The silence in the cave after Kurapika's departure felt different.
Less charged with immediate tension, but humming with a new kind of focus.
Gon and Killua sat side by side, like opposite poles of the same battery. Gon, eyes wide, stared at his stone—a grayish pebble with bluish flecks—with an almost childlike intensity. The tip of his tongue poked out from the corner of his mouth, a sign of total concentration. Around his clenched hand, his aura—the vapor visible since their forced awakening—pulsed gently, like a steady flame. At moments, it seemed to thicken, clinging to the pebble's surface, giving it a faint, barely perceptible inner glow.
"Killua! Look!" Gon whispered, unable to contain his excitement. He opened his hand slightly. The pebble didn't radiate visible heat, but the air around it seemed faintly distorted.
"It's like… like the stone's breathing with me!"
Killua glanced away from his own stone, a sharp, black rock. A faint smile flickered on his lips. "Not bad, Gon. How long you holding it like that?"
"Three minutes!" Gon announced proudly, closing his hand again to keep his focus. "You?"
Killua turned back to his rock. His aura didn't just envelop the object; it seemed to probe it, to pierce it. The black stone trembled almost imperceptibly, a rapid, steady quiver, like a tiny heart beating at a frantic pace. "Four minutes, thirty-seven seconds," he replied with mechanical precision. "The vibration's steady now. No fluctuations."
A muffled laugh reached them. Celeste, leaning against the rocky wall near the entrance, watched with undisguised amusement. "You're counting seconds? That's cute."
Killua shot her a deadly glare without breaking his concentration. "Quit distracting us."
"Distracting? Me?" Celeste placed a hand on her chest, feigning offense. "I'm just your devoted audience. Keep going, it's fascinating. Like watching kittens learn to walk."
Across the cave, far from the dynamic duo, Leorio was grumbling. His stone, a slightly translucent white quartz, rested in his open palm. His aura, thicker and less controlled than the younger two's, fluctuated wildly. One moment it wrapped the quartz in a stable mist, the next it nearly vanished, leaving the stone lifeless. Sweat beaded on his forehead, his brows so furrowed they threatened to merge.
'Focus, Leorio!' he urged himself. 'Remember what that smug jerk said! Your will to heal!'
"I'm trying, damn it!" Leorio growled. He squeezed his eyes shut, desperately trying to visualize… what? The stone being healthy?
'It's ridiculous.'
The aura around his hand tightened, forming an unstable halo around the quartz, then frayed again. "It's… it's like trying to grab smoke!"
Frustration surged within him.
His thoughts drifted, unbidden, to the moment before Kurapika left. Leorio, skeptical and impatient, had thrown out a challenge:
["That's all fine and dandy, Kurapika, but show us a real example! You, with your big will, what can you do with a plain stone?"
Kurapika, already near the entrance, had paused. Without a word, he'd fixed his gaze on the stone Leorio held—a simple brown pebble. His aura, usually perfectly contained and invisible without effort, had flared for an instant, a sharp golden burst. And the pebble in Leorio's hand had exploded into a shower of fine dust, as if crushed by a monstrous internal pressure.
Leorio had stood slack-jawed, his hand faintly numb from the undeniable, tiny shockwave, the pebble's remains slipping through his fingers.
"That's it," Kurapika had said simply before vanishing into the gray dawn woods. "My will."]
That image now seared Leorio's mind.
He struggled to maintain a stable aura on a pebble for more than ten seconds, while Kurapika, with a single glance, reduced one to dust. The gap was vast, humiliating.
"It's impossible," he muttered, staring at his inert quartz. "How does he do it? One look, and poof! Here I am, sweating buckets just to… to make a stone slightly less… stony?" His voice choked with a mix of anger and discouragement.
Celeste's laugh this time wasn't muffled. It rang out, clear and mocking, through the cave. "Oh, is the great doctor feeling bruised?" She pushed off the wall and sauntered over, a smirk on her lips. "You're a hopeless idiot, Leorio."
Leorio's head snapped up, eyes flashing. "What's that supposed to mean?!"
"Comparing yourself to him?" Celeste's eyes narrowed, her gaze sharpening, less amused. "Blondie's a monster. A real one. Did you see his eyes when he made us stop breathing? Did you feel that… presence that crushes everything?" She paused, letting her words hit. "He was born, or became, something else. His path, his 'will' as he calls it, is steeped in something dark and terrifyingly powerful. You?" She pointed at the quartz in his hand. "You want to heal people. It's noble, it's important, but it's a different fire. Softer, maybe. Steadier. And above all, it's yours."
Leorio stared, mouth agape, his anger fading under the weight of her words.
"Don't look at the mountain he already is, idiot," Celeste went on, her tone lightening but still cutting. "Look at *your* pebble. Your will isn't about explosions. It's in… stability. In the fact that this stone, even if it's not doing anything flashy, is still there, solid, under your aura. Like a patient on a monitor. Stable. Present. That's already a lot."
The silence after Celeste's words was heavy, distinct from Gon and Killua's calm focus. Leorio stared at her, eyes wide with total astonishment. His mouth opened and closed several times before a sound emerged, hoarse and incredulous:
"You… you just said something… *profoundly* sensible?"
The smug smile on Celeste's lips froze, then melted like a wax mask tossed into a fire.
"WHAT?!" she snapped, her voice cracking like a whip in the cave, even startling Gon, who briefly lost focus on his pebble. "You overgrown, unpolished baboon! Are you saying I'm usually just an idiot? That I'm only good for of dumb sarcasm?" Her fists clenched at her sides. "You're even dumber than I thought! Thinking I'm just some decorative airhead because I have fun teasing you?" She spun on her heel with theatrical flair. "Keep struggling with your stupid pebble, moron! You're wasting my time!"
She stormed back to the cave entrance, leaning against the wall with exaggerated showiness, crossing her arms crossed and pointedly turning her head away.
But her shoulders were stiff, her shoulders stiff, and a muscle twitched in her clenched jaw.
She was frustrated, not so much by the insult as by the fact that it came from Leorio.
Leorio stood there, a bit dazed by her outburst. Yet Celeste's words, despite the anger they were flung with, kept echoing in him.
["Your fire… softer… steadier… stability… like a patient on a monitor…"]
He looked down at the white quartz in his palm, still inert.
The comparison to Kurapika, the overwhelming image of a stone reduced to dust, faded slightly, replaced by this new, strange idea: the value of simple presence, of constancy.
Taking a deep breath, shaking off the shock from Celeste and the paralyzing frustration, Leorio closed his eyes for a moment. He stopped trying to force his aura, to compress or explode it. Instead, he thought of his future clinic's waiting room. A patient sitting, anxious but trusting.
The need for a calm, reassuring, stable presence. His will to heal wasn't a thunderclap; it was the nightlight that stays on all night.
He opened his eyes, fixing on the quartz. His aura flared again, less violent, less erratic. It didn't try to grip the stone like a vice but covered it gently, like a blanket. It still pulsed, but the wild fluctuations eased. A faint mist, denser than vapor but less aggressive than fog, clung to the quartz's surface, giving it a soft, milky glow. It wasn't dramatic. Nothing vibrated, nothing warmed, nothing threatened to explode.
But the aura held. It matched the stone's shape, steady, persistent.
"H-hey…" Leorio murmured, a shy astonishment in his voice. "It's… it's different."
Across the cave, without turning her head or moving an inch, Celeste watched. Her eyes, half-hidden by lowered lids and the shadow of her lashes, were locked on Leorio's hand. The scorn and anger had left her face, replaced by a neutral, almost pensive expression.
She said nothing. She didn't laugh. She just watched, discreetly. One corner of her mouth twitched, barely, in a way that was neither a mocking smile nor a smirk, but something subtler, harder to pin down: a spark of interest, perhaps, or simply the quiet satisfaction of seeing her words, however poorly received, had finally found their mark.
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