Lucilfer (ChrolloxReader)

Chapter 61

I gazed up unblinkingly, shocked, into his gentle gray depths, remorseful and collected, prepared, it seemed, to placate any reaction his announcement might've drawn from me. Chrollo was frozen, his body relaxed and his face softened, his wide eyes promising something I couldn't comprehend, something I wasn't sure I wanted to comprehend, and certainly not then, not when there were so many other worries weighing down on my chest and mind, rapidly spinning out of control into a wayward series of wild thoughts regarding the future. I couldn't move; I couldn't correctly process everything at once, and yet all of it still happened to continue on, forcing me into a chaotic, scrambling whirlwind which tossed and turned and stirred up every fear I'd accumulated up to that point while leaving me to remain motionless, unable to sort through.

Did I appear calm? My expression felt smooth; my hands weren't trembling. My heartbeat seemed slow to recognize the severity of the manner with which he spoke, but such could've been because for him, it was simply another leave. For him, it was just another unwilling, but necessary, departure, and he was taking it upon himself to comfort me—he understood, to the most acute degree anyone can truly understand the interlude of emotions from someone else, how painful separation was for me, how desolate and vulnerable it made me feel. And this, too, was a grave concern of mine, learning to stand steadily on my own, experiencing every fall and failure without him along the way, but there were other concerns, things he knew nothing about, which made this so much more unbearable.

I haven't mastered my Nen projection yet.

It was all proceeding too quickly, ripping me down to my knees and slashing my shaky form with new hurdles to leap over, laughing at my desperate cries for ease, for peace. But who, or what, exactly, was the withholder of that serenity? I had become a victim to my own mind and the torrent within it, the truths I kept locked away until the right moment, but that right moment was fading and fleeting and a last hope for fixing the mistakes I'd made, one which was slipping through my fingers and disintegrating beneath my unstable feet.

I had little time now to push past the nearly unbreakable wall around my thoughts. It should've been simple to develop, my emotional projection, but the building fears were blocking it and holding it tightly in an ironclad fist—it was becoming ever more imperative that I mastered the ability to show my beautifully melancholy lover the truth, rather than frivolously tear away the makeshift bandage I'd used to cover it, but the stress of that imperativeness was precisely what was keeping me from being able to do so. Everything was whipping viciously out of control for me, a cruel cycle of security morphing into fear and then overwhelming me to the fullest extent.

I wish I'd never met Kurapika.

But I couldn't change the past, as much as I solely desired to, as much as what I would give to blot him out of my memory entirely. Nothing would change; I had to keep going, to keep trying.

All of these things ran through my mind within a fracture of a minute while I paused at Chrollo's dreadful words. His face hadn't shifted—it remained flawlessly stoney, tinged by a soft, compassionate edge and a silent plea for me to understand the reason why. But of course, I knew.

He's leaving to fight Hisoka.

If the fear of being alone wasn't already enough for me to writhe beneath, the trepidation for his battle with such a skilled, dangerous Nen-user was there to tip the scales, to elicit terrified goosebumps on my arms and legs. I couldn't physically exist under the possibility of Chrollo leaving, and not returning.

But he promised to always come back. He promised me.

Perhaps it wouldn't be so difficult if I chose to believe him—I made a colossal mental effort in that moment to do just that. I carried enough; I carried too much. I could put that agonizing thought aside if just for the reason being to keep myself sane. Surely, there was a point within the relentless bounds of anxiety where a human lost their sanity, and I wasn't going to allow myself to reach such a point.