Work Text:
Hello, Gon.
The ever-growing thorn in my side, the poison ivy around my neck, secreting the scent that’s enough alone to make me forget.
When we met at 12 years old, both of us were subsisting on our self-hate, nurturing it with love for others. We were eating up our own reserves to fill up others’ wells. Our meeting was the crashing of two tsunami waves, not the meeting of two rivers that merge and flow into the ocean without tumult.
When we met, you taught me a way in which I could be loved. To me, who had only known one kind of love, the love that isn’t love, not the way those who believed they loved me felt. The love that suffocates you and drowns your own self in it, the one that makes you one with who gives you it. The one kind of love that’s meant to erase who you are. You taught me there was another way.
Your light was my signpost. In the freezing dark waters that had long rendered me numb, you were a lighthouse. When I met you, I was completely taken. I was completely swept away by your force, and I loved you, Gon.
I loved you with the intensity of the only love I’ve ever known. I loved you with the vigour of the one other thing I knew how to do. I loved you with my entire being, from my fingertips with pointed nails to the soft sides of my stomach that are my weak spots to this day. I loved you with my nose, and mouth, and eyes because I didn’t know I had a heart with which I could love, Gon.
You see, my heart was my enemy’s upper hand against me. Something to guard, something to cling to, because only so could I keep going, keep swimming against the current and come out on top. Only so long as I had it beating in my chest that I could do what I was born to do, and so, keep being there for the ones who needed me to. I thought, the fool I was, because I didn’t know any better, because I wasn’t taught any better, that so long as I kept its tangible within my ribcage, I was safe.
When you came round and took it away without ever asking me to, I never realised it. When I did, it took my by surprise, so severe I didn’t know what to do other than tear your body apart, find the heart you stole and hid, and tear myself away from you, run as far as I can into the arms that were the most familiar to me, because they sucked four fifths of my self into their mass. Gon.
You still have my heart somewhere on you. In the end, I decided that you would cherish it better than I would ever be able to. You gave my heart a home, the warmth it needed to survive, you gave my heart a wisp of breath and a single drop from the eternal spring of life gushing out of you, and it was all it ever needed to survive for the rest of its days. Now it lives with the light it reflects from you, with the quintessence you placed in it, with the warmth it can only exude thanks to you. It lives to give you everything it has, to exist for your sake and die for your sake, Gon. Because you gave it everything it ever has, and you gave it the reason to live. Gon…
Your goals in life are bigger than me. They’re bigger than life itself. You have selfless love surrounding you, you are powered by the affection and compassion you receive from everyone and everything around you, you live for those who live for you. You have everything, and you have so many addresses in your notebook to send love back to. You’re an existence everyone needs in their lives, you’re an existence above us all, and you’re so valuable, you’re so invaluable, you’re a wonder of the world. You’re a universal treasure, you’re not for one person’s to keep, and you’re too precious to be a captive of me, my affection, my love, Gon.
I’m small, but a speck of ugly mud brown in the vast tide of this world, nothing but a shadow. You’re light, you don’t need any more shadows, Gon. You can have as many as you like, right from where you exist, where you bathe us in your luminescence, you don’t need a shadow like me that grows more and more avaricious the more beacons you deign to let shine over me, because the more I receive, the more I’ll ask for, and one day, I’ll lose myself and eclipse you, claim you all for myself and never let you go. The first way I’ve seen how to “love”. Because I’m afraid I’m not strong enough to shake off its influence entirely, and I’m afraid the void inside me won’t be satisfied by anything less than all of you.
That’s why I relinquish my feelings, I surrender. I go quietly, and I go smiling, because I got to have you. For such a short amount of time, but it was more than I’ve ever had. I can never forget the honour of being your best friend.
Am I selfish enough to take this decision entirely on my own? Maybe. But you would get the feeling of having to do everything on your own if it means ease and comfort for your loved ones, even if it’s only in your skewed perception, wouldn’t you?
(I still love you.)
Your friend, sad though he is that he never got to be the safe harbour where, no matter what, you could go back to,
Killua.