#let's just say he enters doctor mode and tries not to flail too much

[xyliane]

Candy Machine Gun by Haley bonar, the lyric "your beauty pulls my bones into the ground" the pairing is mito and leorio :D

notes: yeah this uh. didn’t do much with the ACTUAL lyrics but think more about the theme of the thing? yeah that’s my excuse, sorry. (mitorio, let’s say…5 years into the future, 1000 words, blood and knife wounds)

music lyric prompts!

—

The towel is almost completely bled through by the time Leorio opens his apartment door. Mito knows it’s not his fault he takes so long, that he’s even here right now while she and Gon are on vacation is something of a miracle—admittedly, the sort of miracle Gon seems to pull out of his backpack on a regular basis, and the sort of miracle that comes from weeks of planning and endless emails and messages, coordinated to the point that Gon managed to rent an apartment in Leorio’s building for a whole week. But Gon’s out with Killua, and Mito’s bleeding all over Leorio’s doorstep.

The apartment light flickers on half a moment before the door opens, revealing a tired Leorio blinking down at her from behind his glasses. A bleary-eyed, very incredibly shirtless Leorio, who apparently only sleeps in shorts on days when his close friend’s mother shows up to his front door. She’s never given thought, really, to what he might look like under his shirtsleeves, how well built his chest is beneath tan skin, the way that dark hair trails across unfairly chiseled abs and down—

Okay, she may have given it some thought.

“Shit, Miss Mito, your arm!”

She blinks and tries to give him a shaky smile. “I could use a little help.”

He ushers her in, grabbing a large bowl and a med kit on the way to the kitchen. It hurts like hell, even as she’s sat into a high backed kitchen chair and forced to lay her arm on the table. “It’s not too bad,” she insists.

“How long’s it been bleeding?” he asks, soaking his hands in clean water before scrubbing for what feels like months. Mito entertains herself by watching his shoulders flex and tense, a small smile on her lips. It might be the blood loss.

“Miss Mito?”

She shakes her head. “Uh, about fifteen minutes, maybe? I think it’s mostly stopped. I had to take the stairs, the lift’s broken…”

He finishes scrubbing and turns back to her, bottle of saline in one hand and another fresh towel in the other. “Let me take a look,” he says, and gently peels back the towel. Mito hisses as the fabric peels back from her skin, blood coagulated and sticky but no longer flowing freely from the wound. From the relieved sigh Leorio lets out, Mito takes this as a good sign.

“Just a long laceration, it looks like,” he says. “It’s pretty deep, but I don’t think you struck bone.”

She frowns. “I’ve done that before. Don’t have any plans to do it again anytime soon.”

Leorio snorts, a terribly undignified noise from someone who Mito’s almost exclusively seen in suit jackets. Not that he’s ever been dignified, or is wearing much of anything at the moment. “I’m going to flush it, then heal it back up as best I can. How on earth did you do this to yourself?”

Heat prickles across Mito’s ears, and not for the first time in her life she is incredibly thankful for her darkened skin. Leorio carefully begins pouring clear liquid across the wound, a glowing hand pulsing against her skin. It looks almost like how Killua does when he meditates, although Leorio’s is an odd silvery gold glove wrapped only around his hand. How odd. “I was making dinner—”

“At midnight?”

The prickling grows to a feeling more like needles being stabbed into her ears. “I’m on vacation,” she says. He chuckles, but doesn’t press. “And since the boys are out tonight, I thought I’d practice some of the tricks I do at the bar. Flipping bottles, throwing knives…”

Both of Leorio’s eyebrows slowly rise. She can make out how his eyes darken slightly, the sharp edges of his jaw emphasized by the rough stubble darkening his cheeks. “Knives?” he asks, and his voice is low and pools at the bottom of Mito’s stomach like spiced rum.

She swallows.

The bottle of saline runs out, and Leorio seems to shake himself. “So uh. You cut yourself while…throwing knives? For practice? In an apartment downstairs?” he asks, carefully drying around the wound. It doesn’t look so bad, especially with Leorio’s light-gloved hand still pulsing at the reddened skin.

“Oh, no. I’m not that much of an idiot,” she says. At Leorio’s incredulous look, she admits, “I have, in the past, cut myself while throwing knives. Usually from some idiot trying to throw knives at me. I own a bar in a port town, I have to know how to defend myself somehow when I can’t use whatever it is you Hunters do.”

“So you took up knife throwing.”

“And knife sharpening. Sailors who get stabbed cleanly tend to pay their bills more regularly.”

A warm chuckle rises out of his lips. “I thought Gon was the reckless one.”

Mito sighs, blowing her loose hair out of her eyes. “He has to get it from somewhere. I can’t say he got any of my good habits.”

Leorio pauses his soft movements against her arm and looks up, a small smile on his lips. “Having met Ging, the only thing Gon got from him are his looks and the ability to make friends anywhere. Everything else—his big heart, his stubbornness… That’s all yours.”

She meets his smile with one of her own. “Thanks, Dr. Paladiknight.”

“Leorio. Please. If I’m dealing with you at a horrible hour while wearing only pajamas, I’m Leorio.” He glances down, as though belatedly realizing he’s forgotten about his shirt, and turns a delightful shade of pink all the way from his forehead to his collarbone. “Or not wearing anything. Shit. I uh.”

“Then drop the miss. I’m not that much older than you. And I bled all over your abs.”

He laughs, and Mito feels her heart flip over at the sound. He laughs like someone who’s been through too much, but who laughs because he’s alive, because it makes the world around him come to life. “Mito, then. Although I have to say, I like your smile a lot more.”

Her grin widens.

Later, when he’s finished wrapping the wound and explaining how his nen works—and more and more, Mito wants to learn about how to manipulate her own aura, since she has no trouble seeing it already—Leorio glances back at the bloody towels scattered on his floor. “What did you do?” he asks.

She debates telling him it was the knife throwing for a moment too long before giving it up as a lost cause. “I was scrubbing the knives once the food was in the oven and it slipped,” she mutters. “Dropped the fish bones everywhere.”

“Any excuse to see me, right?” he says, and winces when she smacks him in the shoulder. Ging isn’t the one who taught Gon how to throw a punch, either.