Hunters X and X Heroes

The X Silver has X Tarnished

The tall fellow was waiting to greet them. His arms were riddled with curious marks; they were scars but it was near impossible to tell what they were from. They seem like they used to be very deep, as if he had been punctured from the inside out. They were large as well, both in size and number.

The girl who returned the man's friendly 'hello' knew exactly what they were from, and her friends could more or less guess.

When Leorio first saw the man standing at the end of the corridor with a nomadic grin that he had seen before, the intern dropped his checkered suitcase in alarm and called for a retreat. His hysteria made for hysterical laughter from the scarred man and the children.

Rukei couldn't even keep down a smile as she tried to explain the situation to the doctor; her mouth was oddly twisted into a very bad attempt of frown. It looked like she was trying to smirk and hold back a sneeze at the same time.

The scarred man squinted, he was trying to pick out some sort of detailed difference as they came closer. He crossed his arms, but that didn't help him, so he cupped his chin in his hand. "Is it just me or have you gotten shorter?"

"'Shorter'?" Rukei echoed, her bemused expression falling into disbelief and a slight hint of disappointment, "That's impossible, Jen. I'm thirteen. I'm growing."

"Not faster than these boys," Jen hummed, crouching down to the children as he made an invisible line over her head.

She heard the sharp, victorious clap from behind her, so she knew her friends gave each other a high-five. When she first met Gon, she was taller than him, the spiky hair aside of course. In the exam, Rukei was pretty sure that Killua and herself were separated by only a tiny margin, if not exactly the same, and her ever perfect posture usually gave the illusion that she was the tallest out of them.

Now, not so much. Upon her somewhat dismayed look, Jen decided to double-check, "Alright, fine. Back to back."

They followed his directions eagerly, shuffling to stand against each other awkwardly, as the three of them could not be literally 'back to back'. If Glass and Shichi had not already long left for their meeting, they would have rolled their eyes at the foolishness. Crimson would have played along, giving the brunette something akin to a comforting pat on the shoulder.

"Rukei, stop standing on your tip-toes," Leorio snickered.

Both Killua and Gon craned their heads around to check, but the girl was back on her heels just in the nick of time with a denial that nobody was going to take. "I wasn't."

"Killua's the tallest," Jen concluded before anyone could call her out, pulling away his marred arm that he used as a makeshift level, "Gon's gonna catch up pretty soon though."

The white-haired boy set his elbow on her shoulder, using her as a makeshift rest as he leaned on his new post with a smug grin, "'Killua's the tallest,' he says."

She sniffed irritably and roughly yanked her arm away, fast enough for him to lose his balance and nearly fall to the ground. "I'm thirteen, I'm still growing," Rukei repeated, trying to convince herself more than anyone else. She turned to doctor with a hopeful look, "Right?"

"It's hard to say," Leorio made an expression to mimic one contemplating a difficult subject, and Rukei suddenly regretted not taking Shichi's advice of drinking lots of milk.