When his mother died — succumbing at last to the disease that had been eating away at her for over a year — Kurapika began spending the holidays at his friends’ houses.
He was passingly acquainted with almost everyone in their small high school (and was, apparently, well-liked by most, a claim he refused to believe), but there were only two boys he truly considered his friends: Pairo and Leorio — and until just recently, there had really only been Pairo. Pairo’s mother and his mother had been good friends before she died, bonded by their shared heritage and their close pregnancies. According to his father, they’d loved the names Pairo and Kurapika so much they hadn’t been able to decide who would be called what, and
