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Kurapika always wondered what amount of desperation and recklessness would be able to turn someone like himself, a trained Hunter, a strategist who calculated three moves ahead in every encounter, into someone foolish enough to pick up a cursed object in a dark cargo hold with no witnesses and no backup plan.
The answer, apparently, was forty hours without sleep and a body running on caffeine and fury and not much else.
He found the object wedged between two crates stamped with the Kakin royal seal, in the lower storage hold of the Black Whale where he had been searching for surveillance equipment. It was small enough to fit in his palm, an old compass with a brass casing gone green with age and a glass face clouded to opacity. There was no needle inside, only a disc of dark metal etched with symbols that belonged to no language he recognized, and when he brought it closer, the fine hairs on his forearms stood straight and his Nen prickled at its edges like the air before a thunderstorm.
He knew better than this. Every year of training told him so. Kakin had centuries of cursed objects hoarded by royals who understood their destructive potential even when they could not wield it, and this one was humming, a low insistent sound just below the threshold of hearing, burrowing into his awareness like a splinter working its way beneath the skin.
But his suppressants were wearing thin as well, his scent threatening to bleed through the chemical barrier in a ship teeming with alphas who would notice, and the cumulative weight of exhaustion and the Succession War grinding on above him had worn his judgement dangerously thin. He could not afford to be noticed, and yet here he was, crouching alone in a dim cargo hold with a cursed relic purring against his palm like a living thing that was pleased to be found.
His fingers closed around it before the thought finished forming.
The hum sharpened to a scream.
The first thing he registered was cold, and the wrongness of it. Cold concrete under his shoulder instead of the ship's humming floor, and then his body rolled on instinct and the white static in his skull cleared just enough for training to take over. His vision swam and doubled and corrected itself. Night sky gaped above him where there should have been a low ceiling, and the air tasted of diesel and wet pavement and cheap oil from a kitchen somewhere nearby.
He pushed himself to his knees. His hands were empty. The compass was gone.
A city spread around him in the darkness, low buildings packed tight along a narrow street, power lines sagging overhead. Music leaked from behind a closed door somewhere to his left, tinny and distorted through thin walls. The signage was in a language he could read but the fonts were dated, styles that had fallen out of fashion a decade ago, and the realization crept into his mind like cold water seeping through cracks in stone.
He was not in the right time.
His chain was still on his hand and Emperor Time was accessible. He checked both by reflex, and the familiar weight of the links against his knuckles anchored him just enough to steady his pulse. He was in an alley between two dark buildings, and the street at the far end was illuminated by a single lamp that buzzed and flickered, casting a jaundiced glow across the wet pavement.
And then another realization struck him, sharper and more immediate than the first.
His suppressants were not working.
Whatever the artifact had done when it pulled him through, the delicate chemical balance in his blood had been shattered. He could feel it already, the slow loosening at the base of his spine, the warmth gathering low in his belly like embers being stoked back to life. His scent was leaking, sweet and rose-heavy, and in perhaps an hour it would be broadcasting to every alpha within a mile, a beacon he had spent years learning to suffocate.
A sound cut through his spiralling thoughts. Running footsteps, light and fast, coming from his right. Then a second set, heavier, carrying the unmistakable cadence of boots. And voices, clipped with the authority of men accustomed to chasing things that did not wish to be caught.
Kurapika pressed himself against the wall and waited.
The boy came around the corner at full sprint, and Kurapika's chest seized like a fist had closed around his heart.
He had dark hair and dark clothes, and he was lean and sharp-boned, too thin for it to be deliberate, the angles of his jaw and wrists suggesting irregular meals rather than any training regimen. He moved with startling precision, every step calculated, his body twisting through the narrow street with an animal grace that betrayed raw talent rather than formal training. The efficiency of it was almost mesmerizing, how he spent no energy on fear and poured all of it into speed, each turn of his body shaving seconds off the distance between himself and the boots behind him.
He was young, close to Kurapika's age or perhaps younger, with a face that had not yet surrendered its sharper angles to adulthood.
Kurapika recognized him instantly.
His stomach dropped as though the ground had opened beneath him, and numbness spread from his fingertips up through his wrists and into his chest. He had studied those features until they replaced sleep, poring over police files and Hunter Association records and grainy surveillance footage from crime scenes spanning six continents, memorizing every angle and shadow until the face was seared into his memory like a brand that would never heal.
Chrollo Lucilfer looked different young.
He was thinner than the man Kurapika knew from those files, the cross tattoo on his forehead fresh with lines still sharp and the skin around it faintly pink with healing. His hair was shorter and messier, falling across his face without the deliberate arrangement Kurapika had studied in later images. He wore a jacket two sizes too big that swallowed his narrow frame, and a bulky object was shoved under it, pressed against his ribs with one arm while the other pumped at his side.
He did not see Kurapika.
He ran past the mouth of the alley and kept going, and Kurapika's body moved before his mind had given permission, as though some invisible thread had hooked itself beneath his ribs and yanked him into the dark.
He followed from the rooftops, Nen reinforcing his limbs as he scaled the building in seconds and tracked the chase from above.
Chrollo ducked left, vaulted a chain-link fence one-handed while keeping whatever he had stolen pressed to his side, cut through a parking lot full of rusted vehicles, and vanished into the gap between two warehouse buildings. The three men in uniforms behind him reached the fence thirty seconds later, tried to climb it, failed, argued with each other in breathless frustration, and eventually turned back the way they had come.
Kurapika watched all of it from his perch on the warehouse roof. His eyes were scarlet. He could feel the heat behind them, everything sharpening to painful hyper-focus, and he pressed the heel of his hand against his right eye socket and tried to breathe through it. But the scarlet was tangling with the heat gathering lower in his body, the two feeding off each other until his hands were trembling and his skin felt like it was burning from the inside.
This was Chrollo Lucilfer, young and unformed, running from a petty theft charge in a back alley in whatever city this was. There was no Spider tattoo that he could see, no coat with the fur collar, no Bandit's Secret or Indoor Fish or stolen Nen abilities hoarded in that hateful book. He was a boy with quick hands and a tattoo that still looked like it hurt.
And he was an alpha.
Kurapika had always known that. He had known it the first time he stood in the same room as the older Chrollo and every cell in his body had screamed mate while his mind screamed murderer, the two impulses tearing through him like opposing currents that threatened to rip him apart. He had spent years learning to override that signal, to bury it beneath suppressants and rage and the ironclad refusal to let biology hand him to the man who had murdered his entire clan. He had never let Chrollo touch him, not once. The older Chrollo knew what Kurapika was to him, of course he did, and he had carried on as though it were only a matter of time, that serene and maddening patience more infuriating than any overt claim could have been.
But now the suppressants were gone, and the alpha below him was the same person and not the same person at all, and Kurapika's body did not care to make the distinction.
Was this what the compass had brought him here for? To stand on a rooftop in the wrong decade with his heat rising and his enemy's younger face burned into his retinas, and to want? Was this the cruelty of Kakin artifacts, or was it the same cruelty that had lived inside him since the first time he caught Chrollo's scent across a crowded room and understood with sickening clarity that the universe had paired him with a monster?
He dropped down from the roof.
Chrollo had stopped running. He had reached a dead end and settled onto a stack of wooden pallets without any visible panic, as though he had planned to end up here all along, and he had pulled the stolen object from under his jacket.
It was a book.
Kurapika landed eight feet from him, and Chrollo's head snapped up, his body going coiled and still with his weight already shifted toward the nearest exit. His eyes looked grey at first but they were darker than that, deep and sharp, and they were already sizing Kurapika up with an intensity that mirrored his own.
Then his nostrils flared, and the stillness in his body changed entirely.
His pupils dilated until the dark of his irises was nearly swallowed. His lips parted, and his fingers tightened on the book in his lap with a white-knuckled grip. Kurapika's own body answered in kind, spine loosening, heat pooling low in his belly, his feet shifting half a step forward before he caught himself and locked his knees against the pull.
"You're not police," Chrollo observed. His voice was lighter than the one Kurapika knew, the vowels rounder, carrying traces of an accent the older version had long since polished away.
Kurapika shook his head.
"You're an omega."
"That's not relevant."
"It's extremely relevant. You're in my alley, in heat, and you smell like you belong to me." He leaned forward, knuckles white on the edge of the pallet, every muscle in his shoulders straining against the impulse to stand. "We've never met. I would remember."
"We haven't met."
"Then how do you smell like mine?"
A flush was climbing Kurapika's throat, warm and unwanted. Chrollo smelled like the older version of himself but rougher, unfinished, without the layers of careful control Kurapika had learned to brace against over the years. It was worse this way. The rawness of it slipped past defences that the polished version could never breach, burrowed straight into the part of his brain that did not care about vengeance or justice or the years of grief that separated him from everything he had ever loved.
"I need something from you," Kurapika answered, his voice strained.
Chrollo tilted his head, and the gesture sent a jolt through Kurapika's chest like a needle between his ribs, because he had seen that exact angle a hundred times in surveillance footage, and on this younger face it looked like the original that all those later versions had merely been copying.
"Most people who need something from me don't show up smelling like that," Chrollo observed. "It's distracting."
"I'm aware."
"What do you need?"
Kurapika's chain links clinked against each other. He had no leverage over this boy, no Judgment Chain that would work on a non-Spider member, no political power, nothing except his body and what it was doing to both of them.
So he would use that.
"I want you to swear an oath," Kurapika demanded, and his voice carried an authority that surprised even himself. "That you will never go near the Kurta clan. That you will never seek them out, harm them, take from them, or send anyone to do it in your place. Ever."
Chrollo blinked. "The Kurta? The clan in the forest province?"
"Yes." Kurapika glared at him.
"Why?" Chrollo looked genuinely confused.
"The reasons are mine, and they will stay mine. What matters is the deal itself."
"Then tell me the deal, because right now all I have is a beautiful stranger bleeding pheromones in my alley and demanding things he has no leverage to demand."
Kurapika breathed in through his mouth to keep Chrollo's scent from clouding his head any further, and it barely helped. "If you swear that oath and you mean it, I'll bond with you. Willingly."
Chrollo stared at him. The book sat forgotten in his lap, his hands gone still on the cover. His scent shifted and thickened, and Kurapika could feel his own body responding to it like a flame leaning toward a draught, helpless and hungry and utterly without dignity.
"You're offering me a bond," Chrollo repeated, and the words came out slow and deliberate, reciting the terms of a contract he could not quite believe was real. "An omega I've never met, who dropped out of the sky in heat, is offering me a willing bond in exchange for staying away from a remote forest clan."
"Every word of it," Kurapika answered, and lifted his chin, eyes blazing scarlet and his pulse was hammering so hard he could feel it in his teeth, and he had never meant anything more completely in his life.
"You don't know me."
"I know enough."
Chrollo stood. The book hung at his side in one hand, and he took a step closer, then another. Kurapika held his ground, though every nerve in his body was burning. Chrollo stopped three feet away, close enough that his scent was a physical weight against Kurapika's skin, warm and invasive and intoxicating.
"A bond isn't a leash," he remarked, and his tone had gone sharper, cooler. "If I agree and then break the oath, the bond doesn't punish me."
"It will if I sever it." Kurapika held up his right hand, and the chain caught the dim light. "I have the ability to break a mating bond by force. If you break your oath, I will sever the bond between us, and the backlash will kill us both. You've grown up in Meteor City. You know what happens when a bond is severed."
Chrollo's expression did not change, but his scent did, the interested note sharpening into wariness, like an animal that had caught the first trace of a trap beneath the bait.
"You'd die too."
"Yes." Kurapika nodded.
"That doesn't bother you." Chrollo cocked his brow.
"Not especially." Kurapika meant it.
They looked at each other across three feet of cold air.
"The Kurta," Chrollo concluded, and a glint of understanding surfaced in his dark eyes. "You're one of them."
"The oath covers me too. All of us."
"Why would I ever want to hurt them?"
The irony of it seized Kurapika's chest so violently that his lungs locked, this boy with clean hands and an earnest question on his face asking why he would ever harm the people whose eyes he would one day rip from their skulls and auction to the highest bidder. He pressed the back of his hand to his mouth and held it there until the spasm in his chest released.
"Swear the oath," Kurapika demanded, and his voice was rough with wanting he refused to name, "and I'll let you mark me."
Chrollo did not agree easily.
He argued, circled, probed. He asked what Kurapika's name was, (and Kurapika did not give it.) He asked why the Kurta needed protection, (and Kurapika would not say). He asked what would happen to the bond if the omega who initiated it disappeared, (and Kurapika told him the bond would hold regardless of distance or time.)
"You're asking me to give up something I've never thought about wanting," Chrollo murmured eventually. He was sitting on the pallets again, the book beside him, his elbows on his knees. "I've read about the Kurta. I was curious about them. Their eyes. But I've never wanted to hurt them."
"Then the oath should cost you nothing."
"Everything has a cost. You're proof of that." His eyes moved down Kurapika's body and back up. "You're terrified of me. You've been shaking since you landed. And you're still offering this."
"I'm not terrified of you." Kurapika lied.
"Your scent says otherwise." the boy smirked.
"My scent says a lot of things right now that aren't accurate."
Chrollo's lips curled into the faintest ghost of amusement, "Fair point." He was quiet for a long moment, and when he spoke again, the playfulness had evaporated entirely. "If I swear this oath and bond with you, and I keep the oath, what happens? Do I get to see you again?"
"No. Not for years, at least."
"Years." He turned that over, rolling the word around as though testing the weight of a stone he might have to carry for a very long time. "Then what's the point of the bond for me?"
"You'll have a bonded omega, who may give you pups in future, if you keep your oath. Your body will know it. You'll be able to sense me. That's more than most alphas from Meteor City can say."
Chrollo exhaled through his nose and stood.
Pups. That did it.
"I swear on my life and on the people I would die for that I will never go near the Kurta clan, never seek them out, never harm them, never take from them, and never send anyone to do it in my place." He held Kurapika's gaze while he spoke, steady and unwavering. "If I break this oath, you sever the bond and we both die. I understand the terms."
Kurapika's fingers would not hold still. He closed them into fists at his sides.
"Then we do this now," Kurapika exhaled, and his voice was barely above a whisper. "Before I lose my nerve."
The alley was not the place Kurapika would have chosen, had he been given any choice at all.
The concrete was cold and gritty, and the wooden pallets were the closest thing to a surface, and the single light at the far end threw more shadow than illumination, painting everything in tones of grey and amber. His heat was getting worse by the minute, feverish warmth spreading through his limbs like poison in the bloodstream, his thoughts fraying at their limit like cloth held too close to flame.
Chrollo approached him carefully.
"Have you done this before?" he asked.
Kurapika's jaw tightened. "I have never let anyone touch me like this. Not for bonding, not any of it."
Chrollo stopped moving. He was close enough that Kurapika could feel the warmth radiating off his skin, and his scent had gone thick and sweet, pouring over him, drowning the last remnants of rational thought like honey poured over embers.
"You're giving your first time to a stranger in an alley," Chrollo murmured, and his voice had gone quiet with an awe he was not quite able to conceal, "for an oath about a clan I've never threatened."
"Are you trying to talk me out of it?" Kurapika snapped.
"I'm trying to understand you."
"You don't need to." Kurapika reached for the hem of his shirt and pulled it over his head. The night air hit his skin and he shivered. "You don't get to understand me. You get to bond me and keep your oath. That's the deal."
Chrollo looked at his bare chest, pink soft nipples, the lines of his ribs, the scent glands at his throat that were flushed and swollen and visible even in the dim light. His chest expanded with a slow, controlled inhale, and the muscles in his neck pulled tight.
"Okay," he breathed, barely audible, and then his hands were on Kurapika's waist.
His palms were warm and calloused and larger than Kurapika had expected. Kurapika grabbed his shoulders and held on, fingers digging into the oversized jacket, and for a few breathless seconds they just stood there, breathing each other in, suspended in the narrow space between decision and consequence.
"On the pallets," Kurapika managed.
They moved together, clumsy and urgent and entirely without grace. Chrollo shed the jacket and his shirt underneath, and he was thinner than the older version, the bones of his clavicle and ribs visible beneath pale skin. His scent glands were swollen at the juncture of his neck and shoulder, and the sight of them flooded Kurapika's mouth with a hunger that had nothing to do with his mind, nothing to do with the long years he had spent hating everything this body would become.
Chrollo pressed him down onto the pallets. The wood was rough against Kurapika's bare back, and he did not care. Chrollo's weight settled over him, hip to hip, and Kurapika could feel him through the remaining layers of clothing, hard and hot, and his body responded with a rush of slick that soaked through his pants and made Chrollo's breath stutter against his throat.
Would his mother forgive him for this? Would Pairo? Would the version of himself that had sworn on their graves to destroy this man ever stop screaming inside his skull long enough to let him breathe? He was about to give the most intimate part of himself to the person who would one day annihilate everyone he loved, and the devastating, unspeakable truth was that his body wanted it. Not just tolerated it, not merely endured it for the sake of the deal. Wanted it, with a ferocity that made him sick with self-loathing.
"You smell incredible," Chrollo murmured into the skin below his ear, and his lips brushed the scent gland there, and Kurapika arched off the pallets so hard that his spine cracked.
"I can't hear your voice right now," Kurapika ground out, and his own voice was wrecked beyond recognition. "If you talk I will think about who you are and I cannot do that, not now, so please just— don't."
Chrollo pulled back enough to look at him, and his pupils were blown wide, the dark of his irises swallowed almost entirely. He nodded once and lowered his mouth to Kurapika's throat again, and this time he used his teeth. It was not the bond bite, not yet, just a scrape and a pressure and a promise, and Kurapika's hands flew to Chrollo's hair and fisted there, pulling hard enough that a sound escaped Chrollo's throat, low, gravelly rough and devastating.
They got each other's pants off gracelessly. Kurapika kicked his free of one ankle and did not bother with the other, and Chrollo shoved his own down just far enough, and then there was nothing between them and Kurapika's body opened for him with an onslaught of slick, desperate ease that made his face burn with shame and want in equal measure.
Chrollo pushed in slowly, hesitantly, evidently inexperienced and young.
Kurapika's mouth fell open and nothing came out, and his hands locked on Chrollo's shoulders hard enough to bruise. This was the body that would kill his clan. These were the hands that would hold the jars of stolen eyes. This was the mouth that would give the order, the voice that would treat the massacre as an intellectual exercise, the mind that would reduce the Kurta to a line item in an auction catalogue. And he was inside Kurapika now, filling him up, and Kurapika's thighs were locking tight and his eyes were stinging and his stupid, desperate body was clenching around him as though it had been waiting for this its entire life.
How could this be wrong when it was filling a hollow inside him that had been empty his entire life?
Chrollo was unsteady above him, a fine shudder running through his arms and his stomach and the muscles of his thighs, and knowing that the alpha on top of him was as undone by this as he was helped, in some small and wretched way.
Chrollo bottomed out and held still, his forehead pressed against Kurapika's collarbone, his pulse hammering where their chests pressed together.
"I need you, Chrollo," Kurapika told him, and the rawness in his own voice startled him, because it came out sounding less like a command and more like a confession.
Chrollo moved with a gluttural growl.
The first thrust punched the air out of Kurapika's lungs, and the second made him grab for the edge of the pallet behind his head, and by the third he had stopped thinking about anything at all. His body had taken over completely, hips rising to meet each stroke, legs wrapping around Chrollo's waist and pulling him deeper, and the sounds he was making were sounds he had never made in his life and would have denied under oath.
Chrollo braced one hand beside Kurapika's head and used the other to grip his hip, thumb pressing into the hollow above the bone, and his rhythm was steady and relentless and exactly right. It did not feel like a transaction. It did not feel like a deal struck in desperation between an omega in heat and an alpha who smelled like fate. It felt like belonging, and that was far more dangerous than either of those things, and Kurapika bit down on his own forearm to keep the words that were building in his throat from escaping.
Chrollo pulled his arm away from his mouth and pinned Kurapika's wrist to the pallet beside his head and leaned down until their faces were inches apart, and his scent was everywhere, saturating Kurapika's skin and hair and lungs.
"Don't hide from me," he whispered, and it was the first thing he had spoken since Kurapika told him to be silent, and the words burrowed into Kurapika and stayed there like thorns that would never work themselves free.
Kurapika came without warning. His body seized, back bowing, thighs clamping tight around Chrollo's waist, and a sound tore out of his throat that echoed off the alley walls.
"The bond," Kurapika gasped out. "Now. While you're— now."
Chrollo lowered his mouth to the scent gland on the left side of Kurapika's throat, where the skin was thinnest and the blood ran closest to the surface. Kurapika tilted his head to give him access, baring the most vulnerable part of himself to the person he had spent years planning to destroy.
Was this surrender? Was this sacrifice? Or was this desire, plain and terrible, the wanting that had been there since the first time he caught Chrollo's scent and hated himself for leaning into it, buried so deep that even his own heart could not find it until now?
Chrollo bit down.
The pain was sharp and enormous, and it collided with the orgasm still rolling through Kurapika's body and the two sensations crashed together until he could not tell where one ended and the other began. He felt the bond snap into place between them, violent and immediate, slamming through him like a door thrown open in a storm.
Chrollo's knot was swelling. Kurapika could feel it catching at his rim with each thrust, thicker each time, and when it finally locked them together he hissed through his teeth at the stretch and the overwhelming fullness of it.
Chrollo came with his teeth still in Kurapika's throat, a groan vibrating against the wound, and the warmth flooded Kurapika's insides. His knot pulsed, once, twice, and Kurapika lay beneath him on a pile of stolen pallets in an alley that smelled of sex and bonding and blood.
"Your turn," Chrollo murmured against his throat, and Kurapika leaned up and sank his teeth into the scent gland on the left side of Chrollo's neck. Chrollo shuddered and groaned.
The bond completed and sealed them both for life.
Kurapika gasped and Chrollo's arms tightened around him, and for several seconds neither of them could do anything but hold on and ride through it. They were knotted together on wooden pallets in a dead-end alley, the oath sealed in blood and biology, and Kurapika could feel the tears on his face even though he had not been aware of crying.
They lay there while the knot held, long enough for the sweat to cool on Kurapika's skin and the night air to raise gooseflesh along his arms. Chrollo had rolled onto his side and pulled Kurapika with him, the two of them slotted together on the narrow pallets with Chrollo's knot still locked inside and the bond thrumming between them like a second heartbeat that neither of them had asked for.
Chrollo's hand was on Kurapika's stomach. Kurapika had not asked him to put it there, and he did not ask him to move it.
So this was what it felt like. This was the thing he had denied himself for years, the warmth of an alpha's body curved around his own, the possessive weight of a hand on his belly, the low thrum of a bond settling into the marrow of his bones. Was this what his mother had felt with his father? Was this the tenderness that the Kurta elders spoke of when they told stories about fated pairs around the evening fire, stories that Kurapika had listened to as a child and privately ached for, even then, even before he understood what aching was?
And he had found it here, on a pile of stolen pallets, with the one person in the world he should never have touched.
"You're going to leave," Chrollo murmured against the back of his neck.
"I have to. I was never supposed to be here at all."
"And I won't see you again." but his voice faltered on the last word, betraying that some part of him was still hoping to be contradicted.
"Not for a very long time." Kurapika combed through the dark silky mane. Chrollo leaned into the touch.
"But I'll feel you." His thumb moved across Kurapika's skin, just above the navel. "Through the bond. I'll know where you are."
"You'll know I exist. That's different from knowing where I am." Kurapika stared at the wall across from them. "You'll keep the oath."
"I already told you I would." Chrollo insisted, frustrated.
"Now you have a reason to mean it."
Chrollo was quiet for a long time, his breath warm against the back of Kurapika's neck, and the bond mark on his throat throbbed with each beat of his heart.
"Who are you?" he asked.
Kurapika closed his eyes. "Someone who couldn't think of another way."
The knot released, and Kurapika pulled free. He gathered his clothes from the concrete and dressed with his back to Chrollo, and his hands were shaking so badly that it took three tries to get his shirt over his head. The bond mark on his throat was bleeding sluggishly, soaking into his collar.
Chrollo tugged his arm aching for him to not leave, "Do you have to leave?"
"The poet," Kurapika breathed, his voice barely held, broken and coarse. "The one in the book you stole. The one who wrote about cages."
"What about him?"
"Read it until you understand what it means to take beautiful things from people who love them." he ripped his hand out of his grip.
He limped out of the alley without turning around. His thighs were slick and his pants were soaked through, and he could feel Chrollo's spend leaking out of him with every step.
The world started dissolving six steps later.
The pulling sensation came from behind his sternum, and the buildings blurred and the stars smeared and the alley behind him stretched and thinned until it was just a dark line with a pale shape in it, watching him go. He heard Chrollo call out, but the words did not survive the crossing.
The concrete under his back became ship floor, and the low ceiling of the Black Whale's cargo hold loomed six inches above his face, and the compass sat three inches from his outstretched fingers, brass casing and clouded glass, exactly as he remembered.
He did not touch it.
He pressed his hand to his throat instead. The bond mark was there, fresh and bleeding and real, the indentations of teeth still visible in the swollen skin. His body ached in places it had never ached before, and he was still wet between his thighs, and he could smell Chrollo on every inch of his skin, saturating him, claiming him, refusing to be washed out by will alone.
He rolled onto his side and dry heaved into the gap between two crates until his stomach stopped spasming, and then he pulled himself upright against the nearest wall and pressed both hands to his face.
The bond was alive. Faintly, impossibly, across a distance of years and through whatever gap in time the compass had opened and closed, it was humming.
He sat there for a long time.
His phone buzzed.
It was in his pocket, where it had been when the compass pulled him through, and the screen was cracked along one corner from the fall but still lit up. He pulled it out, and for several seconds the name on the screen did not make any sense, sat there in plain text like a word in a language he had once known and since forgotten.
The name on the screen was Pairo.
Kurapika's hand clamped around the phone so hard that the cracked screen flexed under his thumb.
He answered, hands shaking violently.
"Kurapika?" Pairo's voice was older than the one in his memory, deeper. "Hey, I've been trying to reach you. Are you okay? You sound weird."
Kurapika opened his mouth and nothing came out, he bit his lips hardly from screaming and wailing.
"Kurapika? Hello?"
"I'm here." He could barely get it out. "I'm here, Pairo. I'm—" He pressed his fist against his mouth and bit down on his knuckle hard enough to taste copper. "I'm fine. I just woke up. What is it?"
"Your mom wanted me to remind you to call her when you get to port. She says you never call enough, and Dad agrees, which means I have to be the one to nag you about it." He sounded worried. "You sure you're okay? You sound like you've been crying."
"I'm fine," Kurapika repeated, and the tears were running down his face and into his collar and soaking into the bond mark on his throat, and the lie was so transparent that it was almost an honesty of its own kind. "Tell them I'll call. I promise."
"Okay. Love you. Don't do anything stupid on that ship."
"I won't." Kurapika laughed through his tears.
The call ended. Kurapika lowered the phone to his lap and sat in the cargo hold of the Black Whale and wept silently until his chest ached, both hands pressed over his mouth.
Was this real? Was Pairo's voice on a cracked phone screen enough to believe that the world had rearranged itself around a promise made in a back alley by a boy who stole poetry books? Would the new memories come, or would he carry both versions forever, the one where his clan was ash and the one where his mother wanted him to call more? Which Kurapika was he now? The one who had spent years hunting Chrollo Lucilfer, or the one who had bonded him on a pile of pallets and left him in a dead-end alley with nothing but a bite mark and a stolen book?
He touched the bond mark on his throat and felt it pulse.
He made it to his cabin and locked the door, stripped his clothes, and stood under the shower until the water ran cold, but the scent would not wash off. It had seeped past his skin and into the bond mark itself, nesting in the wound like a living, territorial thing, and the whole cabin reeked of an alpha who had claimed him in another decade.
He was standing in front of the small mirror above the sink, staring at the wreckage: the bond mark livid on his throat, his scent glands distended, bruises scattered across his hips and wrists in shades of plum and saffron. Then the knock came.
A single blow against the door, hard enough to rattle the hinges and send a vibration through the thin walls.
Kurapika pulled his shirt on. The collar dragged across the bond mark and the spike of sensation that lanced through him was so acute that his knees buckled and he had to grab the edge of the sink to keep himself upright.
"Open the door." Chrollo's voice, tight and livid, stripped of every trace of the cultivated composure that had defined him for the years Kurapika had known him. "Open it, or I'll open it myself."
Kurapika opened the door.
Chrollo stood in the corridor in his dark coat with the fur collar, and the first thing Kurapika saw was not his face but his throat. On the left side of his neck, visible above the collar because he was making no attempt to conceal it, was a bond mark. Not fresh. An old scar, healed to a pale ridge of tissue that had clearly been part of his body for years, nearly a decade perhaps, carried from the night in the alley through every year that followed.
He had been carrying it since he was a boy. Since Kurapika vanished from that alley and left him tethered to a ghost.
His nostrils flared the moment the door opened, and his whole body went rigid. His hands clenched at his sides so tightly that the tendons stood out along his wrists, and his breathing turned shallow and laboured as though the air itself had thickened and was resisting his lungs.
His dark eyes swept from the bond mark on Kurapika's throat to his face and stayed there, and his mouth was pressed into a hard bloodless line, and his jaw was clenched so tightly that a muscle jumped beneath the skin.
He stepped inside and closed the door behind him loudly with a shudder and bang.
The cabin was very small. It had always been small, barely enough room for one person and a narrow bunk, but with Chrollo in it the walls contracted, and his scent filled the confined space so rapidly that Kurapika felt as though he were drowning in warm musk. Neither of them spoke for a while, breathing heavily, staring at each other.
The gaze had a weight to it, thick and suffocating, pressing against Kurapika's eardrums.
Chrollo raised his hand and touched the old scar on his own throat.
"How long have you known it was me?" Kurapika asked.
"Since you boarded this ship." Chrollo swallowed, and the movement in his throat was visible and painful. "The bond woke up when you got close. For years it had been dormant, barely a whisper, and then you walked onto the Black Whale and it roared to life and I could not breathe for three days." He let his hand drop. "I tried to get near you. Every time, you pulled a chain on me."
"I didn't know it was you," Kurapika whispered, and the horror of it was expanding inside his chest like a crack spreading through ice. "Four years on this ship and I had no idea. I thought you were just— I thought you were the man who killed my people. That was all I could see."
"I know you didn't know. That made it worse." Chrollo choked.
Kurapika's back was pressed against the edge of the sink, the porcelain cold through the thin shirt, and his knees were locked so tightly that his thighs ached.
"You smell like you just left that alley," Chrollo whispered, and then his composure crumpled and he pressed his hand over his mouth, his shoulders curled inward.
Kurapika affirmed with a nod.
"Pairo called me," Kurapika announced, and his own voice sounded foreign to his ears.
Chrollo's hand dropped. His eyes were wide and searching, and for the first time since he had entered the cabin, the fury had given way to bewilderment, naked and longing.
"My best friend. He was one of the reason for the oath. He called me twenty minutes ago, and he is alive." Kurapika's voice splintered on the word alive and he had to stop and draw a breath that felt like swallowing broken glass before he could finish. "My mother and my father and the whole clan. You kept the oath and they are alive."
Whatever had been holding Chrollo upright left his body all at once, and he took a step backward and hit the door and stayed there with his shoulders against the cold metal. A tremor ran through his frame, visible even beneath the heavy coat.
"I wanted them," he confessed, and his voice had gone thin and distant, barely audible over the humming of the ship's engines. "The Kurta eyes. I wanted them for years. I would hear about them in the underground and my hands would itch, and then the mark on my throat would burn like a coal pressed to skin and I would walk away." He swallowed. "I walked away every single time."
"Every time you walked away from them, you were saving someone I love," Kurapika answered, and his voice was barely audible. "Every single time, and you didn't even know it."
"You don't." The words came out sharp, almost vicious, and his eyes were bright with unshed tears, glittering in the harsh fluorescent light. "You have no idea what it cost me. I had to order my troupe to keep others from hunting your clan, I have been keeping them safe for you. I gave up the most beautiful thing I had ever heard of because a stranger in an alley asked me to, and then that stranger vanished and I had nothing left but a scar and a half-dead bond and the knowledge that I had promised something I did not understand to someone who did not exist."
The cabin was quiet except for the sound of the ship's engines and their own uneven lungs, too loud in the cramped space.
He had ordered his troupe to protect them. Not merely refrained from hunting the Kurta himself, but actively deployed the Phantom Troupe as their shield.
How many times had he stood between the underground and the Lukso Province without anyone knowing? How many collectors had inquired about the Kurta eyes only to receive word that the Spider had claimed them as off-limits? And all because of Kurapika, who had given him nothing but an oath and a bite mark and a name he refused to share. What kind of man honours a promise like that? What kind of man builds a fortress of protection around people he has never met for the sake of an omega he cannot find?
The same kind of man who, in another timeline, tore those people apart without hesitation. And that was the part that made Kurapika's chest feel like it was caving in on itself. The difference between the two versions was not vast or mysterious. It was a single oath, spoken on a pile of pallets by a boy who did not yet know what he was capable of.
"You want to know why," Kurapika answered, truth was inevitable.
"I have wanted to know why since I was a boy." Chrollo confessed.
"In the world and timeline I came from, you did not keep the oath. There was no oath. We never met in that alley." Kurapika's hands had gone unreliable and he pressed them flat against the counter behind him, the cold surface grounding him just enough to keep speaking. "You grew up and you went to the Lukso Province and you killed every Kurta there. The elders, the children, Pairo. You took their eyes out of their heads and sold them to collectors. I was twelve years old and I was the only one who survived because I was not home that day."
The colour drained from Chrollo's face so fast that for a moment he looked like a corpse propped against the door by nothing more than the pressure of what he had just been told. His lips parted but no sound emerged.
"I spent my whole life after that, hunting you," Kurapika continued. "I learned Nen for it. I became a Hunter for it. Every choice I made for years was about finding you and making you pay for what you did. And then I touched a cursed compass on this ship and ended up in an alley in the past, standing in front of a version of you who had not done it yet."
Chrollo's legs gave out.
He slid down the door until he was sitting on the floor of the cabin with his back against the metal and his knees drawn up and his head in his hands, and his shoulders were heaving with the silent, wretched convulsions, weeping bitterly, remembering it all at once.
Kurapika watched him from across the tiny room, his own knuckles bone-white where they gripped the counter. He did not know what he was feeling. It was not hatred, or not only hatred. It was not love, or not yet. It was not forgiveness, because there was nothing to forgive in a man who had kept his word. It was all of those things mixed together until he could not separate one from another, and the confusion hurt worse than any of the individual parts would have on their own.
Was he supposed to comfort this man? Was he supposed to cross the room and put his arms around the person who, in another life, had butchered his family? Or was it crueller to stay where he was, watching the head of the Phantom Troupe break apart on his cabin floor, knowing that the reason for those tears was not guilt over something he had done but grief over something he had just learned he was capable of?
And underneath all of that, quieter and more shameful than any of it: did Kurapika want to go to him not because it was the right thing, but because the bond was pulling and his body was aching and the alpha on the floor smelled like the boy who had kept his promise?
"You kept your promise," Kurapika cracked, and his voice broke on the word promise like a bone giving way under too much weight. "You kept it, and Pairo is alive, and I do not know what to do with you now. I built my entire life around hating you and you are the reason my family exists."
Chrollo did not lift his head. His fingers were clenched in his own hair and his shoulders would not stop heaving.
"I don't have a name," he choked into his hands. "You never gave me one. All these years and I don't even know what to call you."
Kurapika let go of the counter.
He crossed the narrow space and lowered himself to the floor across from Chrollo, and their knees pressed together in the cramped gap between the door and the sink. The contact sent a jolt through both of them, the bond flaring at the point of touch, and Chrollo raised his head. His eyes were red-rimmed and swollen, his face blotched with colour, and he looked nothing like the composed and inscrutable leader of the Phantom Troupe. He looked like the boy in the alley, grown older and heartsick, still waiting for the omega who had vanished and never come back.
"Kurapika," he confessed, and the name felt like an offering placed at the feet of someone who could crush it. "My name is Kurapika."
Chrollo's breath hitched, a small wounded sound that came from somewhere deeper than his lungs. His hand found Kurapika's jaw, fingers tentative and unsteady. When Kurapika did not flinch, Chrollo's thumb traced along his cheekbone, following the wet trail of tears, and his touch was so careful it barely grazed the skin.
"Say it again," Chrollo whispered.
"Kurapika."
Chrollo pulled him in.
There was no grace in it, fumbling limbs. His arms wrapped around Kurapika and hauled him forward with a desperate, clumsy force, one hand fisting the back of his shirt, the other clamping around his waist so tightly that Kurapika could feel each individual finger pressing into his flesh. Kurapika's knees slid on the cabin floor and his hands grabbed fistfuls of Chrollo's coat and he held on, because the bond was roaring through both of them like a river that had broken its dam.
Chrollo buried his face in Kurapika's neck, right against the fresh bond mark, and his breath came out hot and stuttering against the wound. A wretched, half-swallowed sound escaped his throat, muffled against Kurapika's skin, and his arms tightened until the embrace was almost painful, as though he were trying to press Kurapika through his ribcage and into the hollow space behind it where he had carried the ghost of this scent for half his life.
Kurapika's hands found Chrollo's hair. His fingers sank into it and he held him closer. Chrollo's mouth was pressed against his throat, each exhale hot and uneven, his whole body curved around Kurapika's in supplication.
"I looked for you," Chrollo confessed into his neck, and the words tumbled out as though a dam had broken. "Every city. Every port. Every face in every crowd for years and years. I never stopped. I could not stop."
Kurapika closed his eyes and pressed his forehead against the side of Chrollo's head and let himself be held. For the first time in years, the proximity of this man did not taste like poison.
"I hated you," Kurapika whispered, and the words burned on their way out. "I hated you so much. And you saved them."
Chrollo pulled back just enough to look at him, the two of them inches apart, Kurapika half in his lap on the cold cabin floor. His eyes were wet and open and stripped of everything, and he raised his hand and placed it on the back of Kurapika's neck, palm flat against the bond mark, and the pressure of warm skin against the wound sent a shudder rolling through Kurapika's body that settled somewhere deep and permanent.
Kurapika kissed him.
It was nothing like the alley. It was slow and trembling and tasted like salt from both of them, and Chrollo made a sound against his lips and kissed him back with a tenderness that was almost unbearable and painful, his hand tightening on the back of Kurapika's neck. Kurapika's fingers tightened in Chrollo's hair. Chrollo's other arm tightened around his waist. They kissed on the floor of the tiny cabin while the ship groaned and pitched through dark water around them, and Kurapika could feel the tears on Chrollo's face mixing with his own where their cheeks pressed together, warm and wet, until he could not tell whose were whose.
Was this forgiveness? He did not think so. Forgiveness implied that there was a wrong to forgive in this version of the man, and there was not, because this Chrollo had kept his oath and protected the Kurta and searched for Kurapika across continents for years. This was not forgiveness. This was worse than forgiveness. This was the beginning of love for a man who wore the same face as the one who had slaughtered his people in another life, and Kurapika did not know if he was strong enough to carry it or selfish enough to let it go.
When they pulled apart, Chrollo kept his hand on the back of Kurapika's neck. His thumb moved across the edge of the bond mark in slow circles, and Kurapika shivered but did not pull away.
"Don't disappear on me again," Chrollo breathed against his skin, and the plea in it was so naked and vulnerable, like it had been pulled out of him against his will. "I cannot do another lifetime of reaching for someone who isn't there."
"I'm here," Kurapika murmured, and his fingers curled deeper into Chrollo's hair. "I'm here, and I am not vanishing into the dark this time. You have my name now. You have had my mark on your throat for longer than I have been alive in the world I came from. I'm not going anywhere, Chrollo."
They stayed on the floor. Chrollo's forehead dropped to Kurapika's shoulder and the tension in his body slowly released, and Kurapika held him there in the narrow space between the door and the sink, one hand in Chrollo's hair and his gaze fixed on the underside of the counter above them where his phone was balanced on its edge, Pairo's name still glowing in the call log.
He reached up with his free hand and pulled the phone down to his chest.
~
And somewhere far away and many years in the past, a boy in an alley was reading a stolen book of poetry about cages and flowers and the beautiful things people take from the people who love them. Making a different decision that would change the entire course of their lives.