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Greed Island is a hot, dry place bathed in sunlight, crumbling soil unfit to support tree growth, winds raising dust into your eyes at the most inopportune of times during fights, but all of it feels artificial. When he focuses on ants drawing transient patterns on the ground, feels the particles in the air on his skin, when he raises daring eyes at the sun and draws comparisons to the warm embrace he knows from Whale Island, he remembers he’s only in here for a game of tag, only in for a game, playing make-believe.
When his gaze finds the night sky, he sees dots a thoughtless pen left behind, not stars. When he looks at the moon, he sees Ging’s hand blessing a crooked branch with a silver sheen and attaching it to this soulless black canvas as an afterthought. The silhouette of mountains in the dark is flawless like an artist’s work, without the indentations an inexperienced child’s hand would have littered all over them. The breeze sweeping over them when they lay to rest is just the perfect temperature every night. The landscape is too carefully imbalanced, pebbles too uniform in colour, imperfections follow a pattern, even Bisky is like a porcelain doll in her fabricated skin, and Killua’s presence is the only thing that feels real.
Killua’s facial expressions aren’t programmed. The glimmer of his eyes isn’t mere reflection. Killua’s breath gets uneven, pace changing according to his energy level, hair a different mess every morning. He doesn’t always get the same type of excited for chocolate. His veins aren’t intricate latticework, his callouses aren’t carefully spread apart, his scars aren’t measured with rulers. In Killua’s mouth, Gon’s name sounds different every time.
Killua is his home field he’s the most comfortable playing in. He’s a benchmark, the universal criterion for being a good friend for all Gon knows. In Killua, he sees strong shoulders forged before their time. He sees stable hands and a stationary heart, unwavering conviction to be by Gon’s side whenever Gon wishes. His loyalty is unintrusive, his devotion not blind, and this bond between them, it’s not manufactured like steel wires, but organic, malleable, breakable, like ivy branches.
He still wants to find Ging. He still doesn’t think of him as a father. This game, this battle against violent players, this gruelling training, he doesn’t regret any of it. Something new catches his attention every day, a new story unlocked, a new ally gained, but at the end of the day, it’s the same painted backdrop of the sky and the same consistent texture beneath his hands that he falls back on. He doesn’t question any of the decisions he made on the way, but he knows he doesn’t have to be content with what he gets, all the time.
In a dream, he sees the two of them, but he’s witnessing the scene from afar. There stands Killua, face in the dark, angled towards Gon as if he wants to say something before parting, but can’t. Gon’s back is turned, fists clenched; looking straight ahead, he doesn’t let it show even if he’s aware of Killua’s eyes on him.
Gon always has his eyes set on some goal. He knows it’s the same for his dream self. But he can’t see what that goal is, here and now, his mind doesn’t give it priority over what he sees, the distance between them, and he’s stuck watching, hollow in his chest, vacuum in his ears.
When he wakes up, he doesn’t know if the dream feels real or artificial, if it’s his mind playing tricks on him or trying to wake him up to an impending tragedy. When he’s lost, he faces his lighthouse, his lodestar in the dark, now with his neutral sleeping face on, Killua.
Gon has never seen Killua smile a real smile. This is the one junction for him and Greed Island. It might be arrogant of Gon, presumptuous in his confidence that he knows what’s going on in the deeper, darker alleys of Killua’s mind when he morphs his face into various expressions, the way that’s been drilled into him. One thing Gon has under his belt, however, the one thing he has trust in when it comes to his relationship with this boy he’s nursing complicated feelings for, feelings beyond his comprehension, is experience. He knows what a real smile feels like, in his mind before it’s given birth to, and on his face, newborn, contracting muscles, crinkling skin, this island boy, carefree son, Gon.
Doubt festers in him at the idea of a pretense, the possibility of their togetherness being a farce. Is he a friend if he can’t even make Killua smile? On the other hand, even Gon can’t get mighty enough to think he can erase a past, be the bucket of paint to spill over pages and re-colour Killua’s memories in forest green; pitch black always finds a way to bleed through, the pages will throw up the blotch.
Killua’s eyes are the most brilliant blue the world has ever seen. There’s an ocean there to get lost in, an Arcadia that makes Gon jealous of a pair of eyelids. If those eyes could ever know what it meant to be happy, unadulterated and carefree, the air would be a shade easier to breathe in.
There used to be a small part of his heart, a baby crying day and night, that Gon had strangled before it could grow up and sow seeds of conflict. The voice used to pull him towards the house on the hill, all the way back to Mito-san’s arms; when he left for the Hunter Exam and met someone he cared for, it would still urge Gon to go back, but this time, after taking Killua’s hand. If that baby had been alive, it would have told Gon to stop, think, ask, see, deconstruct, rebuild. The creeping sensation that throws Gon off from time to time is that his and Killua’s relationship was laid on uneven ground, no engineering or even a watchful eye in the lumping together of shoddy material. But just like Killua, Gon had been shaped into who he is now long before they met, and even though it is hard fact that this building will soon collapse, Gon wouldn’t have lent an ear to that voice before it’d been too late, he knows.