Disclaimer: I don't own Harry Potter of Soul Eater

HAPPY NEW YEAR! :)

…

Death the Kid was in a bad mood.

He had recently recovered from what equated to a horrible case of food poisoning, which meant while he was up and around, his stomach still felt queasy and he couldn't look at food without wanting to run screaming in the other direction. His brain pounded tiny anvils on the back of his eyes in retaliation every time he blinked.

If he had had his way, he wouldn't be in this stupid country; he would be back in Death City, going over tax returns and insurance claims and – well, okay, maybe this was marginally better.

Still.

"Right," he roared over the din that everyone was creating. They were currently all cramped into Stein's back room; while there would have been more space in the front, there were also some suspicious-looking stains that no one wanted to think too hard about, so back room it was. "Right!" he yelled again, louder, when that didn't garner the desired reaction.

In fact, there weren't actually that many people; it was just because of the cramped quarters that turned five into what felt like ten. Liz and Patty sat on either side of him, of course, with Soul lounging on one of the far seats, fidgeting with the need to get back to his Meister as well as trying to get as far away from Spirit as possible without being overly conspicuous. Stein had vacated the premises, taking a drugged-up Voldemort with him.

No one was too keen to inquire any further into that, either.

"SHUT UP!" Kid yelled, thoroughly peeved off.

Everyone stopped talking and stared at him.

"Ahem," Kid cleared his throat, shaking his head a few times to clear up his thoughts. "Right. We've got a bit of a problem."

"A bit of a problem?" Spirit snarled, glaring daggers at an uncomfortable-looking Soul. "My daughter is in a coma!"

"Shut up, old man!" Soul snapped right back.

"Enough!" Kid shouted, feeling his headache morph into something that indicated he was in dire need of some painkillers. "Yes, Maka being in a coma is more than a bit of a problem – however," he added as Spirit opened his mouth, "That is not what I wanted to discuss."

"Why are we here, Kid?" Soul asked, sounding tired. "I want to get back."

"You are not going anywhere near my daughter…!" Spirit started to shout.

"Oh, shut up!" Soul leaped to his feet and made as though to attack the older Deathscythe, though Patty moved quickly enough to drag him back to the couch. "You don't know anything, you old –"

"Enough," Kid said in a relatively calm, happy voice that sent a shiver through the room. Nothing ever happened when Kid resorted to using That Voice (with the last incident racking up a death total of elven iguanas and seven koalas, and the DWMA were still paying the therapy bills of the thirteen students who had inadvertently come across the blood).

Fortunately, both Spirit and Soul were smart enough not to start fighting again.

"As I was saying," Kid continued, still smiling. "At the moment, Maka is not our priority. She is recovering, albeit slowly. Deal with it." He levelled a glare at the older Deathscythe, and Spirit began nodding vigorously. He had been present for the Great Koala Massacre, and wasn't looking forward to a repeat of that anytime soon. "Good, I'm glad we've settled that. Now, onto my actual business…"

There were no glares, Soul thought with no little amount of hysteria, that wasn't good. Things were normal when Kid glared at them. That blank look in his eyes told of upcoming horrors.

"The psycho that Stein has been experimenting on – ahem, interrogating – has proved to be most annoying," Kid said, folding his hands across his lap, perfectly symmetrical. "He's managed to split his soul into six different sections, each of which he has hidden at someplace around the world. This whole thing is one inconvenient mess, and I want it cleaned up before the end of the month."

"Six?" Spirit asked, momentarily dragging his attention away from trying to throttle Soul. "Is that even possible?"

"I think we're dealing with another madman," Kid said. "From what I've seen, he's pretty far along the process for becoming a kishin. Asura really messed things up for this part of the world."

"Great." Liz said. "So what now?"

"I've dispatched a team of people to go looking for these pieces of soul, but that's going to take time. With Maka indisposed, we've lost one of our most powerful Soul Perception abilities in our arsenal, and I'm pretty sure that I'm going to be needed fairly soon. I don't have time for this. So I've been forced to ask the Witches for help, in this."

Spirit looked at him, face cautious. "You really think that's a good idea?"

"How should I know?" Kid snorted, left cheek twitching from stress. "This is getting ridiculous. They assure me that they can destroy the other parts of Voldemort's soul, but I've been less than impressed lately with what they've been telling us. Therefore, I'm going to go out and destroy some of these Death Eaters, and I'm putting you, Spirit, in charge of this."

"What?"

"Kid!" Patty exclaimed happily.

"Are you sure that's a good idea?" Liz gave him a Look.

"No," he admitted to his most-reliable Weapon. "But I'm stressed enough as it is, and Spirit needs something to do, or you're going to commit homicide and I'm going to lose two Death Scythe's, aren't I?"

"No," Spirit grumbled. Everyone in the room just looked at him. "Okay, yeah, maybe. He deserves to die, anyway! He put my precious Maka in a coma –"

"One more word, old man! One word!" Soul roared.

"Soul! Go to Maka! Spirit – stay away from them!" Kid shouted, headache worsening. "Liz, Patty, come with me. I need to go kill something."

Of course, because he was the Grim Reaper and the balance in the world, that probably wasn't the responsible thing to do. He should be working, or making sure this whole endeavour didn't blow up in their faces, or contacting his agents to make sure they hadn't spontaneously combusted, or –

Whatever. He needed to go shoot something.

"Liz! Patty! With me!"

…

Black*Star looked around in disappointment.

"They're all gone," he said mournfully, twisting Tsubaki around in his hands in agitation. He felt like a kid who had been told Christmas had been cancelled (again: Nygus had already pulled that one over him once; it had been the most miserable three days of his life).

"Yes," Tsubaki sighed, just as upset. It had been a while since they had been able to just let loose like that, and it had been glorious.

"I can't believe they ran away," Black*Star continued, eyes scanning for any potential survivors.

They both walked amidst a slaughter ground, with bodies lying everywhere. Some of these were creepily disfigured (one had a pig's nose, another had no face, and a third was covered in a thick green slime that Tsubaki warned him not to touch, or else). Magic was no joke; he himself had been clipped with a few interesting things, to say the least. At the moment, he was spouting blue skin and seemed to be missing the vision in his right eye, though he wasn't sure if that was from a curse or if it had just sealed itself shut with blood. It didn't really matter, anyway; Tsubaki had managed to deflect the nastiest-looking spells, so all was well.

Of course, he had been hit with a few stunning spells, most of which had had been able to break out of with a simple burst of his soul wavelength. Tsubaki had not been pleased at how erratic his soul was at the moment, but it would calm down soon enough.

Black*Star was going to have to go up against wizards again. They were so much fun.

Just as they had been starting to get really into the fight, however, they had all seemed to lose their nerve. All the psychos (who didn't really deserve to be called psychos, Black*Star thought with no small amount of contempt – he was a psycho, and wore the title proudly, while these losers didn't deserve to be labelled as such) had refused to attack him. Refused. Even when he charged them, waving Tsubaki around wildly and insulting pretty much everything about them, from their mothers to their masculinity (he was seventy-percent sure most of the cloaked figures were male), they had just backed away.

Pansies.

"Come on," Black*Star grumbled, fiddling around with Tsubaki's chain-scythe form some more. "Let's go find Kilik. We're supposed to report to him about what we've found out, right?"

"Right," Tsubaki said.

Feeling decidedly dejected, Black*Star made his way over to the castle, which – remarkably – appeared for the most past unscathed. People swarmed around the stairs like ants, casting healing spells or levitating the wounded to better positions for treatment. Everyone was sweaty and exhausted.

"Black*Star!" a tall blonde girl hurried over to them. "Kilik said that you'd be coming. This way."

"Anya," Tsubaki greeted her when Black*Star's mind failed to provide a name. "Are you okay?"

"We're all alive," the girl – Anya – nodded. "Meme got hit with cutting curse, though, so it looks as though I'm going to have to fight with Tsugumi by myself for a while."

Oh, Black*Star thought, the girl who shares her Weapon. Right.

Tsubaki gave a low vibration in his hand, and Black*Star quickly through his Weapon into the air, where she gracefully transformed, landing in a neat kneeling position on the ground. She quickly got to her feet and stretched leisurely. "She's going to be fine, though, right?"

"Yes," Anya said stiffly. "She's going to make a full recovery."

"That's alright, then. Now, to Kilik?"

"This is no fun," Black*Star complained as they quickly hurried on. "Can we go fight something?"

"Maybe later," Tsubaki sighed. "We've got work to do."

"I hate work," Black*Star sulked, even as he followed his Weapon further into the castle.

…

Jackie stared at the castle of Hogwarts with thinly disguised relief.

"We made it," she said, choking back happy tears. "We actually made it!"

"What's that supposed to mean?" Kim snapped at her Weapon, irate.

Jackie ignored her. "I thought we were going to die!" she wailed to the forest. "Oh, Death, it was awful! We were almost eaten by homicidal bunnies!"

"Those rabbits obviously had rabies!" Kim insisted.

"And then we had to hitchhike with a man who looked like an anteater –"

"– his nose was not that long!"

"And when we found the body in the pack of his car, we had to turn him into the police!" Jackie ranted. "I mean, come on. What are the odds that we were picked up by a homicidal truckie? I thought those things were urban legends!"

"Like kishin and wizards?" Kim asked dryly, and was promptly ignored.

"After that," she snarled. "We had to break out of the police station because they wouldn't let us go! I can't believe they locked us up in a jail cell because we showed them we were DWMA students!"

"To be fair," Kim pointed out, "Transforming into a Weapon wasn't exactly the best way to go about that. You set fire to his potted plant. It was plastic."

"Just another show of how my control is slipping!" Jackie insisted shrilly. "We were rescued by bongo-drummers on pogo-sticks. Bongo-drummers on pogo-sticks. What is wrong with that picture?"

"That you haven't scrubbed it from your memory?" Kim suggested.

"They dumped us with the circus, and we had to take care of the elephants. By scraping dung. I'll never be able to look at elephants the same way again!"

"Oh, suck it up," Kim groaned. "We got paid, didn't we?"

"No, you got paid, while I did all the work – as per usual!"

"Hey, it works!"

"But that isn't the point. The circus was okay. Fine. I could live with that. The alpaca farmers we had to hitch up with were not okay."

"I liked the alpacas," Kim protested. "They were cute and fluffy."

"You would," Jackie said darkly. "Okay, how do you explain that travelling acrobats. The ones that tried to kiss you. At the same time."

"That…" Kim paused. "I'm really attractive?"

Jackie's eyes blazed – literally. "You're mine," she snarled.

"Oh, trust me, I know," Kim was quick to reassure her very stressed, very irate Weapon. "And they're sure to know, too. Especially since you torched their caravan."

Jackie shrugged unrepentantly. "They tried to kiss you," she said again, the air temperature increasing rapidly. "With tongue."

"They were terrible kissers," Kim assured her quickly, smiling with just a bit of nervousness in her expression. "Horrible kissers."

"I could have handled that, though," Jackie said. "I could have handled anything after that –"

"I don't doubt it," Kim

"But then," Jackie continued on, in the tone of a war veteran recounting something particularly horrific, "There was the gold-fish."

Kim paused to shudder. "Okay, yeah, I'll give you that one."

"DAMN RIGHT YOU'LL GIVE ME THAT ONE!"

Kim sighed. "Let's go to the castle," she said. "I think they need some help."

Jackie paused, eyes darting around to take in the damaged landscape for the first time. "I think we missed something fun," she said.

Kim groaned. "Probably," she said, reaching out and latching her hand around Jackie's wrist. "Come on. The sooner we clear this mess up, the happier I'll be."

…

…

A/N: hi (ducks behind covering) sorry this is a bit late. Christmas. And New Year. And Pokemon. And…stuff (cringes). Anyway, hope this was an okay chapter! The Black*Star part was probably more fun to write than it should be…and I'm pretty sure that Kid was a bit OOC, but I don't really know how to fix that this time. Oh, well. At least this draft isn't as bad as my first one (blanches). That was really, really bad.

Thanks to: Krazyfanfiction1, pokemon-35055, Kenzie Perth, SoulxMakaLover37, The fallen flames, Amarantha (side note: I'm not planning on Maka making a miracle recovery. Could happen, but I doubt it. Sorry!), Berlin (awh, your review was so cute – seriously, write any kind of review that you feel like, and I will be incredibly happy to read it! Just listening to what people think about my story motivates me to write!) and Waywardneko

Anyway, Happy New Year!

MM