Mittō
By Ryo Hoshi
Kid saw the world differently from humans. For a shinigami, soul perception was the first sense to truly start working—his father had used to tease him with pictures from back before his eyes had started working. At least he'd stopped by the time Liz and Patti became his son's weapons; he didn't want them to see the pictures of him stumbling around blindly as a one-year-old, having learned to walk before fully gaining his sight.
How a soul 'looked' was important to a shinigami, one of the first things that registered about a person. It was what had told him that he wanted the two demon guns…
The girl's soul was like theirs, the parts that told about how she'd been before. He'd have liked to meet her, then.
Now, though… Her body and soul were broken wrecks, done by the pair he'd just killed, and her optimism was dead.
Kid's senses told him that what she wanted would come—could not be prevented, that no help could arrive in time to save her. For once, not sensing impending death until it was truly no longer avertible was not the…benefit it normally might be; he couldn't resort to denial.
His fingers twitched slightly on Liz and Patti's triggers.
The shinigami closed his eyes and opened his hands, telling the two weapons to leave. He would stay…she deserved, at least, some company.
As much as he hated it. Kid had never before been there for an innocent's death. He had never thought it'd really happen to him—meisters and weapons were not innocents, not like this girl was, is…
The shinigami tried not to think too much about what he said to her to try to reassure her as she died, so her soul could have some peace. When he sensed her finally die, he reached out and, gently, with his fingertips, closed her remaining once-sapphire eye.
Then he leaned against the wall, eyes closed, trying very hard not to think of what just happened.
Sight might not be a shinigami's primary sense like it was for humans, but it still was powerful. He found an excuse to hitch a ride back home on one of the various official vehicles that came to…clean up the killers' lair.
It didn't work. Once the soul was gone, all that he could sense from a body were the same senses a human had, though some of his were sharper. It became harder to ignore the color of her eyes and hair, when her soul was no longer there to distract him from such details. The smell of blood and pain had been strong enough to cover any personalized scent she might have had; it would have been enough to make it hard to tell a human from a doll, just by scent, at that strength.
It felt better to ride back, sitting between Liz and Patti in a not-quite-wide-enough back seat. He could just close his eyes and focus on what made them them—their souls warm and nearby, their warm bodies against his cool one, their unique scent of gunpowder-humanity-them… When they were guns, that was lacking, and he needed that right now.
Kid did his best not to think about the edge of distress he felt from the pair during the ride.
He could get rid of it once they were home.
The bubble bath hadn't been enough, so he unlocked the liquor cabinet. He wanted to get drunk; it did seem to help the two he lived with, sometimes, and he couldn't help wondering if, maybe…
But not tonight. He knew Patti had no idea she was being served hard cider instead of her usual apple juice—Kid knew he'd chosen to store them together for a reason—but Liz knew he was giving her alcohol, even though this wasn't a day he'd normally do it.
He settled on the couch between them, still wanting to have them close. The drink worked its magic on Patti quickly; Kid had learned early on that she was easy to get drunk, at least when given a nice tall glass of liquor. Whatever tolerance she'd developed for alcohol before had faded quickly once Kid had taken control of the liquor cabinet.
It probably had helped that Kid generally refused to serve the underaged. Patti had only had a couple glasses of alcohol in the past several years, and always before on special occasions like her sister's 21st birthday.
Normally, the bubble bath would have been enough to restore Patti's usual good mood, and he'd not had any reason to serve her alcohol.
This was not a normal day.
The younger pistol downed her alcohol quickly, and was soon in that adorable state of drunkenness she only occasionally reached now. Kid sort of liked that Patti was a cuddly drunk…and the fact that she could so innocently drape herself over her meister. It'd be…awkward, otherwise.
Liz…was nursing her drink, like he had kept hoping she'd finally start doing. This wasn't enough to distract him from his own memories… Kid hadn't actually seen a dead body before now; when a demon weapon was used properly, the body dissolved to free the soul completely from it faster. The other souls…well, that ship had been kin to a demon weapon, and the rest had been dead long enough for their flesh to rot from their bones completely.
His father likely had done that intentionally. He didn't have to see the body once the flesh had crumbled, if the soul needed sending on.
He would need to thank his father for that.
Kid had never quite expected to feel the…desire to do something he knew was improper. True, Father had warned him that it would happen, but…
Well, he'd expected it to be the 'fun' type of improper and involve a pair of busty blonds.
Not so distressing and involving…an entirely different blond.
When Patti wriggled under his petting, getting more comfortable in his lap as her robe fell open…he was glad she was asleep, and in his lap as she hid his body proving that it found them quite attractive.
There was a reason he'd expected such improper desires to involve them. It'd helped a lot that he knew if he tried them one at a time, he would probably not get the other, which would absolutely ruin the symmetry of the night-time sleeping arrangements, and if he tried to get both…
He would want a new matched pair of weapons.
Kid ran his fingers through Patti's hair. It was soft, comforting and…look, it wasn't lying symmetrically, alright? If it had been, he'd not have been touching it.
When Liz, too, started touching him, Kid decided to do something his father had told him about. He'd not used it to try to comfort them before, merely to help himself deal with the sleeping arrangement's lack of symmetry. A little reaching out with his soul, to touch their own, not quite the same sort of resonance they used when in battle…
Kid had some idea what it felt like to be on the receiving end. He had vague memories of being a small, young shinigami, still too weak and untrained to fare well against even a regular adult human, and…
He had learned that in a very personal way, having been a curious young thing, and it was sheer luck that it'd happened inside Death City and his father had been able to save his undeserving rear.
It was just as comforting now.
He watched Liz relax, in case she opted to fall asleep like Patti, and slowly realized that…she wasn't relaxing very much.
"Liz?"
Kid noticed her slight start; he'd surprised her. "Kid, that woman there…is it still bothering you, too?"
He nodded, thinking about how much she'd been suffering at the end, and how easily he could have…
Liz shuddered, and even Patti seemed to pick up on his discomfort.
He was a shinigami. Shinigami did not do…that. He was a horrible one, to have even thought about it. They did not grant that right to any, not even themselves; it was something Kid simply knew.
He didn't know, though, if Liz was able to tell more detail through the link; he'd not talked to Honorable Father about it, only knew it from having felt it (warm, comforting, wordlessly telling him that his parent was there and he was safe) himself.
It took him a little to decide she wasn't as aware of it as 'other' than he was, and decide it was safe to slip an arm around Liz for physical comforting as well.
Patti shifted as they sat, quietly. She seemed, in her sleep, to be more…not aware, but open to what her meister was doing. He wondered a little if Liz's barriers would drop once she fell asleep, too.
Kid did not doubt that if he could protect them from nightmares…
He'd wake up bruised much less often.
Liz helped him carefully shift Patti—neither wanted to wake her up, if at all possible—so he could get up and take care of their empty glass and mug, and the pair of them carried her to bed. Her robe was slipped off carefully, in an unspoken sort of agreement.
There was just a need to feel warm skin against theirs, and Kid was unsure, right now, if it originated with him or with Liz.
Patti's robe was hung on its hook, his own and Liz's beside it, and he slipped into bed.
It was warm. Liz and Patti cuddled against him and each other, skin soft and comforting. Their scent, calmer than earlier, was reassuring. Their souls were lacking the sharpness of wakefulness; if he had to try to put it into more human terms, it was the difference between two rubber balls—with clear and distinct borders—and two kittens with similar fur in a kitten pile. It was easy for him to tell, right now, that their souls resonated with each other, and why he'd understood so quickly why they preferred to sleep together.
He relaxed, in a way he doubted those without a good sense of their own soul could understand properly, feeling his own soul slip into the easy, low-level resonance—white noise, comforting—that came naturally to them in their sleep.
Kid might not be able to get drunk, he might still be (unwillingly) virginal, but this…the feel of their souls there, beside him as he joined them in sleep…
It was order, it was symmetry…better than either, in its way.
It was what he needed, right now.
Notes: Various bits here are built from a combination of the folklore of death (and Death) in various cultures—I actually have a collection of references that matches a good university-level library (having used one to find out which ones were worth the effort), as befits any self-respecting book-loving goth—and throwaways in Soul Eater.
This is running off of manga continuity, where corpses are clearly left when more mundane causes of death are responsible. It's a minor detail, but…it makes somewhat more sense than having all corpses evaporate a la the anime—yet having a zombie (Sid) and a necromancer witch (Samantha) with an army of reanimated corpses also present. Your guess is as good as mine as to what happened to the dead Mizune's corpse.
Mittō is Latin, not Japanese, and refers to what part of Kid's job is.