… Kurapika told me you’re actually an empress? That must be quite the story.”
“Not really. I—you have to understand, my family was never wealthy… No, that’s an understatement.” She lets out a pitiful giggle, and diverts both pairs of eyes. “We used to live in poverty, we used to have nothing. I—when you live like that…”
“I understand.” Leorio hears himself talk, taken aback by his own voice. It’s the truth, though, forever imprinted in his choice of cheap suits and the way he still hoards canned soup and instant ramen just in case. “I had to do very odd jobs to pay for my studies—sometimes it’s still difficult to think that, hey, I don’t have to gorge myself because I don’t know when I’ll eat next. I have a fridge, for God’s sake.” He grins and her surprised expression turns into two flashy smiles.
“I’m obsessed with shoes. I used to have my older sister’s, they were so big and they hurt so bad on my feet… so now I’m obsessed with shoes.” She tucked them orderly to the side of the bed in all their floral glory.
“So you ended up marrying an Emperor.”
“Pretty over-the-top, I know.”
They’re both laughing still, a bit more hysterically on Oito’s part, when Killua and Gon barge in carrying take-out boxes and assorted cutlery.
*
At first, Leorio thinks that Oito is fretting because of the extreme spiciness of the tandoori chicken. When she actually yelps in pain, one hand pressed on her side, he smiles like a flight assistant on a crashing plane and starts sweating real hard.
As fast as he’s shepherding Gon and Killua out of the room, he’s already asked Nanika to watch over Oito for any sign of, well, anything, and Gon is searching his directories for any information about delivering Kakinian babies. Ging might be a terrible creator-slash-deadbeat dad, but having a friend who’s also a walking, talking intergalactic encyclopedia comes in handy. Gon is also a very nice, good boy, so he smiles when he offers Leorio to watch all the scary holograms about birth-giving with him.
Killua, however, is just a very sassy younger brother who spits fire gratuitously during a crisis.
“Count me out, giving birth sounds like the worst. On Kukuroo, we just hatch fully formed like normal people—no soft, useless baby nonsense!”
“Wait, so no baby Killua?” Gon looks so personally wounded that Killua steps back on Leorio’s foot.
“Well, yes, but with. Like. Fully functional claws and shit.”
Gon’s eyes light up.
“Oh, cute!”
Cute like a litter of poisonous demonic kittens, sure.
The holograms are more than enough for the Indian food to try and crawl around Leorio’s stomach in a choreography of anxiety; Gon pats him on the shoulder and tells him all the most affirming things about Leorio being such a good doctor even when he has to improvise and does he remember that one time he patched up Ikalgo’s wounds despite Ikalgo being very much a talking octopus with not even a single anatomical feature that humans have, apart from a pretty crass sense of humor?
But patching wounds is patching wounds: something’s broken, Leorio can fix it. Delivering babies, on the other hand… At least the organizing is covered: Nanika prints out the list of useful baby-delivery items without Leorio even asking, like the perfect little alien-entity secretary she is.
So, half an hour later Leorio is walking back to the apartment with: a lot of antiseptic, rubber gloves, maternity pads, fresh fluffy towels, a can of cherry Coke he suspects Killua added for himself, a goniometer, and two kilos of lemons with an electric squeezer attached—“no pre-squeezed lemon juice, Leorio! The lemons must be fresh, it’s really important!” Gon recommended.
“I should have bought the one from the commercial,” he tells himself. He makes a point of ignoring the horse as he searches for his keys with hands full of bags.
There’s a horse, more specifically a horse’s butt, that’s parked between Leorio’s own ancient Fiat Panda and a teeny tiny Smart.
In normal circumstances he’d at least try to ask Zepile about it. He’s probably the culprit anyway: he’s an artist, artists are a weird bunch; on this chaotic timeline he's living in, he opts for smiling vaguely at the unassuming blond guy who’s lying on the wall, smoking. He tilts an eyebrow at him like both Leorio and the horse’s butt are less interesting than the nearby very boring construction site—how were those called, the old men who watch construction sites? The guy isn’t old at all, though; he probably spends most of his time in a gym, too, because he looks ripped. He exhales a twirl of smoke, beatific expression in place.
Must be nice to not have one single care in the world.
Leorio kicks the door open with a bit more violence than usual and goes inside. Kurapika starts stirring when he’s placed all the baby-delivering items inside a basin, near enough to Oito’s sleeping form that it’s within easy reach but won’t induce panic for the future mother.
“Hello, sleepyhead. Indian chicken?”
Kurapika blinks through glued eyelids, a yawn shivering down his shoulders with the hem of the blanket.
“I slept. How much time—”
“Nine hours, twenty minutes,” Nanika says, zealous. “I watch the clock.”
“You’re very good, Nanika. Thanks,” Leorio says, because Kurapika is too busy groaning inside his palms, hair stuck in every direction.
“This is bad, I shouldn’t have—where is Queen Oito?”
“Asleep in my bed. She’s fine,” Leorio adds, and picks up a couple crumpled KitKat wrappers Killua has left around. Darn kid. “Gon and Killua fed her Indian take-out and told me a bit about this crazy gig with the Emperor. She’s a nice person, I get why you want to protect her.”
Kurapika is parsing the information much slower than usual; Leorio is tempted to check his temperature, but he doesn’t want to have another discussion with a Kurapika who’s hell-bent into bullshitting him to believe that it’s normal for his species to have a temperature of thirty-nine degrees Celsius on a daily basis.
“Take-out as in food?” Kurapika blurts out; must have been an enormous effort, because he’s already leaning back on the couch.
“Yes, the food. Killua and Gon ordered it. Nanika, where are those two, by the way?”
Nanika’s voice hums, delighted.
“Alluka!”
So, down in the laundry room—figured. Kurapika’s head jerks uselessly toward the ceiling even if Nanika isn’t there, and his neck snaps.
“Killua and—Killua and Gon are here?”
‘Not happy’ doesn’t even start to cover Kurapika’s expression; Leorio would like to check the calendar to be sure this isn’t in fact a scheduled Armageddon day and Gon and Killua aren’t two horsemen of the Apocalypse.
“Yes, they… Nanika ratted us out, I guess. You know Killua likes to be around just in case anything would happen in close proximity with his sisters.” Because having Kurapika as the only paranoid friend would have made Leorio’s life too relaxing, probably.
Paranoid and unpredictably unstable. Kurapika stands up suddenly, hand searching for his blaster gun.
“If they’re here, it means my force field isn’t working anymore. I shouldn’t have fallen asleep—”
“Your what? Was that why my phone wasn’t working?”
“And that means he can come and get us. I can’t believe—I told you not to call them!”
“I didn’t!” Leorio is pretty sure he’s the one who’s yelling, but he still signs Kurapika to stop yelling, one finger pointing toward the bedroom door.
“What is it?” Oito asks, voice thin and still sleepy.
“Nothing, Oito. Kurapika is just being fussy.”
Kurapika’s eyes flash red. Leorio didn’t think a whisper could be so intrinsically threatening until now.
“I’m not—you have any idea of the danger we’re in? You too, and now Gon and Killua… We have to go. Oito and I—”
“She isn’t going anywhere, Kurapika. That baby is this close to squirting out—Gon made me watch videos. I think I can deliver it if there aren’t real bad complications or anything.” There won’t be. Leorio is going to have to do a very thorough laundry of his shirts: he’s sweating again just at the thought.
Kurapika grabs his tie and gives him a whiplash hard enough to make him see stars and some kind of... maybe romantic tension? No, okay, it’s just pain, and Kurapika is angry.
“The baby is going to be killed as fast as she’s out of her, and probably before, if I don’t take her somewhere safe now—”
It’s an unassuming knocking sound. Two soft knocks, cadenced, coming from the front door.
Leorio’s neck hurts when he turns to look at it; Kurapika is still keeping him in place by the tie.
“It’s probably Gon—”
Kurapika plants five nails inside Leorio’s forearm.
“Don’t. Open,” he says, voice strained.
“Okay—I’m just going to take a look? From the peephole.”
Kurapika’s nails dig deeper and the knocks get louder; still polite, but more fast-paced than before.
At this point, Leorio is expecting pretty much anything: he’s seen Kurapika make furniture and cars and people fly around with his disconcerting telekinetic powers more than once, so when the air keeps still and the door doesn’t blow up it’s actually kind of an anticlimactic drop.
“Hello.” It’s a male voice, as polite as his knockings, and Leorio isn’t sure why he feels his back squirming under a shiver. There’s the brushstroke of a shadow coming from the crack above the pavement.
Leorio steps in front of Kurapika and clears his throat.
“Hello. May I help you?”
“Yes,” the voice says, still as unruffled as that of the guy who checks Leorio’s gas meter every year. “You appear to have something that’s mine. I’d like to get it back.”
Kurapika is going to make the apartment implode in a conveniently pocket-sized black hole. Or maybe he’s just going to pop a vein, whichever comes first, and Leorio’s degree doesn’t hold much against both events.
“You go get Oito. Get out from the window,” Kurapika says, and he doesn’t divert his blood-red gaze from the door.
“I can’t fly. Can Oito fly?” Leorio asks, then shakes his head, because this is just ridiculous, and yells toward the door. “What is it that you need, pal? I don’t know you, I think you are confusing me with somebody else?”
The person outside hums a low-pitched note, annoyed.
“Oh no, I’m not confused. You see, I need my legitimate place on the throne and that stolen piece from my collection. All pretty boring things, but still. They’re mine.”
Okay, that sounds like a threat if Leorio has ever heard one. Where did he put his switchblade?
Kurapika steps forward; how he manages to look intimidating while wearing pink nurse scrubs and a wild bedhead is a mystery Leorio hopes to ponder over soon enough, when they will both be safe and sound from not-so-subtle death threats.
The door stays silent for another bit, until the voice sighs, quite theatrically.
“Okay, then. Seems like I’ll have to come in.”
*
The thing about Kurapika is that he’s strong. Another thing about Kurapika is that he knows he’s strong, and he doesn’t care if he gets hurt.
Leorio blinks and the door is still closed. He blinks again and a woman's face is floating right through the still very closed door, getting closer much like a boom rod microphone.
Her eyes are dead. Leorio’s seen dead people before, he’s seen them working in the hospital, and he’s seen them on Pietro’s face now so many years ago, but you don’t get used to dead people, you just swallow and keep breathing, because you’re alive and there isn’t much more you can do and… The woman opens her mouth, too big, and there’s another pair of dead eyes on another face inside—this is the point when Leorio feels allowed to start screaming, and the point when Kurapika unleashes.
The air flashes red. Leorio has seen it before, Kurapika’s Dragon Ball supernatural aura; he can annihilate spaceships as big as Ferris wheels if he tries hard enough and doesn’t care about collapsing later—he never cares about collapsing later.
Leorio squats down right in time for the couch to fly over his head, blanket falling down incongruously softly; the couch travels right through the scary faces and their long reptilian neck and their very horse-shaped body before crashing against the door.
Still crouched on the floor, Leorio registers that the front, uh, legs? of the thing are wearing stilettos.
“Hallucination?” he tries, honestly relieved—at least he’s pretty sure that not even a space-hallucination should be able to eat him alive or something. Maybe. Maybe not.
The thing walks with the same spatial awareness of a confused Roomba, but the closer it gets, the slower Leorio feels, like even his thoughts are dilating, stretching until he loses command on his own limbs and the smell of corpses and blood breathes right at his face, and the second mouth opens up to reveal sharp teeth—
Leorio rolls and time starts running fast again as he hits the wall and an avalanche of books falls on his head; the teeth sink inside Kurapika’s arm like it’s made of butter, and blood sprays on the floor and on the carpet as he steps back under the unrelenting, indifferent push of the creature.
Leorio is useless. His uselessness is so tangible it hurts more than the sharp corner of the physiology manual that’s just fallen on top of his head.
Then the door creaks on its hinges and the figure that appears right in the doorway is offending in its casualness. He’s the blond guy from downstairs, still intent on taking a drag from his cigarette, like he’s stepped in a bar instead of barging into a private apartment with a monster as a brass band. He looks around, breathes in the smoke, exhales, and then scrunches the cigarette butt on Leorio’s door jamb.
“This planet is pretty weird, everything’s so kitschy. I kinda like it—oh?”
Leorio stops throwing books at the horse-lady and Kurapika too stops struggling with his bitten arm.
He can’t come in. He’s stuck on the doorway like a vampire; Leorio would laugh if he wasn’t using every fiber of his being to not panic.
“Out,” Nanika says, her voice shakes the air, seeping through the walls.
“What is this? Some deep-space entity?” Tserriedrich says, only mildly concerned. Leorio managed to grab Kurapika’s other arm to fall back down again, this time with him in his lap and lots of blood—but at least the creepy horse-lady isn’t chewing on him now, so that’s an improvement.
“Go,” Kurapika says, already back up, air vibrating with flashing red like he isn’t losing way more blood than the content of any cup of tea Leorio had time to force-feed him.
The horse-lady is sniffing around; Leorio intercepts its eyes pointed toward the bedroom door and distinctly feels that he’s actually picked the shortest straw in the bunch because the thing wants Oito. He still jumps over scattered books to reach the handle and slide in, Kurapika growling something that sounds a lot like “don’t get yourself killed”.
Behind the bedroom’s door, Oito is already standing up and wielding Leorio’s cheesy lava-lamp, so Leorio doesn’t feel particularly fazed in reporting that a murderous horse-ghost-lady is fixated on killing her while he stumbles on—isn’t that Kurapika’s cylindrical box? Must have fallen during the flying-couch show.
“That’s Tserriednich’s guardian beast,” Oito says, like it should just be common knowledge. “It’s a psychic creature, it can only be harmed by another guardian beast.”
Sure, psychic, why not. Leorio isn’t even meteoropathic, so he quits trying to wrap his head around it; instead, he secures his briefcase around his shoulder, throws Kurapika’s mysterious box inside the basin with all of Gon’s nonsensical baby-delivery items, and picks all up.
“Oh, that looks unsafe,” Oito says as soon as she too has stepped on the tiny balcony. Still, her eyes are already gauging the distance between the railing and Zepile’s balcony right on the side.
Leorio hasn’t thought of doing something this asinine since he was in high school, and even then he didn’t because it’s stupid and dangerous and they’re going to fall off the third floor—they’re going to be eaten alive by the supposed guardian beast that’s once again just walking through the wall like it’s made of water.
Leorio turns and the eyes—the dead eyes are locked on Oito; on her belly, and the mouth of the thing curls upward in an expression so scary Leorio almost hopes to actually fall off for real so that he won’t have to think about it while trying to sleep at night.
Instead of starting screaming her lungs hoarse like it would have been perfectly reasonable to, Oito ties her bathrobe more securely around her body and takes a deep breath.
“Well, it would still be a better death,” she says, with such a scarily matter-of-fact tone that Leorio can’t really do anything but help her climb up the railing. He finds himself with his nose stuck basically in her nether regions, which is exactly where it’s going to be in a little if those contractions keep up. So not looking forward to that, honestly.
“You’re great,” Leorio tells her, when she just breathes in and jumps, accustomed to life or death situations and very inclined to stay in the life zone. She lands on Zepile’s balcony, wavy hair flowing around in the wind and much more balanced than Leorio himself.
He joins her with way less grace and a lot more sweat, lemons definitely too fucking heavy in his arms.
The horse-lady’s head peeks outside, eyes vacant, and for a second Leorio is sure it’s going to just jump them; he steps in front of Oito, teeth bared and goniometer in hand, but the thing stays there.
“I don’t think it can—it can’t fly and it can’t really see. It just senses Woble.”
And probably trashes everything it finds in its path like a mindless caterpillar? Not much for a comforting thought.
Leorio uses the tie to wipe his sweaty forehead and doesn’t panic when Oito suddenly bends over, finger closing around his arm as she groans in pain once again. Leorio multitasks pretty well when he’s stressed out and utterly scared, apparently; he’s kicking the basin in front of his feet and knocking on Zepile’s window all at the same time.
For once in his life Zepile answers in a timely fashion, big brows furrowed and a bottle of turpentine in hand.
“Hey there, Leo. Sorry, this isn’t the best time—I think I must have inhaled something bad, because I’m hallucinating a feral furry with white hair fighting with a couple blond guys out in the hall.”
Ah, so Nanika must have summoned Killua. That’s nice.
Leorio just tries his best to shield the horse-lady-thing from Zepile’s sight as he pushes Oito in.
Zepile steps aside and helps her like a gentleman, blinking at the two heads with a serene expression.
“Yep. No turpentine for me from now on. Oh, are you carrying?”
Oito smiles and answers something perfectly reasonable to Leorio’s ears that probably sounded like Cthulhu’s call to Zepile’s. They blink at each other in a triangle of awkwardness.
“Zep, we’re going to take the fire escape—why don’t you come with us and, like, take a breath of fresh air. Far away from here.”
“You think so? Maybe I should. You wouldn’t believe me, lady, but you have two heads right now.”
Oito smiles again right when a punch comes through the wall.
Zepile startles. Leorio shrieks and is ready to throw lemons if it comes down to it.
Instead, the fist disappears to be replaced by a very bright brown eye blinking from the hole.
“Oops, sorry!” Gon says, before more bangs and general chaos echo through the landing.
Zepile frowns at the turpentine again.
“Yeah, let’s go get some fresh air.”
*
“We should go to the hospital.”
It’s the reasonable course of action: Leorio is carrying both his briefcase and the basin full of miscellanea, lemons pretty fucking heavy in his arms, and no matter how many heads Oito has, going to the hospital is the safest course. So of course she’d start to scream in pain at the end of the stairs.
“Sorry. Okay. I think I’m going to—”
Leorio grabs her arm and tries to conjure dormant psychic powers that will enable him to delay the inevitable. Oito grabs at the railing and muffles a scream inside her arm.
Still no psychic powers awakening in sight. What a drag.
“Okay. Okay. We should—calm down. And breathe, did they teach you how to breathe?”
“In general or for this specific circumstance?” Oito says, and yells again. “Oh. I think she’ll have two heads. It hurts like two heads.”
They managed to climb down the fire escape but, by the time Leorio has convinced Zepile that he really needs to go out for a long walk and throw that turpentine in the trash, Oito is already curled around another gut-wrenching contraction. How close together are they now? How close are they supposed to be until Leorio can properly panic? Not good, not good at all.
There’s no way they’ll make it to the hospital, not even if Leorio felt ready to expose his secret life as a back-alley practitioner for aliens to the entirety of his colleagues and patients and all the generally normal people in his life.
The road is quiet, dustbins for the separate collections gathered against the wall and evening traffic going strong down the street. It’s so surreal, to stand there with a basin full of lemons, that for a second Leorio feels too lost to take another step.
“I think we’ve outrun it.” Oito turns to him, breathing a bit ragged, sweat collecting on both her foreheads.
Leorio collects himself because he doesn’t have any right to be the one to freak out.
He guides her back inside the building, quietly. This isn’t a stupider idea than any other idea he thought of; there’s a full-blown brawl going on a couple floors above their heads.
A flash of red paints itself on the clean handrail of the stairwell—must be Kurapika’s aura special effects: that’s nice, it means he’s still kicking, which should be obvious because it’s Kurapika, right? He’s always kicking, sometimes even in Leorio’s direction because he’s also a little shit.
Oito leans heavier on Leorio’s shoulder, eyes watery as another contraction guts her mid-step.
“What is this,” she asks, when she’s caught her breath in front of the creepy, creaking door of the basement.
“It’s just the laundry room. No one uses it anymore, the apartments have actual functional washing machines inside. We’ll be safe here.”
It’s not that he’s sure—he’s just sure that Kurapika is going to kick ass, and Oito must be on the same page. It’s weird, sharing this kind of blind faith in a short guy made of raging red eyes and confusing polite manners that actually aren’t polite at all.
Oito squints at the flickering lightbulb coming from above; it sets in a soft yellow hue: Gon must have changed it recently.
“This is… surprisingly well kept?”
It is, with a wiped up floor and the fresh, but ugly, bulbous space flowers all rooted around the tiny, claustrophobic windowsill that’s squashed where the ceiling meets the ground.
There are some new orchids, too. Leorio has no idea how they survive down there and, as much as he likes to think that Gon simply has an extremely green thumb, ignorance is bliss—if they’re all going to die of radiation poisoning or something, he doesn’t want to know.
“Oh, and there’s a corpse in the washing machine.”
Leorio coughs, and he finally drops the basin on his feet.
“She’s—she’s alive. Her name’s Alluka, she’s Killua’s sister.”
Oito looks at the sleeping face, pale and just as still as the orchids over the window; she doesn’t look convinced until she starts looking in pain, gutted by another contraction.
There’s an old mattress Killua sometimes crashes on when he wants to keep Alluka company; Leorio dusts it uselessly with one hand before helping Oito to lay down.
“It’s time, she’s coming out,” she says, dead serious and overall dead-looking. “Kurapika says you’re the best doctor in the galaxy.”
Well, isn’t that heartwarming. And utterly terrifying.
“He’s the worst patient, so I’m not sure it counts.”
At least that makes Oito laugh—that must account for something, right?
*
Breathe in through the nose, breathe out from the mouth.
“See? You’re doing great, Leorio.”
Leorio nods and manages not to cry, hands sweating under the rubber gloves. They breathe in unison again, and he uses the goniometer to check the dilation and also the angle of ninety-five degrees above the horizontal.
He needs Gon: whatever is going to come out from Oito’s objectively extremely elastic vagina—thanks, alien biology—will need to be at a very specific angle, and he still needs to squeeze all those lemons. Most of all, Gon is nice and will for sure calm him down with his matter-of-fact demeanor and his extensive knowledge about all the most disconcerting things in the universe.
“Nanika?” he tries. He isn’t sure about anything when it comes to Nanika, and Killua is too busy loving her unconditionally to actually put much thought into it. That’s another can of worms Leorio really doesn’t want to open.
She doesn’t answer and Leorio doesn’t want to take it as a bad sign, but Nanika always answers; he’s been spoiled by her lovely J.A.R.V.I.S.-like presence, the way she keeps him company and updates him freely about the whereabouts of his galactic friends; the way she hums sympathetically every time Leorio gets back from the hospital bearing enough stress to power the whole neighborhood—
He’s not going to cry, for fuck’s sake, he isn’t the one who has to give birth right now.
“Something’s coming,” the person who’s supposed to give birth says.
Leorio flips his head back out from bathrobes and towels and looks at the door.
It isn’t something—it’s someone, steps heavy and fast on the ground; something falls down the stairs and bangs against the wall.
Leorio doesn’t yeet out of his own skin. He isn’t an obstetrician, but the least he can do is smile like he means it.
“Well. We’re going to ignore that,” he decides. “You focus on breathing, okay? I think we’re almost there.”
Oito shakes both her heads, panicking.
“It can’t be. I can’t—I can’t do it. I don’t want to let her go, he’s going to kill her.”
“He won’t,” Leorio says, and offers a forearm to squeeze—and regrets it, because Oito’s grip is deadly. “Kurapika is kicking his ass, remember? You and Woble are going to be—”
Dead. Very very dead.
They both turn toward the door, fighting sounds fast approaching. Leorio lets his eyes wander around the room, searching for something, anything—unless Tsestuffedeggs isn’t willing to sit there and wait for humidity and mold to kill him, there is literally nothing in that stupid laundry room-slash-little girl’s bedroom that could be used as a weapon, if you don’t count lemons. Should he throw lemons? He can throw hands, that’s what he’s going to do: he can keep his own in a brawl, even if he’s never exactly tried it out before against murderous aliens. That’s usually Kurapika’s job; Leorio already fights all the good old fights against flawed universal health care and the post office and always choosing the longest queue when he waits in line for the cashier—
“What’s in the box?” Oito then asks, breath choked and shoulders tense, and neurons running way faster than Leorio’s own.
Still, it’s Kurapika’s stuff and he doesn’t want to intrude. The way he clung to it like a teddy bear while sleeping… But desperate circumstances call for desperate measures: Leorio wouldn’t like to be found dead and then discovered he was carrying some kind of crucially useful weapon right under his nose.
There isn’t much space in the laundry room, but if he angles his body right he can conceal the box from Oito’s line of vision, although he’s pretty sure she’s way busier with experiencing one of the worst pains imaginable to really care for Kurapika’s privacy at the moment.
Leorio unwraps the box carefully. His fingertips meet something cold and smooth under the flowery pillowcase. A jar of some kind? Maybe it’s interstellar pickles—Kurapika is a picky eater, it could just be a very big supply of his favorite kind of pickles that he didn’t want to share with Leorio. He does get weird sometimes, and sad, when they share food, like he doesn’t really think he’s allowed to do normal things; like he wants to detach from it, alien in every single place in the galaxy, never really at home anywhere.
Leorio looks at the jar. The jar looks back.
He muffles the scream fast, and thank God Oito is screaming for way more practical reasons at the moment. The severed head inside the jar just isn’t as urgent as the two-headed baby coming from her uterus.
The eyes, though—those eyes.
“Leorio?” she calls, voice desperately weak.
“Nothing useful,” he decides, and wraps everything back inside the cloth, as fast as he can. He pushes it away beside the washing machine, far from Alluka and Oito, and himself too. He feels sick.
He keeps on smiling, he’ll keep on smiling if it kills him, as the brawl outside the room bursts in loud thumps and yells.
“Leorio?” Oito asks, rightfully scared, and Leorio should get back to her and help her with the two-headed baby—only he can’t. He’s seeing red, in a way probably less literal than Kurapika’s, but still legit. He wants to punch Terrorsandwich’s face until he begs him to be beheaded and replace the severed head inside the mason jar with his own.
He exhales, slow.
“Keep on breathing. You’re doing great, Oito.”
“Thanks, I’ve been told I’m especially good at breathing,” she says, humorous and terrified.
Leorio turns, still smiling, but he knows he can’t just sit there now.
Tsedumpling said “something that’s mine”, something he bought—a head in a jar, eyes red and open wide. Maybe closing the eyes of the dead isn’t considered basic decency out there, it’s too much of a cultural thing. He shouldn’t feel like that, like flames burning at the center of his chest, squeezing his heart in a fist.
It’s stupid: Leorio knew what a black market was way before Kurapika told him about the Phantom Troupe. Hell, it’s not like humanity needs creatures from space to do things as horrible as selling body parts.
Still, he never really thought about the clients, even if it was obvious: if someone goes through the effort of slaughtering an entire species to sell their eyes on the black market at obscenely high prices, it means that someone must be ready to buy them. It’s supply and demand, basic economy stuff, right? Seems like it’s not just the world that runs on money—it’s a universal thing, quite literally.
Now the bangs are right at the door. Leorio’s eyes are stinging when he breathes in, and stands up to grab the rusty rod from a broken drying rack. It’s awfully light in his hands; he has no idea what good it will do.
He turns to Oito, an apology on his lips, but she’s already propped on her elbow, brows furrowed.
“I can throw lemons,” she says.
Great minds think alike.
*
The day Kurapika told him about what happened to his family, Leorio wasn’t having his best day.
Hospitals can be terrible places, especially if you’re just as desperately stupid as he knew he was, all full of dreams and impractical ideas about helping people—like the universe had ever given a damn about it.
Kurapika had appeared right when Leorio was fighting with the keyhole to just get inside the house after a double shift and too much coffee.
Kurapika’s suit was spattered with colorful bodily fluids, but it was his eyes that took Leorio by surprise, and made him think ‘not today’, because he felt hollow and he didn’t have the energy to care about the gaping void inside someone else’s head. He had stepped out of bloody scrubs himself just an hour ago and he couldn’t bear to hear more about death.
Instead, he stepped inside and left the door open.
After he had changed into a pair of joggers and an old, worn-out t-shirt, he put a pot on the stove and stood there to watch the water boil.
“Rough day?” Kurapika asked ten or so minutes later, his voice uncharacteristically calm. He had borrowed Leorio’s bathrobe without asking, and he was sitting on the kitchen chair like he was afraid to break it.
And instead of being his usual standoffish self, his eyes were looking at Leorio’s, waiting for something that didn’t make sense until Leorio’s own mouth started blabbering spontaneously.
“I lost a patient. She was a kid, and she was nice.” He knew he was being stupid: it doesn’t matter if you’re a kid, or if you’re nice. You’re still a bunch of cells—no, a bunch of atoms held together by unfathomable forces, the same ones that bring together Moka pots and distant galaxies. “Nothing makes sense, I don’t even know why I do what I do sometimes. What’s the point? We’re all going to die, the universe, God, whatever, it doesn’t care about me or you, or her.”
“Caring isn’t the point of the universe, probably,” Kurapika said, and accepted his plate of plain pasta while Leorio picked the butter from the fridge and added a big spoonful to his own dish.
“We should at least add grated cheese but I forgot to buy it,” he said, stabbing a couple rigatoni tragically glued to each other. “So what’s the point of the universe, really? Do you know? You travel all around it, you must have found at least one answer.”
“Forty-two,” Kurapika said, in a deadpan. “No, I’m serious. You see, it turned out that the answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe and Everything is actually forty-two.”
“Wait. And how did they—No, actually, what’s the question?”
He smiled, and Leorio's bitter core melted like the butter on his plate.
“I’ve always suspected you were more astute than you looked.”
Jackass.
“Is that supposed to be a compliment? You’re insufferable. So, what about you, then, rough day?”
“I killed another member of the Phantom Troupe.”
Leorio did his best not to shiver, remembering a metal table, creepy alien voices and how he still asked Nanika to check that no weird spaceships are trying to abduct him while he sleeps.
“The ones who traffic body parts?”
“They exterminated my whole species. And took our eyes to sell them on the black market.”
So Leorio thought. Rough life, then—how do you answer something like that? Forty-two? Nothing makes even an ounce of sense; how is one supposed to live like this, in this madness?
They sat in silence for a bit, until Kurapika picked a rigatoni with his fork and looked at Leorio’s through the hole, and his eye on the other side was a molten grey like the calm before the storm.
“I don’t know what the point of the Universe is supposed to be, Leorio. But sometimes, you know—” He shrugged and chomped around the fork, munching on bland plain pasta and touching Leorio’s leg with the tip of one foot under the table, casually, probably accidentally, right?
“Killua is right, Earth food is good,” he says, to the plate. The foot stays there. “Thanks for the meal.”
Leorio still doesn’t know the Question, but he guessed that if forty-two could be an answer, then by any means plain rigatoni-sans-cheese could be as well.
*
The door bursts open, metal on grinding metal, and Leorio yells loud enough to shake his uvula. The rod hit something hard that yelps.
“Ouch, Leorio.”
Leorio opens his eyes. He meets brown, wide ones.
“Gon—”
“Yup.” He’s bent forward, Kurapika heavy on his back and a dark liquid smelling like motor oil oozing from his temple. “Let’s switch!”
Leorio finds himself with an armful of a very limp Kurapika’s body while Gon takes the rod from his hands to bend it around the handle and block the door.
“I don’t think it will be useful for the horse-lady, but maybe it will slow down Tsroastbeef.”
“Tserriednich.” Oito is definitely indestructible: you shouldn’t be able to pronounce that name correctly ever, and certainly not while trying to give birth. She props herself up on an elbow. “If he’s coming here, you should both run.”
“Killua is keeping him occupied. And I punched him twice.” Gon is beaming; Leorio wants to hug him. “I’d like to get back there—but Kurapika needed help, I think he hit his head. And he’s the only one who can fight the horse-thing, since it isn’t exactly punchable.”
Kurapika doesn’t look like he could fight anyone right now; he’s light and bloody in Leorio’s arms. He deposits him near Oito, and checks his pupils while he bandages the big, angry bite mark on his arm, which is the most notable source of blood.
All his rush of adrenaline from before, the rage that filled him up, is depleted now that Kurapika is there and he’s alive and he needs help, and that—that’s a kind of help Leorio can give, way better than dying like an idiot trying to punch an enemy he can’t really beat.
He checks for a pulse, just to be sure, and it’s there, slow but steady. He exhales and turns to Gon.
“Are you okay?”
Kid puts up the weirdest surprised expressions every time Leorio tries to fuss over him, like he genuinely doesn’t get it. That motor oil, or whatever it is, is still oozing from the gash on his head.
“I’m fine, Leorio, no critical damage. But I really need to get back to Killua.”
Killua doesn’t need help: Killua can pluck out a beating heart from gigantic, deadly space creatures with thrashers for fingers with his own, comparatively way less scary claws. Leorio has seen aliens as ugly as Jabba the Hutt bolting after nothing more than a glance from Killua’s slit pupils and a click of his tongue, and Gon was there through all of it, laughing at his side, completely unfazed.
Right now, Gon is frowning with genuine worry and Leorio feels entitled to panic a little bit.
Oito interrupts with a pained wail.
“Listen, I don’t want to be dramatic, but—is it supposed to hurt this bad?”
Gon turns to her with his biggest, most reassuring smile.
“Yes, giving birth is actually one of the most painful experiences a body can undergo. Want me to provide information about the other ones, as a distraction?”
Leorio can see the panic flashing through her eyes. It would be difficult to miss: there are four of them.
“Everybody calm down,” he says, even though he knows he’s actually the most likely to pass out from sheer stress in the span of the next three minutes. He closes his eyes instead and counts up to five, then down to seven as he grabs a clean pair of rubber gloves. They squeak uncomfortably on his sweaty hands.
“Gon,” he says, and there’s something in his voice; he feels possessed by some kind of supreme force, Cheadle’s authority commanding a battalion of young, dumb resident doctors just like Leorio himself.
Gon doesn’t exactly snap to attention, but he’s looking at him waiting for orders—expecting Leorio’s orders to make sense somehow?
“I’m sure Killua will manage. I need you to help me right now. You gotta tell me what I have to do step by step, alright? And we also have to squeeze those lemons—Oito,” he says, then, and he knows that her scared expression is mirrored in his. “We’re going to deliver this baby.”
It’s okay, it’s going to be fine. Only fools don’t get scared, right?
*
Kurapika comes back to the land of the living with a deep growl, shifting his weight on the mattress.
“Where—”
Leorio pulls his head out from between Oito’s legs. The smell of lemons is almost unbearable; Gon is using a laundry measuring cup to measure out the proportion of lemon juice and water, which apparently is crucial if they don’t want to kill the baby during her first bath.
Leorio is feeling as calm as he was while performing his first emergency tracheotomy—he remembers Cheadle congratulating him for not killing the patient. Not killing the patient is in fact Leorio’s main goal every day, and he’d like to bring his pretty good streak of keeping people alive to his side job. He could make an exception for Kurapika, though.
“Where the hell do you think you’re going?”
He might look at least a little bit intimidating with his bloody fingers and his tie tied on his forehead like a bandana, or maybe Kurapika’s hesitation springs from the fact that he’s standing with the same steadiness of a weathercock. He blinks at him like Leorio is the unreasonable one.
“How much time has passed? Killua is still fighting, right?”
A lemon gets squeezed a bit harder than necessary, no electric squeezer needed, when Gon answers.
“Killua can gauge people’s strength no problem, he said he could handle it. And I’m going to help him as soon as I’m done helping Oito. This is how it’s going to be.” He smiles at the lemon. He’s squeezing what’s left of the lemon so tightly that at this point they’re going to bathe little Woble in mashed lemons instead of lemon juice.
Kurapika’s hot, sparky aura hiccups out in poufs of red when he trails a shaky palm on his face.
“This isn’t—this shouldn’t have happened. You weren’t supposed to get involved.”
Leorio isn’t sure who the hell is even talking to at this point. Oito opens her mouth, and she’s probably sorry, but also in labor, and to be honest she shouldn’t have to concern herself with someone else’s angst right now.
Leorio pats her knee in comfort, feeling extremely useless. Still not actually there… Those two heads aren’t going to get out if she isn’t dilated enough; Leorio doesn’t even need Gon to recite all Kakinian medical knowledge to him to know that.
It would be easier to concentrate if Kurapika wasn’t moving around—he’s walking toward the door and Leorio’s brain zeroes in on his unsteady gait, on the blood still soaking the makeshift bandage on his arm. Next thing he knows, he’s tackled him down with a growl, elbows and knees hitting the floor. Kurapika squeals like a dog toy and proceeds to head-butt Leorio's chin with utter disregard for his own pain.
“Stop—stop squirming, you suicidal idiot!”
“Get off me, you imbecile—”
They stop when they see Gon's serene albeit perplexed expression; he’s examining the tangle of their limbs like they’re actually a very interesting documentary about meerkats.
“Oh, is this the thing Killua was talking about?”
“What thing,” Oito asks, desperate for distractions.
Kurapika is sputtering curses that might be too weird even for the babel fish to translate, because Leorio is pretty sure he called him a farting double-tailed goat with pants, which sounds insulting enough but clearly lacks the necessary context. Leorio pushes his head back down and blows inside his ear.
“I’m not sure. Killua says there’s a thing between them, but he didn’t want to explain.”
Oito’s laugh becomes another pained scream; she lets both heads fall back on the mattress.
“Well, at least you know how to entertain a dying person. Kurapika,” she says, and her voice has a solemn quality to it, even while she’s splayed on her back like a toppled turtle, bathrobe disheveled and sweat covering her skin. “I’m your employer and I asked you to protect me.”
Leorio pinches Kurapika’s cheek tighter between his fingers as Kurapika tries to elbow him right in the ribs.
“It’s what I’d be doing if this gigantic jerk wasn’t—”
“Well,” Oito interjects, and she’s sitting up again, and her hair is a disheveled mess, the mouth that’s not speaking is grinding teeth so hard they make the sound of a rusty can opener. “Right now I’m in a time of need, and I need you to stay here and let me crush your hand because I think I’m going to die of pain otherwise, okay?”
Leorio gapes; he knows Kurapika is doing the same.
“Now, Kurapika!”
Leorio is so, so grateful to this incongruous, two-headed queen that he’d squeeze her if he wasn’t also sure that it would end in her sprouting out the kid right into Gon’s lemonade basin. Which would probably be a solution to Leorio’s lack of competence in all gynecology matters.
He meets Kurapika’s befuddled eyes, back to their snowy grey. Leorio stands up and offers him a hand.
*
“So, okay. Clean gloves—”
Kurapika almost protests at being treated like a nurse, but he complies.
Leorio puts on the gloves.
“Goniometer.”
“What does the goniometer—”
“To check the angle, so that the second head doesn’t get stuck,” Gon says, cheerful. “It’s really important.”
It’s made of cheap plastic. Leorio bought it from the school section at the supermarket.
“And you know how—” Maybe Kurapika reads something in his eyes, because he shuts up and gets back at sacrificing his metacarpals for Oito’s sake. He goes two shades paler than usual when his bones creak, but it’s still better than having him roam free and suicidal, or maybe that’s just Leorio’s selfishness: he prefers for Kurapika to not roam free in the direct line of danger, even if it means they’re all at risk of death.
Maybe Cheadle is right about him having a crush. Or being hopelessly in love—something like that.
Thank God he can’t even self-combust right now, not with his knees planted on the floor, sleeves rolled up and tie around his head—which, by the way, should have kept the sweat out of his eyes but is apparently failing. “We also need boiled water to at least try to sterilize—”
Gon provides a bucket full of water and Kurapika pulls out the blaster from the back of his pants.
“Are you still trying to—”
He points his gun at the water. The surface trembles and then starts steaming.
“Microwaves.”
Oh. Smart. Leorio hates him with a fiery passion, and he wants to kiss him senseless. Instead, he breathes in, smiles at Oito’s disarranged faces and somehow, like many times before, something clicks.
He doesn’t know what to do, of course he doesn’t, but Gon’s voice is steady as he lists familiar moves, familiar anatomical parts.
“What if I just pass out, would that be bad?” Oito asks, voice feeble at the mention of her cervix. Kurapika grabs at her hand and squeezes; his eyes are a calm, steady grey now.
“It’s going to be fine.”
“It’s also going to hurt a lot,” Leorio says, because Oito has proven to be perfectly capable of dealing with unbearable pain until now and it would feel cheap to trick her into thinking this is going to be anything short of excruciating.
She shuts a pair of eyes and locks the others into his before she starts pushing, screams grating against the four coarse walls of the laundry room, and inside Leorio’s head.
He zeroes in on the task at hand and decides that he isn’t brave enough to be a gynecologist—evolution is a scam, it can’t be that the universe has invented interstellar instant traveling and, still, vagina-equipped folks have to squeeze their offspring out this painfully. Killua is right about hatching: it’s way more convenient, and clean.
Leorio has a good idea of how much blood is too much blood, but absolutely no idea how a fully formed alien kid should look; she already has a tuft of hair on top of her head, which is out.
“The first one is out—” he says, hands grabbing it delicately but not too delicately. God—it’s terrifying, and warm, and slippery with blood and an entire medical encyclopedia of fluids.
Ah, the miracle of life: Leorio is going to puke, and cry, and laugh. Instead, he turns Woble’s tiny melon-head exactly ninety-three degrees to the right while Gon holds the goniometer for him, and the other head pops out just like that with another push and a wail that shakes the building and probably breaks what’s left of Kurapika’s hand.
Gon unplugs his fingers from his ears and leans to get a closer look. Woble’s second head is just as round and plump as the first.
“I can’t believe Killua is missing this,” Gon says, eyes bright, and forgetting that he could just record it and save it for later.
“Just another—”
“I don’t want to push. I hate pushing, I’ve never been a pushy person—” Oito pushes anyway, of course, and Woble has two pudgy arms, and two pudgy legs and a number of lungs impossible to gauge, but sure functional, since her cry adds itself to Oito’s last scream until it takes over, to become the only sound inside the room. For a stretched-out second Leorio can’t do anything but look at her: she’s dirty and slimy and dark pink like a live bait, and probably the most incredible thing Leorio has ever seen in the whole of his ridiculous life.
“Let me see her,” Oito asks, above the cry. Kurapika is saying something, too, voice hushed and soft, comforting. Leorio has never heard him talk like that.
Something blinks at his side; Gon is pointing at the umbilical cord and passing him scissors. He says “scissors” just like in the video they watched; his eyes are big and curious as he sizes up the baby.
“Aw, she’s so cute!”
She is. Cute like a clump of play dough. Her chubby cheeks puff up when Leorio puts her to marinate for three minutes inside the basin full of lemon juice as per Gon’s instruction.
Then Gon wraps her up in a towel like a squealing burrito to deposit her in Oito’s waiting arms.
Kurapika takes back his own hand, way redder than before, and as he lifts it up, stretching the fingers, six little sausage fingers grab at his pinky and squeeze.
Leorio raises his eyes, gloves still bloody, sweat freefalling, and he meets Kurapika’s: they’re red with something that doesn’t have anything to do with his usual fuming rage.
“He’s going to kill her,” Oito says, voice hoarse and more matter-of-factly than sad. “The rules say that the princes must fight to the death without interference. Now that Woble is born, no one can protect her, he’s going to kill her.”
Woble sputters and lets out a couple silly yelps, like she finds it pretty funny to be the center of attention of so many pairs of eyes.
“I won’t let him,” Kurapika says. “Screw the rules, I won’t let him.”
“I think Killua and Nanika must have taken care of him at this point,” Gon adds, like he’s talking about baking a cake rather than homicide. Xenocide. No wait, that’s definitely an exaggeration—
“Here, this must be him!”
Leorio doesn’t have the time to really compute—Gon has already jumped up at the sound of steps walking quietly toward the door, too excited to remember… What was it? Ah, right. Killua’s footsteps don’t make any sound.
*
The bar wrapped behind the door handle creaks and falls limp with the handle itself. The door opens quietly, squeaking softly on its hinges.
It isn’t Killua. Or—it is Killua, and Gon’s face goes from very happy to shocked as Killua falls to the ground like a sack of potato, with a dull thud and no other sound.
Leorio hears Oito’s pitiful whimper and the only coherent thought that comes to his mind is that he’s happy Nanika doesn’t seem to be here, because Killua wouldn’t have wanted for her to see—
There’s so much blood, incongruous purple blood splattered on the floor and on his hair and on his back around the gaping hole that goes through his chest. Leorio doesn’t need a medical degree to know that it isn’t good.
The purple trail climbs up to the hand of the unassuming blond guy. He wouldn’t look creepier with two heads, and that’s saying something. He looks like a Hollywood actor, the cocky type that makes fans faint and paparazzi search through the garbage to discover what he ate for lunch. Probably babies—yes, he looks like the baby-eating type, quite literally.
Leorio isn’t anywhere near learning to spell his name correctly and he’s going to die ignorant because then the guy’s stepped in; he picks up a towel and scrubs the blood off like it’s a minor inconvenience.
“He put up quite the fight. Silly, vicious things these Dentorian kittens can be.”
Leorio registers Gon moving at the corner of his eyes, still fixed on Killua. Terrorsandwich doesn’t even dodge—Gon’s fist creaks under his fingertips and Gon’s eyes grow big before he’s shoved away like he doesn’t weigh like a small, compact car, like Leorio hasn’t seen him punch holes inside actual brick walls before.
Terrorsandwich looks delighted as Gon’s body dents itself inside the closest washing machine and years of forgotten half-empty detergent bottles come crashing down.
“I know, right? It looks like I’m basically invincible. I thought that would have been quite boring, but I’m actually enjoying it.” He lets out a small laugh, dreamy. “Now, now, I’d like to get down to business. Your funny stunt has wasted enough of my time, albeit quite pleasantly. Give me back what’s mine.”
“You can’t have her, you can’t,” Oito says.
Leorio finds out that he isn’t near Oito anymore; he’s moved to apply pressure on Killua’s wound, but he knows it’s useless; there should be a heart there and there’s only a gaping hole. He’s still warm, but dead. He’s dead and there’s nothing he can do.
The next of Gon’s assault ends up with his skull making a sick cracking sound against the closet metal shelf.
Kurapika is standing in between Terrorsandwich and Oito still sprawled on the mattress with Woble in her arms. Red aura is gushing out in choked spurts, and dissolving not even half a meter from Kurapika’s body while blood has started pouring again from his temple; his knees are visibly wobbling.
So they’re all going to die like that: it’s pretty silly, thinking about it. In a way, Leorio knew that he was supposed to die stupidly and incomprehensibly, one of these days.
He doesn’t regret much. He’s a doctor—he’s saved people, at least he can say that.
“Oh, I don’t care about that,” Terrorsandwich says, and waves at his half-sister like it’s just a boring detail on a boring painting. “I mean, I do, but the throne is already mine—No, I mean my thing. The one you stole.”
Kurapika growls, and the squashed lemon skins, the bloody scissors, and the goniometer are all shaking mid-air over the ground, trapped inside his aura like it’s some kind of viscous magma. When he opens his mouth, Leorio is surprised he doesn’t spit actual fire.
“I stole it, you say? Think again.”
Leorio is still applying pressure—purple pulsing below his hands—stupid Killua, stupid, insufferable Killua with his smug smile and his sisters that he loves so much and where the hell is Nanika—voices are happening around his head, but they don’t make sense.
“Well I paid for it with my money, and you took it from me without using any money—that’s textbook stealing, my friend.”
“I’m not your friend.”
“No, of course you’re not—” Gosh, that smile: Terrorsandwich is clearly a murderous person that belongs somewhere where he can’t hurt people. There must be a special place in space for that, something like the Phantom Zone. Azkaban. Whatever.
He’s looking at Kurapika’s face—no, his eyes: he’s ready to tear them out and use them as earrings. Maybe that’s exactly what the motherfucker is thinking.
“You’re a wondrous piece of the collection yourself. I rarely get to acquire rare pieces all by my lonely self these days.”
“Fuck you.” That has been said somewhere around Leorio’s head. Oh, right, it’s coming from his mouth. So, he’s decided he wants to die next, apparently. Maybe Sanbica will cover his patients for him: she’s good, and she will give Cheadle way less grief than him.
“Leorio—” Kurapika starts, and only then does his voice acquire a hint of panic.
“No, fuck this!” Yep, still Leorio's own voice. He’s yelling, now, over Woble’s crying, and over Kurapika too. He knows what he looks like, with his tie hanging from his head and Killua’s blood splattered on his arms, on his shirt. “Who the fuck do you think you are, huh? Coming all the way here to kill a baby? You’re the lowest fucking form of life in existence—”
What was he saying? There’s a ringing in his ears—he can feel time slowing down and whatever a guardian beast is, that must be what the horse-lady-thing does. It’s scrunching up time, eating at it with raspy breath as it walks quietly inside, long long neck moving toward Leorio and her void eyes staring into his own.
A bunch of flowery cloth flies in the air and everything else stops as fast as Terrorsandwich grabs it with one hand.
“Take it,” Kurapika says. It’s the jar, head bouncing inside it like a dead fish. “You want my eyes? You can fight to get them—but leave all of them alone. The throne is yours and these people don’t have anything to do with it.”
Terrorsandwich tilts his head to examine the one behind the glass, a happy smile plastered on his face as he places the jar on top of Alluka’s washing machine, knocking down an orchid in the process. The glass creaks under his feet as he walks forward. “I’m glad it’s intact. I’m a bit less angry now, so I’ll kill you faster. Maybe.”
The horse-lady brushes beside Leorio and his body slows down: he’s moving inside molasses, the fiber of time shrunk like an old sweater in the dryer. But that’s it: Leorio is completely ignored, like he’s just another washing machine—a cockroach at best.
And maybe he is, right? In the grand scheme of things, Leorio is pretty much a very low lifeform. He doesn’t have any superpowers; apparently he looks just like a Betelgeusian, and there’s a lot of Betelegeusians walking around in space, being very common and boring.
Actually, screw that: Leorio is painfully ordinary even on Earth, the planet that’s cataloged on every galactic encyclopedia as “mostly harmless.” Leorio is mostly harmless, and he’s going to make that mostly count.
He grabs the jar. He can see Gon slowly regaining consciousness with a buzz of machinery, eyes out of focus. Leorio thinks he probably has the same expression, because he doesn’t really know what he’s doing, he just knows that he's moving—his fingerprints splatter red and purple on the jar just in time for the glass to crush against Terrorsandwich's head.
The horse-woman thing turns around, and Leorio is stuck in the middle, watched by her ugly void eyes and the red ones open in perpetual horror inside the jar as the head falls down in a splash of fluid and the smell of alcohol slaps Leorio right up through his nostrils.
The head falls on the floor with a sickening squishy sound, and time stops for real.
Leorio’s arm is still thrown mid-air and Woble’s cry is a flat line of blinding yellow, thumping at his ears while Terrorsandwich's face turns toward him for the first time; against the flashing red of Kurapika’s exhausted eyes, he looks like a monster, rage carved in deep lines around his gritted teeth—
Leorio is going to die. He knows that with stark clarity, as if time shaped itself in that exact sentence in the middle of the air like a glowing neon sign. He’s going to die, and neither Kurapika nor Gon will be able to help, because they’re going to die next, and then Oito and Woble—Woble is still crying, but there’s a rumbling sound that’s growing from behind.
Leorio looks instinctively at Kurapika, but his aura is just exhausted streaks of pale red, while the rumble grows. Oito is just as flabbergasted as anybody else as a big, bulging shadow creeps around her and starts boiling in blisters along the wall.
It’s bigger than the horse-woman. It’s bigger than three horse-women and a car. It’s bigger than the whole room and it keeps on puffing up like an inflated balloon, with teeth.
“Stop,” Terrosandwich says, brows furrowed, hand raised.
It doesn’t stop. It squeezes itself in between Leorio and Kurapika too, and opens its mouth in front of the slightly tilted head of the horse-woman; then it closes its jaws around it with a slow crunchy sound and gulps it down.
It stops for a bit and Leorio isn’t even sure if it has eyes, or maybe it’s just a giant pile of candy floss with a mouth, before it pops and exhales, deflating.
Something dark and cold sprays out of the severed neck of the horse-lady; the horse-body sways and falls down, right beside Leorio, and bouncing against Alluka’s washing machine-like capsule. It opens with a soft hiss and a gust of cold air breathes out.
The silence is deafening then, or maybe Leorio just went deaf because he’s pretty sure that Woble is still crying.
Terrosandwich looks around like he hasn’t understood what happened. His face is still the most monstrous thing in that room, in a way only human-looking faces can get.
It’s the first time Leorio really, really gets it. He was so naive: that head in the jar, of course Kurapika wants to die and burn a couple thousand worlds with him while he’s at it… He can’t even blame him properly, he can’t even regret his own stupid imminent death.
Before Terrorsandwich could even think about doing something, Alluka’s bedhead pops out of the capsule with a soft yawn. Terrorsandwich turns: his wild eyes are screaming “not another deus ex machina” when Alluka comes out of the machine, literally.
“Alluka?” Gon asks, voice cracked, eyes glassy. She has flowy dark hair, and electric blue eyes just like Killua. They set on his body, still slumped on the pavement and losing blood.
“Who killed Brother?” she asks, brows furrowed.
“Eh?” Terrorsandwich says.
Alluka pouts.
“Was it you? You’re mean. Die.”
Terrorsandwich's face freezes. And then his whole body gets—sucked up? Like a rolled-up shutter. Like a wrung-out towel—Gon is always saying that one should never go out without a towel.
Thick dark blood, much like Oito’s, falls on the floor. It looks a lot like human blood, Leorio thinks, and his brain seems to find it funny for some reason.
The wrung-out Terrorsandwich stays there on the ground while the woman-horse-thing starts to wither and deflate until it conveniently disappears into the ether, leaving not even its own silvery blood behind.
“At least we won’t have to bury that in the park,” Leorio says, blinking.
Kurapika blinks back at him, mouth agape.
It’s a small relief, but a relief nonetheless.
*
It goes like this.
Alluka yawns again, and pouts like a child—which she is, by the way. She says: “Brother, the game’s finished, wake up,” like all that blood, and Gon’s glassy eyes, don’t mean a thing.
Then Killua coughs, groans, and stirs, eyes unfocused like he’s woken up from an uncomfortable nap on Leorio’s couch. He looks at his hands, all smeared with blood, and frowns.
“Shit, it fucking hurts. Hey, Alluka.”
“I think you dropped a heart, Brother.”
Killua looks around, then realizes she’s talking about the hole in his chest.
“Ew. Well, I have another three… No big deal, really!” He says the last part against Gon’s shoulder, since he’s basically jumped on him to squeeze whatever blood is still inside his body. “I’m fine. I don’t die that easily—did the fucker die? Oh.” He looks at the shapeless, bloody heap on the floor. “Alluka, I told you not to wring out people!”
“But Brother, he was mean!” It makes perfect sense, really. Leorio feels his tie fall from his forehead and a laugh creeps up his throat.
“Go back to sleep, silly, or Nanika is going to get lost,” Killua says, while he keeps on patting Gon’s back like he’s the one who needs to be coddled.
Alluka sighs, way more stoic than any twelve-year-old looking child has any right to be, and shrugs.
“All right. Goodnight, everybody.”
“Night,” Leorio hears himself saying, feeble. He’d like to scream, but he can only stay speechless as Killua lets Gon half carry him toward the capsule so that he can tuck her in.
Such a heartwarming scene? Maybe. Probably. Leorio is going to get the meanest migraine of his life.
“Gon. Did you know he has—how many hearts again?”
“Four,” Killua says, breathing a bit ragged but overall looking pretty put-together. “And of course he knows. He knows everything in that big brain of his.” He taps on Gon’s forehead with one long claw, affectionately, and Gon sticks out his tongue.
“Ah—right. It’s just. I saw all the blood and I got…” He sniffs, a bit embarrassed, a bit emotional. Leorio wants to hug him really hard.
“You should go—take care of them. I’ll clean up here,” Kurapika says. He’s avoiding looking at Oito and Woble. His voice is strained, but not shaking—just closed off, spent.
Leorio can’t divert his eyes from the head on the floor.
“I shouldn’t have done that. I’m sorry.”
Kurapika’s lips are clipped tight, but he doesn’t look angry at the fact that the remains of his—family member? Friend? Both?—were used as a projectile. When he lifts his chin, he’s smiling: a small, amused smile that’s so incongruous it can only be sincere.
“No, that was… I think Pairo would have liked that. He would have found it badass,” he says, the last word silly on his tongue, like he’s pronouncing it with quotes. Then he shakes his head, as if to shoo away the thought, and nods in Gon’s direction. He’s already out the door with Killua protesting on his back about how he could actually run a marathon and he doesn’t need to be carried. Oito is trying to lift herself up, Woble tiny against her chest. “Go, they need you.”
Kurapika needs a friend right now: maybe he doesn’t even know it, but he does. Only Leorio is a doctor first, and he’s got work to do, and they both know it.
He steps to help Oito on her feet. Woble’s eyes are misty bluish balls; she curls up her lips and sputters white bubbles.
“Don’t worry. That was her guardian beast—I didn’t know it would have come out like that. I think we’re safe, it will protect her from now on.”
Okay, well, if having creepy cotton candy balloons with teeth is what makes people feel safe these days, who’s Leorio to judge? And he’s friends with the kid who wrings people out like wet towels, by the way—that he’ll have to ask about. He’s not sure he wants to know, though.
“I’m sure Kurapika will help you find a safe place to stay. I mean, of course you can stay here as long as…”
“I’d very much like to return you to your bed.” She stops on the doorstep, eyes on the sorry remains of that unrecognizable stepson of hers. “We’re very indebted to you, doctor Leorio. Thanks for saving our lives. We’ll never forget the kindness you showed us in our time of dire need.”
“Jeez, this is too formal—and it also sounds like a goodbye. You’ll definitely come back to visit, right?”
Woble smiles the involuntary smile that children this small scrunch their faces into, and Leorio feels like he’s eating actual cotton candy.
Oito is smiling too.
“I’ll be sure to not lure in dangerous relatives with me, then.”
Ah, yes. That would be nice too.
*
Leorio lingers on the doorstep, black stairs behind him.
The suburb never sleeps, cars are already darting on the highway and pigeons are fighting with seagulls for supremacy over garbage. Kurapika is nothing more than a dark silhouette, an outline of disheveled hair and slouching shoulders pulled down by some invisible force. There’s a bundle of towels right at his side; Leorio doesn’t need to ask what’s inside.
Whatever Leorio will say now, it’s going to sound stupid, so better just be done with it.
“Here you are.” Yeah: definitely stupid.
Kurapika doesn’t move from his spot, legs dangling over the parapet. His hair is tinted in an even more vivid gold, ruffled by a slight breeze that smells of traffic even that far above.
“Nanika told you?”
Leorio steps closer; he feels like he’s intruding, but if he doesn’t intrude, Kurapika will never let him in.
“She’s back online—did you know she gets lost in something called the Anxiety when Alluka isn’t asleep?”
A snort; pretty rude, and still, Leorio can’t help but feel relieved.
“It’s the Ansible, Leorio”.
“Whatever, be smug all you want over all this sci-fi mumbo jumbo. Earth has pizza and you’re never going to beat that. Point is, Nanika is all right, she’s fussing over Killua.”
Kurapika stiffens—touchy subject. Leorio should tell him it isn’t his fault; it isn’t his fault that people love him enough to put their life on the line for him.
“I didn’t mean for any of you to get involved in this.”
“No biggie, we survived, right? Oito and Woble are both healthy and happy, and Killua’s tougher than a cockroach. Now he even has an excuse to sleep in and let Gon pet him like a kitten, it’s a win for everybody.” That’s exactly how Leorio left them, all curled up on the couch while Nanika was browsing channels on the TV for them to fall asleep with.
Kurapika’s lips straighten in a sad resemblance of a smile, empty and tired, and Leorio frowns at the sad bundle. It really smells of pickles.
“How do you—ah, I mean. I still have the shovel, you know. We could have a burial, say some words?”
Ah—maybe not. Kurapika is looking at him like he’s suddenly started to recite Vogon poetry—Gon subjected them all to a sample once, for the sake of science: it was one of Leorio’s most brutal experiences.
He isn’t sure how to move; his limbs feel as long and lanky as they were when he was still a teenager and suffering through the most brutal growth spurt.
He lets his legs dangle off the rooftop with Kurapika’s own and looks down. The dawn is climbing up the buildings, brushing over the sign of the kebab place and the coarse surface of the parking lot, glinting on the cars.
No horses in sight, and isn’t that just the most comforting thought.
“Was he…”
“A friend,” Kurapika says, quiet. “His name was Pairo. He wanted to travel around the galaxy, see the universe. He didn’t have the greatest eyesight, though, so I promised I would have gone with him, kept him out of trouble.”
“You’d have been extremely ill-suited for the job. Trouble loves you.”
Kurapika shoots him a glance, but the smirk is there.
“Like you can talk. You’re a magnet for trouble yourself. I wouldn’t be here otherwise, right?”
Leorio tries his chance at scooting a bit closer and Kurapika doesn’t move.
“I don’t really mind, you know? Well, I’ll probably mind tomorrow when I’ll have to go to work—all this adrenaline isn’t good for the heart, really.”
He’s tired—dear God. At least it’s Sunday. Leorio yawns and his neck pops painfully as he stirs.
“What should we get for breakfast?”
Kurapika blinks at him, eyes flashing pinkish, but maybe it’s the dawn. He shakes his head, hair rustling on the big band-aid plastered to his temple.
“You’re so weird, Leorio.”
“What? Me, weird? What should that mean—you want to pick a fight, huh?”
Kurapika’s laugh lights up galaxies inside Leorio’s stomach, inside his stupid monkey brain.
“And what does weird even mean? You wanna talk to me about weird? The whole universe is weird!”
With his fist raised just to cover up his smile, Kurapika sighs.
“You know, there’s this theory. That if someone would ever come up with a sound explanation for the universe, it would suddenly disappear to be replaced by something even more bizarre. Someone thinks it already happened.”
His eyes are grey and bright; when did his face get so close? That wild bedhead is still there—Leorio is brushing a strand of hair away from his cheek—
It’s fast, and surprisingly rough. Or maybe it isn’t surprising, because Kurapika is rough like a pirate, like a hardened assassin, and wild and scared and smart and handsome, and Leorio is totally smitten and also he’s kissing him. They’re kissing, with urgency and clumsy determination while the seagulls are so loud that maybe it’s Leorio’s own heart trying to hurl itself out of his ears.
Kurapika’s breath is warm on his lips when they separate.
“Did I—” Kurapika swallows hard. “I read this is how you’re supposed to… I mean, I asked Gon. He showed me some videos. He said—”
“A kiss. That was a kiss, yes,” Leorio says.
Kurapika nods solemnly.
“Yes, that was my intention. I’m not sure about the execution, though.”
Bizarre, huh? Leorio is chilling on the roof with his more-than-friend from deep space and a severed head after a night spent fighting for their lives and delivering an alien baby. Bizarre doesn’t even start to cover it. And no amount of swallowing seems able to push back his thumping heart.
“We can practice, if you like,” Leorio says. “I’d really like to practice with you?”
The metal door whines at their back; Leorio turns around, fists ready, and Kurapika’s hand is already on the blaster’s holder.
“Oh, I see there are some even earlier birds, who would have thought! Want to join me in some good old sun salutations?”
He’s naked. Old man Netero from the third floor, he’s naked. And carrying a yoga mat rolled neatly under his armpit.
Leorio knows he's gaping, while Kurapika is laughing instead.
“This planet... I swear humans must be the weirdest lifeform in the galaxy.” He rolls his shoulders, relaxed, and sighs, face to the rising sun. “I don’t mind it, though.”