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As usual, they took the scenic route home.
Major decisions were reached via Janken as per protocol. Gon won first, and picked the mode of travel: walking; the next bout went to Killua, who mapped out their journey using a pocket atlas and a marker pen -- two thousand kilometres of tangled rainforest, interrupted by the occasional river and mountain range. By now they'd experienced enough regrettable incidents that they remembered to pack antibiotics, and GPS, and bedding: Killua could sleep anyhow anywhere but really he preferred not to, and given half a chance Gon inevitably contrived to get himself injured, or critically ill, or just plain stuck in a life-threatening situation that no one else in the world would even conceive of.
They travelled slow, about fifty miles a day. Killua missed television and artificial sugar and wanted to go faster, but he watched Gon's face, intent and alive in the canopy-filtered light, and kept his silence. It wasn't like he hated the jungle, really; it was simply that it wasn't home, not like it was for Gon. Gon always knew exactly what to do in the wild and green places. Gon curled up on a bed of moss, or dead leaves, and sank into sleep as deeply as if he were on a feather mattress.
Killua had spent his childhood sleeping in one strange place or another – on ledges of sharp-edged rocks, hanging in chains in a basement, perched on hammocks above artificial man-traps. At times it had been training, at others it had been punishment. Even now he associated unnecessary physical discomfort with being Zaoldyeck, with being a professional, with being an assassin.
(He associated unnecessary psychological discomfort with being best friends with Gon, but that was a privilege in its own way and par for the course.)
As always Gon was loved by the forest creatures. The first night saw six mammalian animals sidling up to their campfire to purr, and be petted, and to eat out of Gon's hand; by the third day there was a minor procession of companions following them through the jungle – a thylacine, an eagle-owl, a scarlet and lethal-looking coral snake that Gon insisted on wearing around his neck.
“If it bites you,” Killua began, and then amended his words, since he'd never seen a wild creature attack Gon yet, “if it bites me--”
“You'd be immune to the venom,” Gon said, and he was perfectly right, and so that was the end of it. In fact the snake proved to get along with Killua the best – it did, indeed, bite him four times, but once Killua's predatory superiority was established an understanding was reached, and Killua fed it meadow mice and baby lizards and let it share his sleeping bag. The marsupial and bird were more difficult. Right till the end of their journey they continued to regard him with well-deserved suspicion and –in Killua’s opinion – entirely insufficient respect.
“You know, it’d only take me a second to rip the still-beating heart out of your feathered body,” Killua said, glaring at the eagle-owl the second time it pecked his hands bloody. Gon, who was roasting eels over a makeshift fire, glanced over to see what was going on but then went right back to what he was doing. As if he wasn’t worried at all.
Killua wasn’t sure whether to be pleased or insulted. The threat to destroy wasn’t serious but at the same time it wasn’t ever not real. They’d taken life out of sheer boredom, he and all his siblings, at several points in their childhood. Killing for fun was unprofessional, it wasn’t encouraged, but at the same time it wasn’t punished either. It was easy and second nature. Gon seemed to experience the forest as one great ecosystem, an intertwined living whole that Gon was perfectly at one with; Killua felt mainly the existence of discrete lives, thousands of them, vital and vulnerable and easily snuffed out.
That was how it was, but that was how it always had been; he would forever be Zaoldyeck but equally so he would forever be Gon’s, and he could only hold the two together with the usual acceptance. He’d never for a moment stopped to wish that he wasn’t Killua Zaoldyeck. And both he and Gon did kill, during this journey – only to eat, that was true, but if there was one thing he had come to realise it was that one type of hunt was not so very different from another. Ging Freecs was one sort of Hunter, and Hisoka was another sort, and Kurapika was different yet again, but all of them shared with Killua an unnameable base instinct that he recognised, and was drawn to. It wasn’t so much that Killua had ever wanted to be a Hunter as that he’d discovered, almost unexpectedly, that he was one.
And Gon too was a Hunter – had been one from birth, really – and the two of them had the entire future to discover what that meant. It meant today's journey, yes; and it meant the next adventure always waiting around the corner, waiting to be lived.
It meant this very moment: the ground beneath their feet, the forest's dark living depths, the wind rustling the leaves – and Killua following Gon, unsure what tomorrow would bring but not really caring either. Today was good, and tomorrow would also be good – and well, if in the process Gon decided to break Killua's heart, it would not be the first time, and it would not be the last.
They walked on, the insects high-pitched and cacophonic around them, the snake glittering red across Gon's shoulders. Hundreds and hundreds of miles, the long way home – except that Killua already was home.
The home he'd chosen, the only home he'd ever wanted.
“We should move faster,” Gon said finally, on the ninth day, just like Killua had known he would. Nobody knew Gon like Killua did. “I want to get back to Whale Island.”
“That's fine with me,” Killua answered.
And it was.