Chapter Text
i.
Scarlet Eyes.
They’re just as beautiful as Chrollo remembers. Perhaps even more so now, staring out at him from a living face.
The rain hammers against the windows as the car races down Yorknew’s streets. It distorts Chrollo’s image in the glass, his pale face silhouetted against the dark sky outside. The chains are so tight around him that he can hardly breathe, and he feels them constrict his lungs whenever his chest expands to draw breath. They chafe against his neck, rubbing the skin there raw, and bite through his clothing. He can feel the zetsu imbued within the metal, shutting off his aura.
He's sweating beneath his heavy, fur-lined jacket. The seats beneath him are fine leather, and the vehicle itself smells like disinfectant and air freshener. A rental car, then. The expensive kind. One of the Nostrade Family’s.
And next to him, the chain user.
He’s younger than Chrollo was expecting. Prettier too, if he’s being honest. Soft, delicate features and a small, willowy frame. Even without the disguise, Chrollo might have mistaken him for a girl. He still has the slightest hint of lipstick smudged on his mouth from where he wiped it off with the back of his hand. And those eyes, the color of the world’s most coveted jewel, unable to be replicated—
The Kurta Clan. Oh yes, Chrollo remembers them.
He remembers how stunning their eyes looked in his hands.
(He remembers the children tortured and mutilated on the ground—their heads flying from their shoulders, the blood soaking into the grass and across the floor. And he remembers the brief, nauseating thought he attempted to banish as soon as it came: They look like Sarasa.)
He remembers Lukso Province, with its lush meadows and canopy trees; its blue skies, fresh streams, and the way the sunlight fell over it to turn everything it touched to gold. The complete antithesis to Meteor City—it felt like stepping up out of Purgatory and into the Garden of Eden.
And five years ago, the Phantom Troupe entered through its gates and stained the land permanently in red. Like the serpent slipping into the garden, poisoning it with its evil
The boy sitting next to him in the backseat is a specter of all his sins. He can’t be any older than eighteen, no younger than sixteen. He would have been little more than a child when his home was stained in death and violence—when the naïve innocence of his youth was ripped away and stolen from him. Around the same age as Chrollo, in fact, when the world stole his away with a single hanging bag and a rain-soaked note nailed into a tree.
The chain user is practically vibrating with fury. His body is like a harp string pulled taut, but it’s being played too forcefully, too harshly; and with each strum, the golden strings threaten to snap. His fingers clench around the chains on his hand. Chrollo spares a curious thought to the other chains, apart from the one on his middle finger—what abilities do they have?
And how much careful maneuvering would it take to be able to steal them?
A useless thought, of course. Chrollo is in no position to contemplate it. He’s already resigned himself to the very real possibility of dying here, and he knows his spiders must be doing the same. They’re all going to come—Pakunoda will know the correct choice to make, will know better than to follow the chain user’s demands—and Chrollo can only pray to a god he long ago lost his faith in that the fortune doesn’t prove itself to be true.
The words ring in his head, even now: You will remain supreme. Even after losing half of your limbs.
It’s basic fatalism versus determinism. In a world dictated by fate, is that fate intrinsically fixed or is it causally determined by prior action?
The chain user’s irises are flooded scarlet, burning with fire. It’s all there, in those eyes, the desire for blood washing brown into a brilliant red. The entirety of humanity’s capacity for hatred, glaring into him from the face of one pale, thin boy. Golden hair reaching just past his chin, framing his face like a halo.
An angel of vengeance, Chrollo thinks, and appreciates the poeticism of it all. Is this who you’ve sent to judge me?
Those eyes. Ruby red, a color unreplicable.
“Beautiful,” Chrollo says.
He doesn’t actually intend to say it out loud. But it’s worth it to see how those eyes flare in response, hatred brightening them even further still, beyond what he thought possible.
“What did you just say?!” the chain user snarls. He’s nothing but fire and blood, consuming.
All of it directed at Chrollo.
It feels almost flattering, to be the singular target of such powerful, potent rage. Such hatred, after all, requires its own type of devotion; it’s like love, in that sense, that it requires caring and tending and dedication to keep it burning—so brightly, for so long. It’s utterly exhausting.
Chrollo can’t say he knows how that feels. Not entirely, at least. He knows the shape of it, the outline, but Sarasa was different—her killer was not a single person, a single organization, but rather, the world itself. And it is impossible to hate an entire world with such narrow, focused intensity. He has tried.
So yes, the chain user’s devotion to his vengeance might be flattering. Were it not the weapon that speared Uvo through the heart and left him cold.
“Kurapika,” the woman in the passenger’s seat warns. “Calm down. Your heart rate—”
“I know,” the chain user snaps, struggling to keep control.
The red fades from the teenager’s eyes, irises returning to their much more ordinary shade of brown. It’s no matter to Chrollo—his fascination with the scarlet orbs has ended, brought to an abrupt, cold stop as he remembers Uvogin. The fortune’s words on the page, confirming what he already knew in his heart to be true.
He remembers the harsh, polluted air of his home. Uvo looking down at him, making a solemn pledge: I’ll follow you until I die.
He keeps his expression blank, despite the weight crushing his ribcage and lungs. The burn of anger—but unlike the boy in front of him, his is controlled. Unseen, except for perhaps the slight hardening of gray eyes, which only his spiders would be able to recognize.
His gaze flickers down to the chains on the blonde’s hand. He can feel the pulse of nen—electric, charged—in the air between them.
“Are those the chains you used to kill Uvo?” Chrollo asks.
“I’ll kill you with them, too,” the Kurta says.
Chrollo smiles. It’s a cold, humorless thing. “No you won’t. You kill me, you’re killing your friends. You care for them far too much to do that. You won’t endanger their lives for your selfish pursuits.”
In that regard, we’re the same. The realization is slightly unsettling.
The chain user gnashes his teeth. “Speak another word, you bastard, and I’ll gag you.”
“Kinky,” Chrollo says.
For the second time, a fist lands solidly and forcefully in his sternum. He can feel one of his ribs splinter, pain slicing through his chest, the oxygen knocked from him. The chains scrape against his skin, and he tastes metal in his mouth. Choking on his own breath, he laughs.
Yes, Chrollo thinks. Such beautiful eyes. The last of their kind to exist within a living face. If this boy didn’t kill Uvo—if he wasn’t pursuing the Phantom Troupe with eyes so full of vengeance and flame-forged resolve—
Well. Chrollo almost feels it a shame, that those eyes are going to be snuffed out.