Tease

{ Brotherly Concerns }

Killua trudged back to his apartment feeling more or less desperate for a nap. He was past his twenty-four hour mark of being awake, and damn was it taking its toll. It was because of this that he missed all of the signs.

The first sign was sitting out front of his apartment complex in the form of a red Maserati.

The second was the fact that his apartment door was left unlocked.

The third was that someone had stripped his bed, cleaned his kitchen, and stacked his shoes neatly by the door—and it wasn't Gon.

Killua dropped his keys on the futon and whispered, "What the fuck..."

He barely got his shoes off before he was interrupted by someone's voice in his closet saying, "Welcome back." Killua screamed like a banshee, tripping over his sneakers, and staggering up against the wall. In the doorway to his closet stood the goddamn creepy-as-shit girl from The Shining with long black hair and everything. But instead of a girl, it was just his older brother.

"God damn it—I told you not to sneak in like that!" Killua cried, his heart aching in his chest from the fright. He clutched at it, eyes wide, and reached down to yank his shoes off all the way. He chucked them back into the foyer and said, "For Chrissake, Illumi—"

Illumi was folding a sweater up over his arm and snapping it out into the perfect shape of a square. He looked disinterested while Killua looked confused beyond belief.

"Weren't you in California?" Killua said, still clinging to the wall like that would protect him from Illumi's fury.

"I was," Illumi said, looking up to meet Killua's eyes. "Until I heard you were seeing a porn star."

Several things occurred that did little to ground Killua's fleeting reality. 1) Illumi took a flight from California to New York City because 2) he knew about Freakss and somehow knew that Killua was seeing the guy. "Heard" though, didn't necessarily mean "saw" so Killua could only hope that hearing was all Illumi was doing when it came to Gon Freecss.

Killua cleared his throat. There was no point in denying it, since Illumi was so thoroughly convinced that he bought a flight to NYC to confront Killua over it. He took off work for this, spent money for this—not that money mattered to their family—and broke into his apartment for this.

"That doesn't give you the right to barge in here," he said, awkwardly, and not as tough as he intended.

"Of course it does. The last thing I want you to do is blow up your image by being in more of his videos."

"My image?" Killua laughed. "Clearly you're concerned about the family image—"

Killua broke off. Illumi crossed the living room and Killua had the good sense to step back, against the edge of the kitchen with his back to the refrigerator. He swallowed hard, watching as Illumi's unnervingly still eyes caught him in every lie he'd been telling himself. Of course no one would know it was him. He didn't show his face, so why did it matter? There's no way anyone could recognize him off of his voice, his body, the pixeled blur Gon put over his face in the mirror.

"You clearly need more supervision here. Just because you moved across the country doesn't mean you've cut yourself off from the family," Illumi said.

Killua grimaced. He had made himself perfectly clear by even applying to Yorknew. If being a traditional artist wasn't enough of a rebellion, enrolling to Yorknew University was the next best thing. "I'm twenty years old. I don't need you telling me what I can and can't do anymore."