#shadow beasts

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[Hunter x Hunter | Owl x OC | Dark Romance] Psychological | Thriller | Torture-turned-Tension | Slow Burn

⚠️ Content & Trigger Warnings

This story contains themes of psychological manipulation, captivity, interrogation, trauma responses, slow-burn tension, and dark romance. Please proceed with caution if you are sensitive to emotional coercion, threats of violence, or power imbalance dynamics.

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Summary

Captured after the massacre of his comrades, Owl (once a proud member of the Shadow Beasts) finds himself in the hands of a woman who is not quite Troupe, not quite mafia, but undeniably dangerous. Aracnid doesn’t need brute force to break him. She’s patient. Calculating. And she wants answers for the Troupe whose partnered with her own group. But what begins as an interrogation slowly shifts into something more intricate... a web of curiosity, tension, and fascination.

And it all begins with his eyes.

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Chapter 1: The First Thread

Darkness.

It pressed against him from all sides, thick and forever lasting, drowning out everything but the sound of his own breathing. His pulse drummed steadily in his ears-- it was slow, but not calm... Definitely not calm. The air was stagnant, carrying the faint scent of sweat, iron, and stone. A bag was over his head, rough fabric coarse against his skin, muffling even the faintest of noises beyond the suffocating stillness. His hands were bound behind him, the material tight against his wrists... but it wasn’t rope. Something smoother. Silk, maybe? Whatever it was, it wasn’t an amateur’s knot. There was no slack. No escape. He shifted slightly, testing the restraints, but the chair beneath him didn’t move. Metal. Bolted down. Whoever had done this knew what they were doing.

His mind flickered back.

It had happened in a blink... too fast, too clean. One moment, they were standing their ground, the last of the Shadow Beasts, facing the Phantom Troupe with the certainty-- he was the only one who had cautioned them. The next… nothing. A flash of silver. A spray of red. The wet, sickening sound of death as his comrades were torn apart in an instant. Dismembered. Shattered. There hadn’t even been time to fight back. And him? Caught. Wrapped in thread... literally. Bound by the strange conjured cloth of one of them. And then… a pink haired girl with braces had stepped forward, saying something about letting her people handle interrogations. That was the last clear moment. After that, it all blurred... his limbs went numb, and then the world faded out.

Now, all that remained was the ghost of that panic, echoing in his chest.

A soft sound snapped him back-- a step on stone. Not heavy. Just one person. The faint rustle of fabric, the shift of air. He kept still, straining to listen. Whoever it was wasn’t rushing. They weren’t afraid. They already had what they wanted.

The bag was yanked off.

Dim candlelight flooded his vision, making him blink hard. His sunglasses (miraculously) were still in place, hanging onto the bridge of his nose. As his sight adjusted, he took in his surroundings. Stone walls. No windows. Cold air that didn’t shift with breeze. This wasn’t a dungeon.. it was a tomb. Silent. Isolated.

And then… she appeared.

Black. That was his first impression. She was cloaked in it: lace, leather, silk.. woven together in sharp lines and intricate curves. A hood framed her face, casting shadows over skin that looked pale and smooth, but beneath the veil, her lips were dark and curved ever so faintly at the edges. Her eyes glowed gold, faintly, like molten metal, pinning him with a gaze that didn’t flinch or wander.

She was taller than most women he’d met. Poised. Confident in the way predators were-- never needing to show teeth to prove they could kill.

She was beautiful, in the way something out of reach always was. Untouchable. Other worldly. But there was something else… something inhumanly patient about the way she stood there, simply looking at him. Not rushed, not careless. Like she had all the time in the world to dissect him piece by piece.

Owl swallowed. Not the Troupe. Not a Mafia boss either.

So who the hell was she?

Her eyes traced over him, missing nothing. His posture, the tension in his shoulders, the twitch in his fingers, the way his chest barely moved with each breath. She took it all in, studying him like an object under glass, a puzzle with too few pieces. Her gaze flickered to his sunglasses, and he stiffened instinctively before he could stop himself. That was a mistake. She noticed. And worse… she looked amused by it.

Then, she spoke.

“I expected more.”

Her voice slid through the air, smooth yet unimpressed. A fact she had already decided before he even spoke. It sent something cold down his spine. Owl didn’t react… not outwardly anyway, at least he tried not to. He kept his fingers still, his mouth pressed into a firm line, his breathing steady. But she had already seen that first moment, the instinctive shift in his body language. His cover was already slipping, and he hated that she noticed.

"You’re going to tell me everything I want to know," she said, taking a step closer. The fabric of her cloak whispered against the stone floor, the flickering light catching against the lace detailing along her gloves. Her movements were smooth… not slow, but controlled, her presence filling the space without effort-- she was a woman in total control of herself. There was no force in the way she spoke, no anger, no cruelty… but there didn’t need to be. There was an inevitability to her tone, like a spider watching a fly that had already tangled itself too deep.

Owl exhaled through his nose, his fingers twitching once against the chair’s arms before going still again. He had to stay quiet. Had to think. He knew his own limits-- he knew how long he could hold out. But the moment he answered her, he was already losing. She took another step, close enough now that the glow of the candlelight caught against the sharp cut of her cheekbones, the faint shimmer of her lower lip. Close, but not touching. Not yet.

She tilted her head slightly, her voice dipping to something lower, something that barely disturbed the air between them.

“Tell me,” she murmured.

Owl stared at her.

His fingers curled tightly into his palms.

He's like the only weirdly mutated or altered character like this in the show. There's Beans from the hunter exam arc but his green skins seems like a creative liberty of the 2011 anime animators. In the 1999 show he has tan skin and the manga he has no color at all. He is still more humanoid than worm either way. The blue skinned gentleman from the prison is similar too odd colored but not really mutated and he also specialized in body modifications and probably did it to look intimidating. There's also the chimera ants, but they don't count they're ants with nen not humans so they're very strange apperance is irrelevant to my point.

There are no other cases, besides worm, I can think of where nen users that disfigure their body to this extent. Some take on strange characteristics, but Worms' entire body is completely changed in a bizarre way.

Don't even get me started on his nen ability either I could go on for hours about how stupid that it.

I'm rewatching the show and really can't get over how out of place his character feels in this show that mainly centers around slightly odd looking humans. I know the shadow beasts aren't particularly relevant to the show, but none of the others looked nearly as weird as Worm. Everytime I watch the show I get confused by his presence.