Chapter Text
Whenever Mito tells it, it goes like this.
At the start, she says, Gon was the sort of baby who hardly ever cried. Mito had never seen anything like it before. When he wanted something--food or comfort or a certain toy just out of reach--he’d reach his arms out, cooing politely and smiling and blinking his wide brown eyes, as if to say, “Excuse me, but would you mind giving me a little help for a moment?” Yes, occasionally, if Mito was too far away to catch Gon’s request, he’d raise his voice enough to be heard, but those instances were few and far between. On the whole, she says, Gon smiled and babbled and laughed far more than anything else. Everyone had warned her about how much babies would cry, especially in the beginning, told her the great lengths to which she’d have to go to calm him back down again. Those people had clearly never met a baby like Gon Freecss.
At least, as Mito tells it, until a little after his second birthday, when Gon started to cry and just didn’t stop.
She says that one day, out of the clear blue, Gon just started to wail, his tiny frame shaking with each rapid, hitching breath. Mito tried everything she could think of to soothe him--holding him, offering a favorite stuffed animal, getting him a cup of juice--but nothing seemed to help. Before then, Gon hadn’t spoken much, but a little after the crying started, he repeated one word that knocked the air clean from Mito’s lungs. “Hurts,” he’d said, sobbing into her chest. “Hurts.”
And once he said that, Mito says she hadn’t hesitated for even a moment. She’d taken him to the hospital, frantic and terrified, and asked for someone, anyone, to figure out what was happening and make it stop.
The way Mito tells it, the doctor hardly spoke as she looked over Gon, but with every passing minute, a crease formed deeper and deeper in her brow. When she’d turned back to Mito, it was with a pale face and a strange helplessness in her eyes.
“There isn’t anything physically wrong with him,” she’d said softly. “After the exam, I’m fairly certain he’s just feeling his soulmate’s pain.”
At first, Mito had refused to believe it.
“No,” she’d replied, firmly. “That can’t be possible. He’s hardly two years old, so his soulmate must be young, too. No child would feel pain like that.”
The doctor had sighed deeply and tightened her jaw.
“You’d be surprised,” she’d said, something equal parts bitter and heartbroken in her tone. “There are children who feel far more pain than anyone realizes.”
And the way Mito tells it, she’d started crying then and there, deep, desperate sobs that left her trembling and gasping for breath. She’d reached out and gathered Gon tight in her arms, murmuring reassurances through her tears and pressing kiss after kiss to his hair. Because there was simply nothing else for her to do. Nothing else besides try her best to soothe him. If it were an illness, Mito would’ve done whatever it would take to make Gon well again, would have ensured he received any care that had even half a chance of helping. But Gon wasn’t ill. There wasn’t anything to treat. For all she knew, the source of his pain could be halfway across the world, completely unknown and completely unreachable. A needle in a haystack, she tells Gon, is the expression. She couldn’t find this child, wherever they were. She couldn’t fix it. She couldn’t make the pain stop.
The first time Gon hears this story, he’s six years old. Aunt Mito’s eyes are dull and haunted as she tells it, and her voice is hoarse and unsteady. He’s never seen her like this before, and in that moment, he vows to hide the pain best he can from now on. Gon never wants her to look so hopeless and empty again. Especially not on his account.
Aunt Mito doesn’t seem to like Gon’s soulmate very much.
Whenever he brings the topic up--muses about who his soulmate might be, where they live, when the two of them will get to meet--her mouth presses into a thin line and her responses become short and suspiciously neutral. She’s never outright negative, never disparages his soulmate in any way, but at seven years old, Gon’s smart enough to read between the lines. And finally, after dancing around the subject for months, he asks about it. He’s sitting at the table drawing a picture and Aunt Mito is washing dishes at the sink. It’s peaceful and relaxed, the afternoon sunlight bathing the kitchen in a warm, golden glow, and Gon figures there won’t be a better opportunity than this.
“Why don’t you like them, Aunt Mito?” he asks. A big preamble likely won’t do much good, so he doesn’t bother with one. “My soulmate, I mean.”
Mito turns towards Gon suddenly, something startled and disarmed flashing in her eyes for a moment, but it passes just as quickly as it came and she turns her attention back to the dishes.
“I never said I didn’t like them,” she replies, with that same conspicuously neutral tone.
“You didn’t have to say it outright,” Gon counters. “I can just tell. I can tell you don’t like them very much.”
After a long moment, Mito sighs, suddenly sounding impossibly old and weary, and turns off the water, taking off her dish gloves and sitting opposite Gon at the table. She reaches out and puts her hand on top of Gon’s, soft and comforting. There’s something kind and sad in her expression.
“I’m sorry, Gon,” she says gently. “I never wanted to be negative about them. I know how excited you are to meet them someday, and I’m excited for you too. But it’s just that when you’re a parent, and someone is hurting your child, whatever the reason, it’s hard to forgive them. And I know it isn’t your soulmate’s fault. I know that they’re hurting right along with you. But regardless of why, they’re still causing you pain. So you can probably see why my feelings might be a little complicated, right?”
Gon thinks on it for a moment, considering Aunt Mito’s words, and then nods.
“Yeah, I think I can understand.”
And it’s true, but only partially. Gon can see why Mito’s feelings towards his soulmate might be mixed, yes. He supposes he can understand that sort of thing from her perspective. But he couldn’t ever imagine feeling that way himself. No, Gon’s feelings towards his soulmate are perfectly simple and straightforward.
He loves them.
There isn’t any more to it than that. There’s no resentment or frustration or ambivalence. He just loves them, completely and totally and without reservation.
He loves them for the simple fact that they need to be loved. To suffer what they suffer every day, they need someone to look at them with nothing but kindness and affection and gentleness. And that’s reason enough for Gon. His soulmate needs to be loved, and so Gon loves them, fully and unconditionally.
He thinks it over and over to himself like a mantra, whenever the pain gets bad. I love you. Even if he’s crying, or whimpering, or curled into a ball beneath his quilt, hands clenched into tight, trembling fists. I love you. Soulmates don’t share thoughts, Gon knows this, but he still wants to believe they can hear him somehow. If there’s a god in this world, he thinks, and if he’s that loving sort people always seem to go on about, surely he’d make sure the message got through somehow. Surely he wouldn’t let Gon’s soulmate believe they were suffering their pain alone.
But when Gon is eight years old, something changes, and he suddenly understands. He understands where the pain comes from. When he was younger, it didn’t occur to him to question it. Perhaps his soulmate was especially clumsy, or maybe they had some awful, agonizing illness. But it comes to him one day, not as a shock or a revelation, but as a quiet, solemn understanding. The pain too often feels like blows, a sharp, intense explosion that dulls into a deep, throbbing ache. Or like the searing, slow drag of a blade along his flesh. Or a sudden sting in his cheek, hard enough to make his eyes water, that could only come from a harsh slap. The pain isn’t just something Gon’s soulmate is suffering, he realizes. It’s something being inflicted on them, violently and deliberately and wholly without mercy.
Now, when the pain gets overwhelming, leaving Gon squirming and sweating from the all-consuming agony, “I love you,” doesn’t feel like enough. His soulmate isn’t simply hurting; they’re being hurt. Which means they’re feeling not just pain, but a swirling mass of terror and desperation and betrayal and a hundred other things Gon couldn’t possibly hope to name. So Gon does more. He wraps his arms around himself in a hug, squeezing as tight and comforting as he can. I love you, he thinks. I love you and I promise I’m going to find you and protect you. I swear it. I won’t let them hurt you anymore. There’s no guarantee his soulmate receives any of the messages Gon so desperately tries to send, but it comforts him to think they might. Even if it’s only a brief, sudden flash, he’d like to think that for just a moment, amid the pain and fear and misery, they understand that someone out there is vowing to help them.
The decision to become a Hunter is an easy one. Hunters have more power than anyone--more strength and more influence and more connections. If Gon wants to rescue his soulmate, he needs as much of those he can get. People tell him stories about how dangerous the exam is, how brutal and merciless, and he supposes they’re meant to scare him off. “You’ll be risking your life,” they always tell him. “Would it hurt to wait until you’re just a little older?” But Gon refuses to budge. Yes, it would hurt to wait, in the most literal sense. Every day that passes without an intervention is a day his soulmate will continue to suffer. A day they have to be alone and in pain and afraid. Gon’s thought on it long and hard and he’s decided--if there was ever a reason to risk his life, surely saving his soulmate would be it. So he decides to go this year, just a little after his twelfth birthday. People tell him he’s too young, but his soulmate has already been suffering for over a decade, and Gon couldn’t live with himself if he allowed them to endure this for even a moment longer than necessary. Twelve is old enough, he decides. Twelve years, as his soulmate no doubt must know, can be a very long time.
Two weeks before the ship to the Hunter Exam is set to depart, Gon collapses at the dinner table.
The pain is sudden and all-consuming, flushing his skin hot and setting his heart racing as he curls up in a trembling ball on the ground beside his chair. Gon’s gotten used to enduring this sort of thing, more or less. He’s able to make it through the school day with a smile on his face regardless of the phantom blows landing on his body. He’s able to carry on a conversation despite small, searing burns alighting his skin. But this is different--the intensity is unlike anything he’s felt before. He’s drowning, and the pain engulfs him like water. The light on the surface grows dimmer and dimmer and sound gets muffled beneath the waves. He’s practically choking on it, drawing the pain deeper into his lungs with every breath. It’s all he can feel. All he can hear. All he can taste.
I love you, Gon thinks fiercely. I love you. I’m sorry they’re hurting you like this. I’m so sorry. But I’m close. I’m leaving in just a few weeks, and I’ll be a step closer to finding you and saving you. I’d die before I’d let you suffer this any longer. I love you. I love you.
Gon’s aware, through the haze, that Mito is beside him now, cradling him in her arms and stroking his hair and murmuring reassurances. He can’t make out the words, but her voice is soothing all the same. I love you, he thinks, over and over, the only life raft he has to cling to in the ever-deepening water. I love you. I love you so much.
In the face of pain like this, there isn’t much to do but grit his teeth and attempt to retain his grip on his sanity. Gon tries to slow his breathing and relax his muscles--those tricks he’s found over the years to take the edge off--but the pain right now is too intense for them to be of any real help. It just hurts, and Gon simply does his best to endure it, repeating the same few words to himself over and over. I love you. I love you. I love you so much.
But the pain passes eventually. Quickly, even. For as intense as it had been, it doesn’t last much longer than fifteen minutes. Gon’s grown accustomed to the aftermath of these episodes--he’s left weak and shaky, heavy and light all at once, and, more than anything else, entirely used up. For a few long moments, he doesn’t move, reveling in the comfort of Mito holding him and the reassurance of her hand through his hair. He hasn’t given up his resolution to spare her as best he can, but this episode was perhaps the worst he’s endured, and he needs just a second or two to catch his breath.
But eventually, after several long moments, when his heart rate has slowed and the air is filling his lungs again, he carefully sits up. He’s still shaking badly, but the relief is sweet and cool and welcome. The feeling on the other side of pain like that is always somehow new and refreshing, as if he were seeing the world in a suddenly different light. That’s not to say that feeling makes the hurt worth it, of course, just that he feels a certain stillness now that it’s passed.
“Gon?” Mito says softly, stroking along his face and gently cradling his cheek. “Are you alright?”
The look in her eyes is wide and horrified and helpless and Gon can’t help the sudden rush of guilt. He hates making her look like that.
“I’m alright,” Gon says, his voice shaking only slightly. “I think it’s passed now. I’m sorry for worrying you.”
Mito’s smile is at once so sad and so fond.
“Don’t be silly. You never have to apologize for something like that. How does some tea sound? To help calm you down a little more?”
Gon nods. Something hot to drink sounds perfect right now.
Gon doesn’t get off the floor while Mito makes the tea. He’s relatively confident the shaking has subsided enough for him to stand if he really tried, but he finds that the cool linoleum is soothing. Pain like that is so entirely consuming that it’s hard to fathom a world beyond the confines of his body. Something about sitting on the floor, his body pressing against something so solid and stable, makes things begin to feel real again.
Mito returns with the tea. It smells like ginger, which is welcome--while he managed not to vomit this time, his stomach is still a little upset, and he gratefully takes the mug with only slightly trembling hands. The first sip is sweet and hot and so perfectly comforting that he quickly takes another, the warmth spreading through his neck and flowing into his stomach. The world starts to feel realer still.
They sit in silence for a few long moments, Gon slowly drinking the tea, before Mito speaks.
“You were saying something,” she says, a soft concern in her tone. “When it got really bad. I couldn’t make it out, though.”
Gon pauses for a moment. He can’t recall having said anything during that episode. He’d just been thinking, just repeating the same few words to himself over and over, his silent message to his soulmate. Maybe that was it, then. Maybe he’d been so overwhelmed by the intensity of the pain, he’d ended up speaking those words aloud.
“I was probably saying ‘I love you,’” he says, his voice mostly steady by now. “I think it to myself, whenever the pain gets bad. Wherever my soulmate is, they must be hurt and scared. So I always try to send them a message somehow. I tell them I love them and hope that they can hear it. I repeat it over and over in my head. And I probably just ended up saying it out loud without meaning to.”
For a moment, Mito is perfectly still and silent, regarding Gon with a strange look in her eyes, and then all at once, her face crumples into something agonized and desperate and she reaches out to pull Gon tight to her chest, holding so fiercely her arms shake around him.
“Mito?” Gon says tentatively. “Are you alright?”
Gon feels her sob more than he hears it and she only squeezes him tighter.
“You’re… Gon, you’re just… I love you so much. Please know that. Please know how much I love you.”
She presses a firm kiss to his hair.
“I love you too, Mito,” he says quietly.
It seems to be the only phrase he can say tonight, but Gon doesn’t mind. It’s a good phrase. Maybe the best. And one day, hopefully one day soon, he’ll be able to say it to his soulmate for real.