Suddenly Quirkless

The Difference Between Solitude and Loneliness

Killua Zoldyck was a boy carved from ice.

From the time he was a small infant, he was trained for greatness. Molded into the perfect continuation of the Zoldyck legacy. If only they had remembered to remove his heart entirely, instead of simply leaving it frozen.

Ice thawed, with enough persuasion.

Still, Killua supposed, at first it didn't really matter, did it?

He learned to resist the poison flooding his veins, even as it boiled his insides and made his mouth taste like the iron of a muzzle, and of the blood that dripped onto the metal every time he put it on. The lining of his stomach felt like it was peeling away sometimes, and that was when Killua started practicing abstaining consumption altogether. His family was surprised he held out as long as he could, but this only meant they were more pleased with his great potential.

He learned to resist sleep, until all he needed was a few hours every week and he was able to replace rest with fighting. Training and training and training only so that he could begin more training. By three, he was tailing potential victims on the streets, constantly putting his life in danger and preparing, but never being allowed to, kill. By the time he was five, he'd long since started using his new live targets in his more specialized 'practice.' Dozens of innocents lying dead at his feet, but none as hollow as he felt.

He learned to resist the soft, padded thumps his feet had once made on the cold ground, replacing them with a chilling silence. The air begged to be filled with noise, but all that remained of Killua Zoldyck was a ghost. No, not a ghost.

Killua hadn't died. Rather, he'd never been given a chance to live. He was more akin to a doll, or a marionette.

'A puppet of darkness,' a little voice whispers, sonorous and resounding within Killua's head. 

He knows it's not real- not in the way it used to be, at least. But the truth of those words was and always would be as real as Killua himself, and honestly, the young ex-assassin wasn't sure which verity he'd prefer. Was he living a nightmare, or was he the nightmare?

His worth had always lain in his skill in killing, in deceit and violence. He was born to be an empty husk with no desires except to rise to eminence and preserve his prestigious family name. He was shrouded in death from the day he was conceived, and he had been raised to know no other purpose but that he was so generously given.

He was a killer, meant to classify people into two categories: those he would kill and those he would not.

Gon's radiant personality just didn't compute; he was an unaccounted for variable, so Illumi tried to convince Killua that his friendship was an illusion. That Killua was merely...intrigued by such a unique character, rather than the truth of the matter.

Killua had not been intended to develop attachments. It shouldn't have been possible, but then, even as he excelled in every task assigned to him, even as he grew to be potentially the most (in)famous Zoldyck of all time, even as he experienced nothing but the company of his own faint heartbeat(it had learned to be quiet, just like his feet and his will), Killua was still somehow a failure. 

How paradoxical.

Perhaps it was like Illumi had said. If Killua were to stay with Gon, he'd have eventually hurt him. Killed him. It was his nature, to fail and betray and walk the fine line in between his two worlds, not because he was part of both, but because neither wanted him(all of him) and there was nowhere else for him to be.

Or maybe, the reality was truly a sick perversion of that prediction. Maybe Killua had sapped at Gon's light like a leech, replacing it with his ice in his naïve belief that Gon was incorruptible.