Author's note: Another request from shialuvr222. I had no premise except "gratuitous tragedy" when I started out, but it spiraled into a deep (11 pages! What even!) character study of the Thompson sisters. Since I cosplay Liz on occasion, it was very important for me to get her emotions right, even when I don't share them. Once you read, please leave a review and tell me if you think I did or not. I'm still iffy about some of this.
"It's a carnival, not a banquet." Elizabeth Thompson leaned one hip against the doorframe, her arms crossed in front of her chest. "Or a funeral, for that matter."
Death the Kid glanced down at his black suit and jacket. "What, is the tie too formal?"
Rolling her eyes, she strode over to him and unfastened his coat, spreading it out to display the bone-white dress shirt underneath. "Look. If you're going to wear this, let it breathe. We're going to be sitting in a crowded arena. Being buttoned up to the neck like that won't be any fun." She undid the skull clasp at his collar.
Kid marveled at the gall she had to march into his room, come this close to him, when they'd only just met about a month ago. Weren't most people scared of soul reapers? He glanced down at the open jacket and tried to readjust his own symmetry, indignant. "I didn't know you were such a fashion expert!"
She paid more attention to the clasp than to him. It wasn't as though the Death City logo was frightening or offensive. It was a rotund, goofy caricature of a skull, and looked more like a 50's cartoon character than a symbol of mortality. Yet she seemed lost in thought over it. She set it on his dresser absently. Kid was straightening his blood red tie when she spoke up again.
"Are those colors the only ones you wear?"
He shot her an offended look. "Black and white go best with my hair."
She stared at him, deadpan, then, without even looking, pulled his closet door open to exhibit rows of white, black, dark red, dark yellow, and even a sickly green or two. "I'm just saying. You seem to only ever wear colors associated with death."
"There's…nothing wrong with being proud of my heritage," Kid faltered. He'd never actually noticed before.
"No," she agreed, shrugging. "And it's fine. Death looks good on you."
He couldn't decide if he was supposed to take offense at that.
She moved to leave and paused before she reached the doorway. "We're still waiting, by the way. Don't blame me when Patti's bouncing off the walls."
"Yes, yes, I'm coming," Kid grumbled, distracted. He stared into his closet for several minutes, at a loss, then finally reached deep into a pile of untouched garments and selected a light blue necktie to replace the one Liz had criticized. A compromise, he decided. It was the color of the ceiling in his Father's room.
He really did need some new options.
"That's it! It's two-thirty! We missed the first showing!" he heard Liz yell.
He scrambled to worm the tie around his neck before shrieking, "What?! When did it get so late?"
Liz and Patti Thompson had been partners with the reaper for a few weeks before the oldest sister began to realize what had been happening. Kid had decided on this day to visit a carnival, due to a rumor that there was a set of identical twins who did a show where they mirrored each other. Pretty much just for that one reason. He dragged his weapon partners along with him, probably hoping they'd find "inspiration" in the act.
Liz was fairly comfortable in crowds. Most people would feel exposed, like every eye was on them, but anyone from the streets knew the truth: in a crowd, you were hidden. You were one moving cell in a body, at unity with any chaos around you. Invisible in plain sight.
It was Patti who seemed to be acting up today. She used her pretty blue eyes to glare daggers at carnies who came too close. The performers felt oddly challenged by her apparent lack of interest, and soon they were being followed by a crowd of clowns with free time and bets were being laid over who could make little blondie laugh.
Kid thought it was annoying at first, but Liz got him to stand still so they could enjoy what was pretty much their own free show. The clowns went to ridiculous lengths, pulling faces and comically attacking each other or themselves in an effort to summon the ancient, mystical art of slapstick.
After several rounds, Kid glanced at his watch. "The show's starting in ten, we should find a seat."
Liz turned to him, sticking an elbow in his ribcage. "Will you relax? The show can't start without these guys, anyw—"
She could never figure out what had happened in those two seconds when she'd looked away, but all at once she was interrupted by a bubbling explosion of laughter. Patricia was doubled over, gasping with hysterics. Two acrobats exchanged high-fives, congratulating each other on a job well done.
It wasn't a wicked chuckle, meant to intimidate. It wasn't the relieved sort of laughter she'd heard upon discovering the safety of someone close. Patti was letting forth a real, enthusiastic, entertained laugh. She'd finally found something funny, and it dawned on Liz that this was a foreign concept to both of them.
She glanced at Kid, with his monogrammed, skull-emblazoned wallet and generous heart, then back to Patti, and she had to remind herself that even after the years of building each other up as fearless demon weapons, they were both still young girls. As the crowd of carnies began to file away to prepare for the next show, Liz seized her younger sister by the shoulders.
"Patti!" she exclaimed.
Patti's face was still split in two by a wide grin. "Yeah, sis?"
Liz pointed at a stand loaded with stuffed animals. "Do you like those?"
The younger girl's first instinct was to glare at them, but gradually, as she took in the menagerie of colorful critters, her eyes widened and she nodded her approval to her sister.
Liz smiled, then pulled her into a hug. "Good! That's so good! You know what? It's okay to want things now! Do you want one of those?"
"Y-yeah, but…"
"Which one do you want?"
Patti squirmed. "…I want the cow."
Pulling back, Liz looked at her with one eyebrow raised. "Really, the cow? Okay. Coming right up." She turned to Kid. "Hey, you!"
"What is it?" He turned his attention away from his watch—he was wearing two today, she noticed again. An expensive watch. On each hand. What was with rich people?—and towards his weapon partners.
"You gotta keep us happy, right?"
"What do you mean?" Kid took a step toward them. "You're my weapon partners and I—"
"Yeah, well, we ain't gonna be partners anymore if you don't buy that for my sister, capiche?" she demanded, swing an arm around to point at the fat cow plushie.
The boy glanced back at her with a bemused expression as he dug his money out. As he passed her, he paused to whisper, "You know, if you want something, you can just ask. I don't threaten easily."
She grabbed him and was unable to resist. "Oh, really?" Slowly, she raised one arm. Two shiny silver bangles hung from either of her wrists and now, deftly, she worked one off and held it in front of his face.
You would think she'd torn out Kid's heart and was showing it to him. Sweat poured out of him as his eyes flicked rapidly from the bracelet to her wrist to her other wrist and back again. Liz was unbalanced. She did not match. She only had three bracelets. She was asymmetrical.
He nearly screamed in terror before she put it back and tousled his hair condescendingly. "Now go get the cow."
He wandered off obediently, the incident forgotten.
Liz turned her triumphant smirk on Patti. "Can't let these rich kids push you around, am I right?"
Patti was biting her lip. "You know, sis, he wasn't really pushing you around or anything."
"I—yeah, I know, that's kinda not the point, though."
It was a spluttering sentence with no real meaning behind it. And suddenly, that was the best she could do. She'd just bullied their caretaker. And sure, he was an entitled rich brat, but was that really his fault? Liz began to wonder if she could even hold up a relationship with anyone besides her sister that didn't involve bribery or deceit.
"I'm just saying," Patti shrugged. "If it's okay to care about stuff, do you think it's okay to care about people now, too?"
Patti laughed at everything for the rest of that day. It was as though this was a new emotion for her and she tested it out on everything, even the basic, dumb clown stuff her older sister didn't understand. Enormous shoes? Funny. One guy somehow switching costumes with another buffoon? Hilarious. Them both crashing into each other in an attempt to change back? Priceless.
She even chortled over the death-defying stunts performed onstage, much to Liz's obvious concern. Perhaps it was because she'd stared real death in the eyes back on Brooklyn streets, over and over again, and in comparison, these acts were a light-hearted parody. Or because another version of Death was sitting next to her in a plastic folding chair, and he didn't look shaken.
Throughout the show, Patti sat with her fingers buried deep in the nape of her new furry friend, her mind buzzing with ideas on what to name him—for it was certainly a him, as it was lacking any semblance of an udder. Even Patricia Thompson, with her limited animal education, knew that girl cows had udders.
When the twin act finally came on, Patti laughed more at Kid's reactions than at the show. He was absolutely enamored by the two colorful and rather androgynous figures in the arena as they slowly rose high above the audience. They kept up the perfect illusion that there was only one person up there acting in a mirror, but then, every so often, one of them would purposefully slip, causing Kid's eye to twitch and ensuring the rest of the audience that both of the performers were real people.
Patti was still on a sugar high from the ridiculous amounts of cotton candy she'd consumed when they got back to Gallows Manor. Her stuffed animal had found a new resting place on top of her head, and she raced around the house with her arms out like wings.
"Precisely eight o'clock," Kid commented with a smirk as he crossed the threshold.
Liz found she could not roll her eyes hard enough. "Ugh, will you can it with the symmetry stuff already?"
"You know, I really think you fail to appreciate the beauty of balance." Kid turned on her, both hands on his hips. "If the world had more of it, there would be no wars."
"You're just saying that because you want me and Patti to look more like each other," she countered.
Patti grinned and slipped her cow onto her shoulders, watching the two argue from across the couch.
Kid's eyes shone as he reminisced on the day's events. "Don't you want to? You saw those twins today!" He drew his expression into a scowl suddenly. "Though they kept falling out of sync."
"That was intentional, Kid! You know why? Because they had to make sure everyone knew they were human! Being human is about imperfections." Liz grew quiet, as though surprised at the depth of her own statement. Then she snapped out of it and continued. "Patti and I aren't twins. We're individual people and we like it that way."
"But just think," Kid insisted, "what it would be like if you were identical…"
Elizabeth Thompson threw her hands up. "Agh! I'm done. I'm gonna go make some coffee."
"Coffee, coffee," Patti mumbled, her eyes growing wide. She dashed over and ran in circles around her sister. "That's it!"
"What's it? No way am I letting you have coffee this late at night, Patti!"
"No! Cow!" She held up her new toy as if it was obvious. "That's his name now. Cowfie!"
Liz just stared at her, unable to fathom the complex workings of her little sister's mind.
"Cowwww," Patti pronounced slowly, "Feeeeeee."
"…Maybe I'll just go to bed early," the older Thompson sister concluded, reaching a stray hand up to rub her temples where an impending headache was awakening.
Kid nodded at her. "We have a mission tomorrow, so it may be wise to rest up and be well-prepared."
"Meaning practice fighting formations all day to make sure they're 'symmetrical' and then go out at night," Liz said mockingly, but Kid didn't rise to the baiting. She sighed. "What are we going after, anyway?"
He flipped a page of his planner nonchalantly. "Some supposedly master-thief named Lupin."
"Awwww, just a thief?" Patti moaned, disappointed. She liked fighting the more violent gangsters and legendary killers.
"A thief...of souls," Kid clarified. "And you'll have to leave the cow here if you don't want to lose it, Patti."
Patti decided this was a fair tradeoff.
Once the sugar drained out of her system about a half an hour later, Patti found herself wandering back to the double room she and her sister shared. There was a wall down the middle that could be drawn closed when the two sisters were mad at each other, but now, as it normally was, it was pulled open. The room seemed too big, even for the both of them. Liz sat on the edge of her queen-sized bed, painting her toenails. Patti flopped down next to her, curling around Cowfie and watching her sister's actions dimly.
"Did you have fun today?" Liz asked.
Patti nodded, smiling.
Liz capped the polish and patted her sister's bright blond hair, mentally comparing it to her own. Then, almost too quiet for Patti to hear, she whispered "We really are different..."
Since she couldn't remember much about their mother, Patti had never thought about it. But considering their mother's rather...questionable line of work, the thought that popped into her mind suddenly made sense: she and Liz weren't full-blooded sisters. That would explain why Liz's face was so different from her own; why her hair, while still retaining a golden sheen, was so much darker, bordering on brown.
Patti looped one arm around her sister's leg suddenly. Did Liz already know this? If so, why did she even feel a responsibility to her little sister?
Yet Liz's arms enfolded her protectively, and Patti gave up any doubt. They were sisters. It didn't matter who their father—or fathers—were.
"Darn that Kid," the older girl chuckled. "I really didn't want to let him change me like this. But at least I know one thing. You and me, Patti, we're going to stick together forever. Okay?"
"Okay, sis," Patti said, nuzzling her face into Liz's knee. She drifted off to sleep with Liz's hand still stroking softly through her short hair.
Transfixed, Death the Kid slipped down into a seat at the head of the long dining table. His weapon partners were wearing matching outfits and sitting on opposite sides, drawing—Liz with her left hand, Patti with the right. As he watched, Liz copied every sluggish line her sister made onto her own picture.
Both girls even had their hair pulled up under the same hat. The scene was so beautifully symmetrical that he immediately suspected something was up. They'd been partners for two full years now. He knew by now that they only did something like this if they wanted him in a good mood. (Which was, granted, more agreeable than threatening him.)
"Okay," he said flatly after a few minutes. "What do two you want?"
The illusion was immediately broken as both girls stood and surrounded him. Liz whipped out a poster. For a second he was frustrated by the lack of order in the design on the page, then his eyebrows furrowed as he realized it look familiar.
"It's the circus," Liz explained. "Remember that show with the two guys who looked exactly like each other?"
"That same one just pulled into town and they're going to do it again!" Patti said excitedly.
Kid's face lit up. "Oh, yes! Glorious! That show was beautiful, fantastic—just perfect in every way! They're back in Death City? How did I not know about this?"
"We're telling you now. Patti wants to go. Isn't that right, Patti?"
The younger sister's face flicked over to her quizzically. "Yeah, sure, sis, but you were the one who found the poster and circled the date on your calendar three weeks ago and—"
Liz blushed and encircled one arm around Patti's head, conveniently enclosing her sister's mouth with her forearm. "Patti's just so excited. I can't get her to stop talking about it." The end of that sentence was spoken through clenched teeth as the older girl's eyes narrowed down at Patti.
Patti gave a slow nod from inside the headlock.
Kid was too enlivened to notice, however. "This will be brilliant, just like last time. A perfect balance. Come along, ladies, let us make preparations! We're going to the carnival!"
But the girls had already rushed back into their conjoined room to get dressed. Patti drew back one side of the room divider to display the outfit she'd picked out: a light blue belly shirt that matched her eyes, white slim jeans, and golden wrist bangles.
Liz tilted her head. "Might not want to go with white for the pants, Patti. The circus was pretty dirty last time. I'm not even wearing nice shoes this year."
The girl glanced down. "Oh, yeah. How about beige?"
"That'll work." Liz turned back to her reflection and decided her hair was as brushed as it was going to get. Then she put on a pair of her own beige capris and went to high-five her sister before they both emerged, having been in their rooms for less than five minutes.
Patti had something tucked under one arm: a familiar stuffed animal that Liz honestly thought she'd forgotten about or discarded long ago.
"Hey, you still have him."
Patti glanced at the carnival plushie. "Yeah. Cowfie's special."
Elizabeth smiled, suddenly feeling very nostalgic. "With all your nice new toys, I thought you didn't like him anymore."
She blinked. "No, he's been under my pillows. I didn't want to have to bother you with my bad dreams anymore, so I started talking to Cowfie about them instead."
She was unashamed to admit sleeping with a stuffed animal, even at her age. Patti was cashing in on years of being a kid that she'd missed out on back on the streets. That was the real reason for the ability she'd found over these years with Kid to find humor in every situation.
Conscious that saying anything now could embarrass them both, Liz ruffled her sister's short blond hair. "Come on, we can't keep Kid waiting or he'll forget about us," she chuckled.
"Kay, sis!" Patti grinned, and when they rejoined Kid in the foyer, she was still faithfully clutching 'Cowfie' at her side.
Elizabeth Thompson was on her knees, twisted tightly into herself, arms pressed into the dirt floor and protecting her head. It took her a while to realize the noise had stopped. Every now again a creak or a rumble sounded and a cloud of silt would fall to settle on her back. She gradually uncurled, seeking anything familiar in the half-light shed by slits in the colorful canvas. She felt unhurt, though fragments of glass were making a mess of her legs.
For a while, it had just been screaming. If the trio from the DWMA had not expected a pre-kishin to appear in the middle of a show, the circus performers and audience had expected it even less so. Thankfully it seemed like most of the civilians escaped when their battle broke out, and the rest of them had gotten out before this disaster had occurred. Liz remembered seeing carnies waving their arms and yelling at them for their indiscriminate aim and just wanting them to run away until she heard the first tent pole snap.
Now, she was trying hard not to have a panic attack. The big top had collapsed over them all. People would need help, yet here she was, in decent working condition, cowering in a puddle of tears. She forced herself to blink her vision clear. Patti. And Kid. Where were her partners?
With a sudden sense of alarm, Liz rose to her feet, grateful she had elected to wear sneakers today instead of the usual high-heeled boots. She called out to them, but her voice was contained in the crooked space. She coughed up dust.
"Patti! Kid? Hey!"
She couldn't straighten up fully without scraping her head against the oppressive tent fabric. It would be easy to blast her way outside, but as much as she wanted to rush into open space and fresh air, she could not—would not leave without her sister or her meister.
A hand twitched nearby, still clutching a stuffed cow, and Liz punched a hole in the drooping ceiling to get better light. The hand was—oh, thank God—still connected to an arm, which led to a body draped over the fallen remains of another wooden pillar that had once supported the circus tent. There was a rustling before Patti's face rose to find hers.
"Sis?"
"Oh, Patti." Liz threw her arms around her sister and swallowed her sobs. "Thank goodness you're okay!"
"Can't move my leg," Patti noted after she'd tried to waggle out of her current position.
"That's okay, I'm sure Lord Death knows where we are and what's happened by now so help should be on the way. Here, let me take a loo—" Liz peered around her sister and stifled her own scream before flipping back around Patti with an encouraging smile. "Ahahaha, it's fine, it's just a break. Your foot's trapped under what I guess must be the remains of the cotton candy stand."
Patti buried her face in her plush bovine, quaking with agony. "Curse you, cotton candy! Ahh, no! Cowfie!" She pulled it away to examine areas where wooden shrapnel had pierced the fluffy cow straight through.
Liz's heart skipped a beat. "Just be glad that's not you," she said with no small amount of relief. Still, the cuddly toy's unfortunate fate singed a dark omen into her mind. At one time it had symbolized the end of the life they led on the streets, where luxuries like toys were only a far-off dream meant for some other child. A sinking feeling crept into her that things were about to get hard again.
Patti glanced around, trying to fight off a wave of lethargy. "Did you find Kid?"
"No, I haven't yet." Liz wavered, trying to decide whether she should leave her sister like this.
"I'll be right here." Patti glanced back at her leg and shrugged, then pulled her cow closer to use it as a pillow.
"Okay," Liz said hesitantly before making herself back away.
It took a while to find him. He was lying flat out, like a young man already in a coffin, glaring down at his midsection as if plotting out how to move again. It was so dark she could only just make out his skin and the stripes in his hair, because, of course, even though they were going to one of the most colorful events in existence, Kid just had to wear black.
"Kid!" she cried.
"Liz! Where's Patti?" he asked immediately, screwing his neck around to look at her.
She knelt by him on the sticky, stony earth, despite painful protests from her knees. "I found her, she's okay. Well, not totally okay, but she'll be fine."
He released a long breath in a sigh and rested his head back on the ground. "That's a relief."
Once again, she reached up to rip open the tent fabric and let in the outside light. "Yeah. We should get back to her, she was probably in pain and—oh my g…Kid…"
Kid stared at her, made curious by her reaction, as if he didn't know. Splintered wooden beams pinned him straight through to the ground. His legs were splayed as though the force by which he'd been impaled had driven him into the ground, and judging by the size of the shafts, it had. His entire midsection was a mess, and she realized the ground was sticky, not with spilled soft drinks, but with a growing pool of his blood.
He chuckled quietly and she didn't even want to know what that meant for the wreck of his insides. "What, this? I've, uh…had worse."
The timbers running through him had been split up the middle into two smaller pieces. While it wasn't perfect, she realized he was optimistic because at least his injuries were even on the left and right. Liz fell backward, one hand practically shoved into her mouth, strangling her shrieks.
Kid's arm snapped out to snag her and he glanced from his wounds to her tearstained face. "Wait," he said, unnervingly calm. "I can't move, could you please…?"
"I—" Liz looked guiltily behind her, back to where her sister was waiting, torn between the two of them. "Patti…"
Kid released her suddenly, his attention turning back to his mangled abdomen. "Right, of course, you should be with your sister. Sorry, I didn't mean anything by it. You can come back for me after she gets help."
It occurred to Liz then that the boy did not understand that he was dying. Despite sharing a name with it, he did not know that Death was also meant for him one day. He was something of a demigod, after all. An angel of death.
And with a chill, she realized she had always seen him as immortal, too. As a reaper, that's what he was supposed to be.
His eyes closed as he attempted to keep his breathing steady. Then his legs flailed in an experimental attempt at movement, and a visible wave of excruciating hurt shot through Kid. He gritted his teeth and bled and all at once Liz just wanted to scream for him to stay still and help would come. She was nauseated by the sight of his rent flesh, but at the same time, she dared not leave him now. Death itself did not deserve to die alone.
She crept closer to his face as tears blurred her vision and tried to smile for him. "Patti will understand. You know, when we were on the streets, she had to wait for me all night sometimes because of trouble I got myself into."
"Really?" he asked, his stoic and painless façade beginning to show its cracks as his abdominal muscles trembled weakly.
"Yeah," Liz said, feeling a sudden shame color her cheeks. "I did a lot of terrible things back then."
He sucked in a hissing breath and fresh blood began to gush out from under him. "I can't imagine it. You've never been that much of a hoodlum around me."
"That's because I changed around you. At first it was just…supposed to be a temporary thing. I never thought we'd get so attached to you. I…didn't think it would last. I mean—Lord, my own mother didn't let me and Patti stay long." She slipped underneath him until his head was supported in her lap, half afraid that his neck would break at her touch. Her tawny hair slipped off her shoulders to frame his face. "Heh," she continued, "I never really thanked you, did I? You got us out of that hellhole in the streets and did all this great stuff for us. You let us learn how to be normal girls and I think that's the greatest thing anyone could do for a criminal like me."
He stared dimly up at her, trying to figure out why tears were slipping from her cheeks to splash his forehead. "Why are you telling me all this all of a sudden?"
"S-sudden danger really…opens your eyes," she sniffled.
His next attempt to address her ended quickly in a gurgling cough. His head fell back limply as blood escaped his mouth to draw lines down his chin. After a while, he said quietly, "You mean…the way you realize you might not see someone tomorrow?"
Liz let out a long, whimpering "Mhh-mmhmm…!" and bent until their foreheads met, her body wracked with uncontrollable sobs.
"My father says death is just a normal part of life, you know," he whispered.
She curled her hands around his face as if she could protect him. "But I don't want to lose you! I've lost so many already but you and Patti are the only ones who really—" her voice hitched. "—Really matter to me. Because you matter to both of us."
He used what remaining strength he had to comb his fingers through her dusty, tangled hair. "You don't have to worry."
She couldn't breathe. There was a weight inside her that was growing, strangling her. "Bu—but what—what am I gonna tell Patti, if you die, Kid? You—you're our life now."
"Just tell her…I'm sorry."
And that was it. His hand tumbled out of her hair, and Liz yelped and tried to catch it before it hit the bloody ground, pale and lifeless. He died with his eyes and mouth half-open, as though still trying to convey that last message to her.
Some distance away, Patricia regained consciousness in time to hear her sister's distant sobs of dismay. Workers were beginning to sort through the rubble that had once been a circus tent, but she knew how to differentiate her sister's footsteps from their heavy trod. She waited silently, her tense grip tearing at her already-damaged stuffed animal, until her big sister came for her. Liz's hands were stained in a dark red liquid that hadn't been there before she left. Wordlessly, she used those hands to rip the broken candy machine away from Patti's leg like a woman possessed, then she hefted her little sister in her arms and whispered "It's time for us to leave."
Patti nodded, and let her soft, broken toy fall from her hand.
By the time Lord Death sent a small army from the DWMA to search for his students and help the carnival rebuild, Death the Kid was cold where he lay, and the Thompson sisters were long gone.
Few people were invited into Lord Death's room alone like this. We must have done something pretty awful this time, Liz thought, glaring around at it and trying to seem indifferent. One strap of her dirty, moth-eaten tank top had slipped off her shoulder, and she still had an unlit cigarette hanging out one side of her mouth. No one was around to care that she wasn't balanced anymore.
Beside her, Patricia's arms were crossed and her scowling eyes downcast. Her sleeve had been ripped off and someone, Spirit, maybe, had draped a jacket over her shoulders when they'd come in. Patti did not acknowledge the gift, but she didn't shrug it off, either.
There had been nothing but pity in the faces of the faculty that had once known them as the two girls were led inside, passing each familiar stranger without comment. And sure, they looked a mess. Bloodied and scuffed up, with ragged clothing that smelled like the inside of a bar (for indeed, that was where they'd been stolen from). Furthermore, Patti's limp had never healed properly. Liz just stared directly into any sympathetic eyes, challenging them.
Feel sorry for this.
And she'd kicked over any stray furniture on the way in.
Lord Death seemed taller and thinner than she remembered him. He was like a rising point of black smoke, frozen in the instant that it touched the sky and topped with the mask that had become a blatant logo all over town. His hands weren't visible, and it was hard to tell if he was taking stock of their condition or glaring at them.
"How long are you girls going to keep this up?" he snapped suddenly.
They tried to seem unaffected by his anger, but couldn't help shrinking back.
"You've been running amok in the streets of my city for months now; stealing, vandalizing, and wreaking havoc." He sounded betrayed.
"Hey, it's just the way we are." Liz spat out the cigarette and rolled her shoulders, still feigning apathy. "We were invited to this place." She couldn't continue, because she didn't know why they hadn't been able to leave afterward.
"You were invited to attend this academy. To be the weapons partners of my son," Death said harshly.
The borrowed coat fell from Patti's shoulders to a crumpled ball on the floor as she stomped forward, fearless. "So what now? You gonna send us to join him?"
For a split second, that was an attractive option.
Lord Death was, appropriately, as still as a tomb. "I…I may have lost my son," he said, considerably softer, "But I don't want to lose two daughters as well."
So shocked were they that when his skeletal hands came up and encased them, the girls accepted his embrace and found themselves buried in his black cloak. His hold gave off no warmth and even seemed to chill them, but the touch, the closeness, was so welcome. They hadn't been held like this, not in a long time.
His voice was clearly sorrowful. "Did you think you weren't allowed to come back to Gallows Manor?"
"I don't know," Liz admitted, letting herself cry again for the first time in weeks. "I didn't know."
"We're so sorry. We're so…so sorry." Patti wrapped her arms around the dark form.
"He taught us how to…not be like that. But with him gone, it just…everything seemed so pointless. I just wanted things…to go back."
"I wished we'd never met him," Patti sniffed.
"It's not your fault this happened. It's no one's fault." Lord Death pulled them against him.
Patti nodded. "I don't, really. I just…"
"Want things to go back," Liz finished for her. "I think we needed something familiar…something that wouldn't remind us of him."
"Let's get you two cleaned up, okay? You're going to live at the manor and be my own special students from now on, whether you like it or not!" A hint of his former jolliness managed to seep into that deep voice.
The girls nodded over his shoulders and pulled away. Liz drew her eyebrows down and formed her mouth into a line, trying to regain her strong, passive air, but gave up after a few second. That wasn't her anymore, that was the stiff mask of a thug, someone who needed to intimidate in order to survive. She smiled as she wiped the tears away. Because, despite the pain she was revisiting, it felt so, so good to care again.
It was a beautiful irony that in Death's presence, they had been reborn.