Hour of Need

A Soul Eater Fanfiction

Disclaimer, just in case you missed it the first time: I don't own Soul Eater or any of the characters in the following fanfiction. However, the story idea is copyright 2011 to me.

Rated PG-13 for dark themes and light cursing.


Chapter 01


"Kid, what are you doing?"

Finding Kid up and awake at all hours of the night was not an abnormal occurrence. Over time the other inhabitants of Gallows Manor had become more than adjusted to the workings of the next Grim Reaper's mind, and the clicking and clacking of spice jars being readjusted or the dull thud of books being stacked had become as common and as comforting as the ticking of the clock in the hallway.

What was abnormal, however, was the increased frequency with which these compulsive needs were coming up and the amount of time and effort that was going into quelling them. This was the third night in a row in which Liz had awoken for a glass of water, only to find Kid in the kitchen, scrubbing the spotless floor in a pin-prick size spot with an almost frightening intensity. His eyebrows were knitted together, his tongue poking out of the left side of his mouth, his bony shoulders jutting up through his black pajama top and the muscles tensing and releasing as he pushed the wire scrub brush back and forth in a swift, rhythmic motion.

"I can't get this spot to come up off the floor. I've been trying for days, but it won't come up…"

The tone of his voice was abnormal as well. While he was always prone to a tinge of panic or frustration when he was in one of his cycles, the last few days had given rise to a near hysteria and a slight lack of focus in his golden orbs that Liz found unsettling. He was paler than usual as well, and while it was not out of the norm for what little color his skin did possess to take a few days coming back after an exceptionally hard battle, it had not escaped her notice that he had eaten very little and slept even less. Liz had her own theories that the battle against Asura had taken a much deeper emotional toll on her meister than he was willing to admit, but Kid had been closed off and hard to reach since that battle only a few days prior, and she had no clue how to go about bridging this sudden gap. She had contemplated going to Shinigami with her concerns, but feared that doing so would yield more problems than results. Kid was nothing if not a prideful teenager, and above all else he valued the approval and praise of his father. Anything that he felt could be viewed as a failure or flaw in his father's eyes was an abomination of the worst kind, and he avoided such instances at all costs. While Shinigami had never outright criticized his son's obsessive-compulsive behaviors, at least not in front of Kid or his weapons, there were looks he would give or actions he would take that spoke louder than words. Those were the moments hardest for Kid, and thusly they were the moments he took the steps to avoid. Over time he had been careful to hide his compulsive issues from his father, performing them late in the night when the rest of the house assumed he was sleeping and Shinigami was disposed of in the Death Room. In Kid's mind, if his father couldn't see it, it didn't happen, and therefore it was a failure that was to some degree manageable. Liz knew how his mind operated, at least somewhat, and to bring his father into the mix would be a betrayal of the worst kind.

So she had come to handle the issues herself, coaxing Kid away from whatever had unhinged his troubled mind, prying the cleaning cloth from his fingers or shooing him away from the dishes so she could finish what he started and he could go to bed and get a precious few hours of sleep before school. In the past it had always worked, even if it took her some time to make him come around (and if worse came to worse, Patty would step in and handle the issue in her own "special way"). Lately, however, nothing seemed to be breaking him out of his cycles and Liz feared that his mental state was too shaken to handle an assault from Patty's methods of persuasion. That left her helpless, able only to watch as her meister and best friend suffered in a silence of his own making with no way to fix what she didn't even know to be broken.

"Kid… it's late. You need to sleep, we have a test tomorrow. Let's worry about the spot later."

"Not yet. Soon. I just need to finish what I started. I just need to do something right. I'm sure, any moment now, that it'll come up and everything will be fine. I can't let the house stand in such shambles, what would Father think? He would see me for the bad son I am, the bad son I have always been but he's always been so blind to it…"

That was something else that was disturbing to Liz. Kid had been prone to fits of self-deprecation ever since she had met him, but they were usually isolated to points at which there was something asymmetrical that overloaded his thought process. She had never taken them seriously because they had never occurred during a time that warranted concern. Now that fact had changed; suddenly Kid could do nothing but put himself down, no matter the reason or the setting. Over morning breakfast he would mutter about his lack of worth, how he wasn't fit to be the son of such a great reaper, but always to himself in a hushed tone so that Liz could barely hear him and Patty paid him no mind. In class his mind would wander and his lips would move soundlessly as a film of tears glazed over his bloodshot eyes. Liz didn't need to hear the words to know they were nothing good.

Something was very, very wrong, and Liz had no clue how to go about fixing it.

She found herself down on her knees on the floor next to him, her hands reaching out to gingerly take hold of his shoulders. He had definitely lost weight recently; his arms felt like brittle sticks with a thin mesh of flesh stretched over them, and she could hear the faint popping of his shoulders as he continued with his obsessive scrubbing, seeming to ignore her presence at his side.

"Your father is more than proud of you for the things you've accomplished. He wouldn't want you to sit up all night obsessing over a spot on the floor when you have school tomorrow and you need to sleep. Why don't you go lay down and I'll handle the spot on the floor? Your shoulders could use a rest."

"Go back to bed, Liz. I have it handled."

But he didn't have it handled, and they both knew it. He didn't have the imagined spot on the floor handled, or the sleepless nights handled, or whatever the Hell it was that was making him act like this handled. Something, somewhere, had slipped, and Kid either didn't realize it or was attempting to pretend like the issue didn't exist by burying it under the tedious motions of compulsive cleaning. Liz sighed and shook her head, reluctant to let him go but unsure how much good it would do to keep holding onto him. She was nowhere near physically strong enough to force him away from his self-appointed task, even with Kid in this weakened state.

"Thirty more minutes. If it hasn't come up in thirty more minutes, I want you to call it a night and go to bed. Otherwise I'll get Patty out here to convince you. Understood?"

He paused only briefly in his work, but she didn't miss the little shudder that quaked his body in response to the threat.

"Fine. Go back to bed."

It wasn't a good enough compromise, but it was going to have to do. Liz retrieved her glass of water, said goodnight to him when she reached the doorway, and waited for nearly a minute before giving up on a response and ascending the stairs to bed.


"Liz, is something wrong with Kid? He looks terrible."

"He didn't sleep well last night."

"You mean he didn't sleep at all last night."

Liz glanced over at Tsubaki and sighed, nodding her head. She hadn't been surprised when she had come downstairs this morning, a half-awake Patty in tow, to make breakfast only to find Kid still on his knees on the kitchen floor. His slumped posture had spoken of both exhaustion and defeat, and it had been almost too easy to pull him to his feet and walk him upstairs to his room, where she had ordered him to take a shower and get dressed for school. While he was getting ready she had carefully examined the floor, looking for the spot of imperfection that had weighed so heavily on his mind the past three nights, and was troubled to discover that there was nothing there. The floor was polished, spotless, the tiles all the same shade of burgundy red without a single blemish in sight. She had checked twice to be sure. There was nothing there.

Kid had appeared on time, refused breakfast, and taken up his usual position exactly two steps ahead of them on their walk to class. As if he had slipped on a mask, there was no trace of just how hard last night had been save for the deep bags under his eyes and the pale tone of his skin. It could be passed off as a restless night, nothing more, to those who did not know him as intimately as Liz did. This, unfortunately for her and fortunately for him, was nearly everyone else in the school.

"How many sleepless nights has he had?"

Tsubaki kept her voice low and hushed so as not to attract the attention of anyone else around them, though Liz was not concerned about being overheard. Black*Star was too wrapped up in himself to pay any mind to anything that didn't pertain to him, Patty was absorbed in converting her textbook into an origami elephant, and Kid's eyes were glazed and distant, far away from the school and in a world of his own making.

"Every night since the fight against Asura has been a sleepless one. He hasn't eaten much, either."

"It's starting to show."

Liz shifted uncomfortably in her seat, glancing at her meister and then back at Tsubaki.

"… what do you mean?"

"We finished our test two hours ago, and if I'm not mistaken, that packet of papers sitting in front of him is his exam. Which he hasn't even attempted to put his name on, let alone complete. I don't think he's even moved from that position since you guys arrived."

Tsubaki was right and Liz knew it. She also knew that out of all the people that could have noticed Kid's change in attitude, she was most thankful that it was Black*Star's quiet, respectful weapon. Her concern was endearing, but she was intelligent and respectful enough to know that any attempt at intervention would not be a wise idea. Liz could (and would) tell her to leave it well enough alone, and Tsubaki would respect her request. What was warrant for distress was that it was now only a matter of time before Kid's strange behavior caught the attention of someone who wouldn't understand the way his mind operated and they would attempt to fix things themselves. Undoubtedly Professor Stein would find Kid's lack of a submitted exam suspicious, and Liz already found herself dreading the inevitable conversation that would arise between Kid and his father as a result.

"… Kid's going through a rough spell right now. That Kishin attack really messed him up. I think he just needs a little time to cope with everything that happened and to sleep off the last of his injures. I've got it handled, and I'm sure in the next few days he'll be back to his usual self."

Making light of the situation would have eased the mind of anyone in the class save for Tsubaki. The soft-spoken weapon cocked an eyebrow and shook her head, but took the unspoken plea for her silence for what it was and turned back to face the head of the classroom.

"For his sake, I hope you're right."

When the class bell rang to signal that the day was over, Kid was still sitting in the same position as he had been when the day had begun. It took Liz nearly twenty minutes to get him to respond to her calling his name, and another ten to pull his stiffened form out of his chair. He appeared lucid and zombie-like as she led him towards the door, and when he pulled away from her, it was so he could step up to the chalkboard, his hand already reaching inside his pocket for the cleaning cloth she knew he kept close at all times.

'Oh no…'

"You two go on home without me. I just need to take care of something here first."

He raised his arm and began to rub at the pristine black surface with the cloth, moving in slow, meticulous circles. Liz and Patty exchanged a glance and the younger of the two sisters reached up to grab her elder's shoulder, pulling her head down to whisper in her ear.

"What's he cleaning, sis? There's nothing there."

There's nothing there. There was nothing there on the floor, either.

"I don't know, Patty. Maybe he sees something we don't."

She didn't want to leave him here. There was a sinking feeling in her gut that if she did, they would come back the next morning to find him still in the same spot, scrubbing at the same non-existent flaw, looking even more pale and brittle than he did in this moment.

"Kid, let us help. It'll go faster if we all three work on it."

"Go home."

"Kid, please…"

"GO. HOME."

He had not raised his voice, but he hadn't needed to. The intensity in his words came from his tone, not his volume, and there was no mistaking that it was a demand, not a request. They were neither wanted nor needed in this moment. Liz swallowed the lump that had jumped into her throat as she put her arm around Patty's shoulders, shushing her sister as she opened her mouth to give what was undoubtedly a snippy comeback.

"Come on. I'll make spaghetti for dinner."

The distraction worked and Patty nodded brightly, her wounded pride forgotten as she bounded out the door. Liz paid Kid one last glance, shook her head, and followed after her sister in silence.

TBC