Police sirens blared loud in the rural town of Ricketow, Alabama. Tragedy was unfamiliar to its simple streets, and only in the recent times did the unassuming folk begin to remember what kind of world they inhabited. A few police cruisers were pulled up to the scene on a cold fall morning, at a small house belonging to a mother of two.
An officer and a deputy laid wait in their car on standby, while two officers went inside to scope out the situation. "Why's everybody keepin' me in the dark nowadays? Don't seem all that big to me." The deputy idly tapped his nightstick against the frosted window.
"Kid gone missing. Dart Dekei, his name is." The sheriff mumbled, donut crumbs spilling onto the rudimentary notes he'd taken during the initial call: twelve years old, caucasian descent, black, frazzly hair and between 5'4'' and 5'5''.
"Dekei?" The deputy blinked, a sense of urgency running through his blood. "Y'mean... Dekei, Dekei?"
Coffee buzzed at the sheriff's lips. "Yep. Same family. We ain't gonna make connections to the other case until somethin' relevant pops up though."
"Hey, sarge, we got somethin'!" One of the rookie officers yelled, poking out of the front door of the house.
"S-Shiiiiiiiyet." The deputy and sheriff began to hustle out of the car simultaneously, nightsticks tapping while they barged in.
/
"What's the problem?! We got a lead?" The sheriff asked, quieting a bit as he saw the grieving mother standing by the kitchen table.
She was shaking in-between sobs, clutching something in her hands. "Ma'am, is there...there somethin' we need to know?" The deputy laid a hand on her shoulder, looking at whatever damning evidence she seemed to have found.
Her expression was dreading, the circles under her eyes having been a witness to so much hardship in forty-something years. "He did it. He's gone and ran to that death-trap school!" She collapsed over the table, bitter tears smudging the hasty black ink the letter was written in.
Meanwhile, Dart Dekei sat gazing out the window of a wayward train, filing through some postcards with an insurmountable sense of dread rising in his chest. The sting of dried tears still lingered on his cheeks, no matter how he tried to hide their traces.
One in particular stood out to him. It was tattered and faded white in some spots, like it'd been gathering dust since the eighties, with bright colors that looked to take on darker hues with its age. Death City: the land that breeds courage, it said. Courage. I can't do it. I ain't meant for it. His fingers knotted within themselves, head bowed as the true gravity of his choice hit. Away from home. Away from ma. And worst of all, his purpose there: the hunt and subsequent killing of Kishin eggs and everything that went bump in the night. He shuddered imagining it—their gaping maws twisted into a heartless grin, ripping through flesh and bone in search of the souls they coveted so badly.
Dart pressed his palms against the train's cracked window, gazing out to the endless Nevada desert sand. "Ya think I'm gonna do the world some good?" He couldn't help but look back in the direction of his hometown as he asked the question, his childhood nostalgia left behind on the train to Death City.
Author's Note:
Timeline: The short "prologue" chapters take place around the same time as Soul Eater NOT (2007, let's say). The chapters from then on are two years later, shortly after Asura's defeat in the anime's chronology (2009).
Welcome, welcome! First off, I wanna thank you for taking an interest in this in the first place. OC-fics aren't the most popular genre, so I'm grateful you took the time to read this. Aside from that, what'd you think? Questions? Comments? General critiques? I'll read 'em all, and with pleasure. But if you have a question, make sure you have an account so I can fill you in with a PM.
