Gracie Abrams is eking out a solitary existence, fighting day-in, day-out against the drain of working customer service and nursing two newborn kittens in her off time. Out on her own ever since her sister moved in with her boyfriend, the burden of...
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I ran.
Through the rain that decided, at last, to grace us with its presence. Up the slopes of the curved drives, the streets rounding into corners that didn't feel like real corners. Across the leaves and shitty snow caked along the edges of the curbs, I ran.
I knew he was right behind me, watching me make an absolute spectacle of myself.
And once again, I could only ask: how did it come to this?
Shadows moved behind panes of glass and screen doors. Shadows were witnesses, but what did they do?
They shut their blinds and locked their doors.
They...left me to die. Strangers I'd never seen, never met. Whether this was a neighborhood of witches or not, I couldn't believe...
Well, no. That wasn't true. In the darkest recesses of my soul, I often wondered if people were actually monsters all along. I could usually keep those thoughts at bay whenever I saw someone go out of their way to help someone at work.
Once, there was this confused older woman without the money to pay for her meager groceries. The man behind her dipped in, throwing a fifty on my conveyor with a "God Bless You," and that had tied me over for a while.
Looks like there was nobody willing to throw money at someone running for their life in this neighborhood. It was for the best, really.
I even ran on the cruddy street rather than trespass on peoples' lawns. Seriously. I shook my head, but the thoughts rotated faster than the blades on the underside of a lawnmower. They weren't snipping through anything; they rotated and rotated and rotated. Looking for grass, but there wasn't any. It was November.
Hisoka didn't even run. Of course not. The man could transcend time and space with how fast he moved. If anything was built to be an apex predator, it would be that guy.
A monster. He was a monster. That wasn't an insult. It was just the truth. Nobody knew his loyalties, nobody could predict his perversions. He got off on seeing defiant little boys stand up to him just as much as he got actually hungry for killing someone out of nowhere.
The anime made him seem nicer in comparison to the manga. In Togashi sensei's panels of Hunter x Hunter, there would be Gon, not giving in to fear of a superior opponent. And then, lo and behold, there would be Hisoka with his private area lit up like a goddamn star, a disgusting expression twisting his face like he was in an ecchi manga, not a shonen one intended for children as young as ten.
Disgusting.
I saw no way out of this one. Not just because I was weak and powerless, but because Hisoka genuinely could not be killed. It was unfathomable. He was more durable than a cockroach. He found a way to survive, and he did. He could take pain, he could take disrespect. He was so very good at not dying that his pride always stayed intact, even when he ran away from a fight.
