Death's Door // COMPLETED ✔

Cheating Death As A Skill

Too embarrassed to admit that they had just left the exact premises where Gon lived, Gon asked Alluka to drop him off three blocks over. It wasn't until he was out of the car that he realized that he'd likely be seeing her again and wondered just how long his pathetic brain would let him continue the charade of where he lived.

He thought this the entire three-block walk back to his apartment, Alluka's phone number in hand, dirty shirt and towel in the other.

I have got to be the least smooth person alive, Gon thought to himself as he groaned miserably and wandered down the back alley. It'd been roughly twenty minutes, but who knew how long Killua would be out on the stoop smoking.

Gon trudged in through the back door and up the stairwell to the seventh floor. If he'd had a concussion, his head would have been misery to endure. Luckily, that wasn't the case, and setting foot in his apartment gave him the first real view of the state of himself.

He looked... normal.

He shut and locked the door behind him, eyes still on his reflection in the floor-length mirror behind the door. He pulled his bottom lip down—teeth intact, tongue un-chopped, face unbruised.

The crash replayed in his head. He hadn't hardly felt the crack of the side mirror on the back of his skull, but the bumper....

All of it should have been pulsing through his head, but the sensations vanished. Like none of it had happened.

Gon dragged his hands down the sides of his face with a pathetic groan. He'd almost died, and then what? What would he have done—Well, nothing for one, because he would have been dead. What would have become of his new apartment, how would his Auntie have known? Who would tell her?

Distressed at the possibility of this, Gon tossed the dirty shirt and towel in his hamper and flopped face-first onto his bed, shoes in the air.

He turned his head to the side, pouting. At least I didn't die, he thought, closing his eyes. He pinched his cheek just to be certain and winced. Definitely still alive.

And so, at nearly four in the afternoon, Gon fell asleep.

He woke up thirty minutes later to the knee-jerking reaction of falling in a dream.

The full-force of the floor hit his nose first. Pressure popped to his eyes before he was ever fully conscious and saying, "Ow, fuck—"

Gon pushed off the floor and immediately crashed his head into something solid and wooden. The world was dark for all except the hazy golden glow of dusk but...

Wait a minute, he thought, because his apartment didn't have a view of the sunset.

His hand went skyward only for his wrist to hit the underside of a low ceiling. Still face-first on the floor, Gon flattened his palm against ribs of wooden slats and the firm fabric of something in between. It was a bed—his own bed.

Gon had fallen off his bed before—he'd fallen off a top bunk before—but never in his life had he managed such a feat while also rolling underneath said bed.

After expertly barrel-rolling himself out from underneath his mattress, he bumped into the stack of boxes he had yet to unpack and sprung to his feet. The digital clock on his nightstand read that it wasn't quite dinner, and yet that warm sunset halo was filling the room now.

A single glance down at his hands confirmed that something was horribly, terribly, undeniably wrong with him.

The scream left him before anything else—words, thoughts, feelings. Staggering, he nearly toppled the boxes over but somehow missed them in his fall to the floor.