Before you read this, go back to chapter two and read the first few paragraphs again. I want this to be less confusing, so it's completely manga-based. Although I am keeping Maka as a weapon because it is impossible to have this story without that element.

Lily- Age Seven

It was cold outside.

I rubbed my hands together and pressed them to my nose, which had lost all feeling even before I left the school building.

I reached into my back pocket and pulled out the food notes Mother had given me, and turned the corner towards the General Supply. Dead leaves blew down the cobblestone streets, and officers stood in groups of two or three at the front of a few shop units that had been closed down before I was born.

I entered the old building where everything was stored, and got into Line 5, as per usual. There was a new lady at the desk today. She didn't seem any happier to be here than the last one.

"Classification?" She asked, not looking up from what she was doing.

"W. MacIntyre family, block C, building 42, unit 51." I told her.

The clerk grumbled to herself and entered the information I'd given. A receipt printed from a slit in her desk, and she handed it to me. "Take that to the back room, someone will be there to get the goods for ya, hon. Next!"

I took the receipt to the back, and retrieved the pound of protein solution, cup of assorted flavor solution, and 400-pill bottle that my mother had requested on the notes she'd given me this morning.

We were supposed to take the pills every day. I had tried not taking them once, and I had gotten a massive headache. When I'd visited the nurse, she told me I was just reacting to not taking the pills for once, and I was lucky I didn't become sick.

Later, I'd found out exactly what "sick" meant.

Some had decided not to take the pills at all, and had had some sort of rabid reaction. They frothed at the mouth, and their eyes twitched independently from each other. Some were even violent. The officers usually ended up putting them down, and their bodies were immediately covered and taken to the incinerator.

It was getting dark, and I knew Mother would be irritated if I wasn't home soon. I touched my hand to my ear, and my music implants turned on. I made hand motions to select a song, and soon I had turned up the volume quite a bit more than I should have.

It was a mistake.

I didn't hear the sick person come up from behind me.

I felt something huge on my back, and suddenly all of its weight was on me. It grabbed for my chest with one hand, and the other held a knife. I couldn't tell if he was trying to stab me or take my groceries.

I panicked. I was small even for a seven-year-old, and I'd taken a back road, so there were no officers. Likely, though, they would've killed me if necessary to get to the sick person on my back.

I sensed the monstrous thing was hungry, but angry and fearful. He moved like he was desperate, but confident that he could get what he wanted from me.

The free hand closed around my throat, and the knife aimed for my heart.

I guess he didn't want my groceries.

Suddenly, I felt a searing pain down my back, like I was being burned, but it soon subsided. Warm liquid, black in the moonlight, dripped onto the ground, and the knife clattered on the cobblestone. What was left of the man slumped to the ground with four giant slits clear through his torso.

At first I was relieved, until I realized that I did not know where the four slits had come from. I looked around, and caught my reflection in a nearby window.

I was covered in blood, and the top of my uniform was a bit more loose than usual, because the back was torn in multiple places. The groceries dangled from my hand, and something was hanging over my head. When I moved, it moved with me.

I stepped closer to the window, the thing shining in the moonlight, more blood slowly dripping off of it. I saw that it was… attached to my back, I think, and that there were more of them.

Turning, I realized they were long, black and silver blades that curved, two from my shoulder over my head, and two from my lower back that stuck straight out like spikes. I looked like some sort of demonic butterfly.

High above me in the sky, the moon drooled blood down onto the city.

-Cara-

It was like a castle, only much smaller.

It was only two stories, maybe three, and there were arrows and odd lines with short sticks crossing them painted over the concrete blocks that made up the building, which was shaped like a bunch of arrows pointing upward.

Ms. Marie held my hand as we walked through the gate. "Welcome to the Patchwork Laboratory," she whispered to me.

Azusa walked directly before us, arms and back straight as the arrows that covered the odd house. She had barely spoken during our entire trip.

I had waited in the hallway at the museum for what felt like forever, until the rest of the visitors had gone home. Ms. Marie had returned after the lights had gone out, and taken my hand. We'd used the teleport in the lobby to connect to one at a town hall somewhere in the desert, where Azusa met us. The three of us then walked through the sand until long after the moon had appeared above us. The whole time, I'd held on to the nice woman with the honey- yellow eye and tried to remain calm.

But even Ms. Marie's healing touch could not prepare me for the girl that had dropped seemingly out of the sky to land, standing, between Azusa and I.

"Is this her?" She asked, kneeling to brush my hair back, as she adjusted the wide black hat on her head. "She's-"

"No, Blair. I'm sorry. This one is mi- I mean, the other one. Her name is Cara." Ms. Marie told her.

She was by far the oddest person I'd ever seen. Her eyes were a pale yellow-gold, not so different from Ms. Marie's. Her hair was a deep purple, as were her long fingernails. She wore a black jumpsuit and black high-heeled boots.

Her face fell at what the older woman had said, but she quickly smiled at me again and sprang to her feet. "Should Blair go tell Miss Kami anyway?"

"Would you?" Miss Marie smiled at Blair, and I could tell she didn't need to use any sort of wavelength to convince her.

"That poor girl," I thought I heard Miss Marie whisper.

We made it to the front porch of the building, as the door opened and another woman stepped out, followed closely by Blair.

"Hello," she said. "You must be Cara."

"Good evening," I smiled at her and bent my knees in a half-curtsy. "And what is your name?"

"Miriam Kami White, but you can call me Kami," she replied with the smile of a schoolteacher with her first class.

Much like the other women I'd met so far, she seemed very friendly. Her eyes were a dark green, and her hair was pulled into two looped pigtails. She was wearing an old, worn white shirt and dark green cargo pants. When she leaned forward to shake my hand I noticed the only thing that seemed slightly off about her.

She had no pupils.

Creepy, I thought. I looked at the woman for a moment, trying to figure out where I'd seen her before.

"Never talk to strangers," my mother had said, but I was positive I'd seen Kami White somewhere.

I wondered if she was one of the Shibusen weapons like Marie and Azusa. Who were the other ones? She Justin law, Spirit Albarn…

Albarn.

She looked just like Maka Albarn.

I gasped and hid behind Miss Marie's leg, peering up at the woman through my bangs.

"You're her," I whispered.

A small smile played on Miss Kami's lips, but she raised an eyebrow.

"Who? Who am I?" She asked me, sitting on the ground cross-legged.

"You're Maka Albarn, all grown up," I accused, pointing my finger at her. "You just changed your name!" But then I pulled my hand back and bit my lip.

Miss Kami gave a small, sad laugh. "No," she told me. "Maka Albarn is my daughter."

Lily

I ran all the way home, and because it was nighttime no one saw me and my odd winglike... things.

I made it to the living room, where Will, my twin, was sitting in the floor stacking cups. I was too short for the top blades to reach the ceiling, but I accidentally nicked the doorway on the way in.

"Will?" I asked, not sure if I should tell him about the odd experience but realized that hiding it was futile. I couldn't get them off.

"Hey, Lily... WHAT ARE THOSE." He looked up at me in shock.

"I don't know," I told him. "I was attacked by a sick person on the way home, and they just appeared."

"Can I see?" He asked.

"Uh-huh." I stripped off my jacket, having to rip it off over the blades. It seemed attached to the blades somehow. Like they'd grown in or something, I dunno.

I was sweating even though I was cold, and pulled off the head wrap and overshirt I was wearing also, so Will could look more easily.

"It's attached to the skin," he told me. "Should we tell Mother?"

"No. She'd take me to the doctors." I did not want to go back there.

Black dried blood was crusted all over me. I would have to take a quadruple bath tonight.

Will got up to put his cups away, and on the way back, he tripped.

He was about to fall on the blades that killed the sick man. No, no, not my brother not Will NO!

He fell on me, just as the blades disappeared.

I hugged him for a minute. This was good.

Somehow, I had controlled the blades.

Two Hundred Years Ago

Maka

The streets of Death City were empty. There were no bustling crowds, no paper cups flying across the sidewalks, and the doors to the shops were wide open in welcome despite their absent owners.

"Odd," Kidd commented, running his hand over a doorframe. "There's no one anywhere."

The fifteen of us walked silently down the road, not bothering to look for passing cars because all of us could feel that there would be no drivers.

I kept to the back of the group. There was an itching in my chest that I felt like clawing through my own rib cage to scratch. It was like something was supposed to be there but wasn't, and the void that remained was trying to find the rest of itself.

I coughed. I hacked like I had the flu. I thought maybe that could scratch it, but I just felt a horrible pain, as if I'd ripped off a scab. In my distraction I'd been separated from the rest of the group. So I just walked back to my apartment. Kidd or Ox would sense where I was.

I had no key, but the door was unlocked. I shut the door behind me and collapsed, crying for no apparent reason. Something.

I'd lost something.

There was a card on the wall. A picture of me from a Christmas card from several years ago that we'd sent out.

We?

There was just me in the picture.

I brushed off my brain's apparent lack of ability to correctly use pronouns. But when I began to walk away, I thought I saw someone else in the picture.

What was wrong with my brain?

Suddenly I spun, flipping something over in my hands. I looked down and saw that it was a broom.

Where did that broom come from?

I must've grabbed it from the corner.

I looked down again and the broom was gone. Why had I spun it so suddenly?

The window was open, I could see. I went to close it when I noticed that the moon was drooling blood again. Someone must have just died.

But the moon wasn't laughing, so it was an innocent person.

I started to run toward the door. "SOUL!" I called, reaching my hand toward the room down the hall.

I didn't know where that one syllable had come from, but it hurt my heart. I felt like I was being ripped apart from the inside. But what was this "Soul?"

Oh, right. Him.

He'd left me, right? I could see him standing on the street across from me with that girl with the purple hair, telling me how he'd never be able to fight alongside a woman who had a body like mine.

No. No that wasn't it.

Even if that wasn't how it happened, the point was that he left. He was here before, but he was gone now. I sunk to the floor.

I saw the moon, still dripping blood.

I felt something warm and sticky on my face. Just for an instant, the image of my clean apartment vanished, and I saw another living room. Definitely my furniture, but blood streaked the walls and the bodies of Death City police officers littered the flat.

I saw the clean apartment again. The broom was in my hands.

No, stop. Go back.

It's not a broom.

Without meaning to, I ran out of the apartment and flew down the staircase. I willed myself to stop, but I couldn't. I could see now that the broom was a scythe, slick with the bodily fluids of those who stood in my way. I couldn't see who I was attacking, but sometimes I could hear splatters after each turn of the blade.

I ran down the street, where Kidd was waiting for me. He looked at me with a crazed look in his eyes, but blinked and the expression was gone. Patty crouched behind him, beating up an invisible person with her metallic fists.

I spun the scythe again, and felt Anya at my back mirroring my movements. She laughed for a moment, uncharacteristic of her, and I noticed that her skirt was ripped up to her thigh. She'd hate that on any other day, but I could see that she, too, had figured out exactly why we'd lost control of our own bodies.

I blacked out then.

And when I woke up, we were all on the moon.

Looking down, I had changed into my black cloak. My body looked clean, but I knew it was only an illusion because I could feel grime all over me. I felt a humming in my chest, as if my soul were about to explode with excitement.

I wondered how many innocent spirits I'd devoured.

Everyone around me blinked at each other, and I knew they'd blacked out too. It was nighttime, and I could see that we were over a large city, New York, maybe? One look at Liz and Patty confirmed my suspicions.

"What are we doing here?" I heard Akane think.

I heard him think.

That meant we were in resonance. Chatter buzzed incessantly around me, and we each glowed just a bit brighter.

We trekked through the nostrils of the moon, to its core. The moon was a center of balance for telepathic creatures of every kind, and manipulating it meant manipulating the world.

I stood next to one tooth, as did each of the others. Ten meisters at ten bottom teeth. Without making myself do it, I closed my eyes and connected to the moon, and the stone I was at, as well as the one above it glowed a dim blue. It was dark, inside the odd formation, but I could see fine.

I had already been connected to the moon, as all meisters and weapons were, but this last interaction had been me manipulating the moon directly.

I ran out the back of the mouth and up, escaping through the nostril we'd come in through. The other Spartoi were close behind me. I looked down.

The lights were off, there were no cars on the streets, and there were no people. Just like Death City had been. But I willed myself to see past this illusion. If I couldn't have control of my body, at least I could have control of my mind.

Cars were crashed into each other, people were running and yelling, and trampled figures littered the sidewalks. I switched over my vision, and could see blue souls shaking in panic, many just waking up.

Others weren't so innocent. I quickly filtered my search only to meisters and weapons, and to my horror my hypothesis was right.

I looked down at my own chest. Instead of blue wings sprouting from a bright ball of energy, the wings were solid black and oily, the orb they sprouted from an angry red and covered with scales. It had swelled to at least twice its size.

Looking at the others, I saw that each weapon was at least twice to three times as powerful as they had been this morning. We must've killed everyone in Death City.

I remembered my apartment building. Which of my neighbors were a part of me now?

I heard a little girl scream deep inside myself, and fell to my knees.

But that was nothing compared to the massacre down below. I flew down to the Empire State building, but I couldn't make myself help. The Kishin within me wouldn't allow that.

A brother and sister, about my age, ran out onto the street. The girl was a demon mirror, I could see, because everyone who looked at her in weapon form began to claw at their own eyes.

There weren't a lot of weapons and meisters in the world outside of Death City. But the few that lived here were doing a lot of damage, as one by one they all lost themselves and began attacking innocents.

A human police officer on the ground who had happened to be in the area took out his gun and shot a man in a janitor's uniform who was attacking him with flaming fists.

I gasped in shock as I realized what was wrong. The janitor fell to the ground, bleeding black everywhere.

Crona has infected Soul, and Soul had infected me.

And then I passed it to the rest of the Spartoi, and we passed it on to the moon.

And now every meister and weapon on Earth who had ever attended the DWMA was infected with the Black Blood, and unable to control themselves.

Yes, Maka has to be a weapon for the purposes of this story because she has to eat souls. The only reason Asura could was because he had devoured his own weapon first- at least that's how I understood it. Besides, although I hated the ending to the anime, I loved the fight scene where she was a weapon.

Reviews are cake, tomorrow's my birthday, and that cake is no lie.