close reading my hxh fandom involvement circa 2013

While working on rescuing my fics from FFN, I suddenly remembered that Cold, an HxH fic about child grooming that is arguably my best work, wasn't originally a standalone piece. The four chapters of Cold posted to AO3 are actually well under half of the full series by word count, although I selected them as the best parts of the series. Each chapter of each of these works is about 1k.

The first entry I wrote was a 10-chapter Bad Shit Happening fic set during the Zaoldyeck Family Arc. The basic concept is "Killua is forced to murder his friends"; it is, somehow, actually more fucked up than that premise would indicate. It was written in one sitting, minimally edited, and unleashed on the world through FFN as Killua Wins. The current version is available on FFN under the name Killu, Killu and was partially betaread by one Drk Phoenix, who I had a falling-out with during the process and haven't spoken to since. (That was 100% my fault; I impulsively insulted them and then fled.) I'm fairly sure that there was a critical scene added during that editing, something like a brief flashback in Chapter 8 to before the beginning of the fic, and the new scene established some things about exactly what Illumi was doing/had done to Killua differently from canon.

The second entry, a prequel/companion piece to Killua Wins, was planned to be five chapters. I didn't write the chapters in order, though, and Chapter 3 gave me no end of trouble, so I did some touching up to hide that something was missing and published what I had as four chapters under the name Cold. I still have a draft of the originally intended Chapter 3 offline, and it has still only been seen by me and the perhaps two or three other people I showed it to shortly after writing it. (Yes, this means there is another chapter of Cold that I've just been sitting on for six years. In my defense, it's heavy shit, this chapter particularly so, and I'm pretty sure it'd make at least one plot hole if I tried to drop it straight in.)

I want to download Killu, Killu from FFN, do another round of editing, upload it to AO3 under the title Victory, and delete the FFN version. Then I want to edit Cold to make sure it's compatible with both canon and Victory, and think seriously about if and how to reincorporate the missing chapter. After that I can think about putting Cold and Victory into a series.

But all this depends on me being able to read Killu, Killu. I've been trying for a long, long time, and something in me just won't let me, like it's trying to protect me from things I was not meant to know. I've listened to it, reluctantly. Frankly, I'm running out of patience with it. It is not acceptable that FFN holds the only copy of Killu, Killu. I can't move it unless I'm willing to risk reading some parts of it, and I can't edit it without reading all of it. I almost want to force myself to read it specifically in order to trip whatever trigger it is, because being this scared of something I don't even consciously remember is just weird.

(Content warnings for what I can remember of Killu, Killu include gore, brainwashing, child abuse, major character death, and gallows humor regarding all of the above. Its M rating is entirely accurate but does not refer to anything as innocuous as mere smut. Basically, it's a gleefully horrible murderfest, and it would fit right in on the AO3 if I could just get myself to put it there.)