It is good to be doing something, good to be in weapon form and have a meister's hand around him, good to have someone else in his head even if it's not who he really wants. Even Lord Death's presence isn't a problem, is invigorating instead of overwhelming as it usually is; his Reaper wavelength floods out into Spirit's weapon-form and Spirit breathes, inhales long and slow and luxurious, and lets adrenaline ripple through him in place of the normal human energy that he has been lacking all this time.
He can see the Kishin, both from his own position in scythe-form and through Lord Death's eyes, but it's hard to see and hear when Lord Death is wielding him. The Reaper has something more to his senses, something like Stein's Soul Perception but deeper, more resonant, so Spirit feels like he is seeing in a wider spectrum of color and hearing more sounds than usual, things that he can take in but that his human brain can't make sense of. It is easier when they are fully Resonating, but that experience is not exactly pleasant either. For now he focuses on his own ears, tries to tune out the extra tones Lord Death picks up and just listen to the speaker himself.
Kishin Asura is surprisingly ordinary-looking. His clothes hang on him, too large and strangely colored, but he is more or less human-shaped, and when he speaks his voice is ordinary too, steady and calm and faintly amused.
"I have to say, you're as reckless now as you always were."
The tone and words both ping off memories in Spirit's head, drag up Stein in his thoughts. He shoves it away, hard; there isn't time to think about that, this moment right here and right now is exactly why he has been avoiding the distraction of those thoughts, this is the last moment of crisis. The resemblance flickers and disappears, and then there is just the Kishin on the floor of the Death Room in front of them.
"It's nice to see you again too, Asura." Lord Death sounds casual, almost friendly, as though he is catching up with an old friend instead of facing down the cause of the Madness that is sweeping over the world.
Asura pushes to his feet. "It is one pleasure I would have been more than happy to forego." His words juxtapose with his tone but Spirit is more interested in the way he moves, graceful and liquid as a snake, almost as though he has no bones at all. When he shifts his clothes hang limp on him, catch on a shoulder and a hip and otherwise drape loose, accentuating the skeleton underneath more than protruding ribs or tight-pulled skin ever could. The only part of him that doesn't hang loose are the patterned bandages draped around his face; those drift behind him like spiderwebs, like they are reaching for something.
Lord Death tightens his huge hands on Spirit, spins the scythe in midair and catches him angled into a combat stance. "I'm sorry for the inconvenience, but there's no running away this time." He sounds so polite even as the words echo with the weight of their meaning against Spirit's head. "You can't leave this room without my permission, which I don't intend to give you."
"You put me in a difficult position. If you won't let me leave, I'll have to kill you." Even that is steady, calm. It sounds nothing like a threat. Asura might as well be saying he'll have to borrow a coat from the Reaper in front of him.
"Is that so? After all this time, you actually believe you can defeat me?"
The Kishin smiles, his mouth spreading wide under the wrapping over his face, and then the fabric parts. Spirit wants to look away, doesn't want to see, but curiosity freezes him in place and he can't shut even incorporeal eyes against whatever is under those bandages.
The pattern breaks apart, unfolds over the Kishin's face. There is relief, for a moment, that the Kishin is utter ordinary-looking, at least compared to what Spirit expected. His nose and mouth are normal, his eyes are where they should be, and but for the third eye balanced on his forehead and something strange about his irises he could blend right in with any of the students at the Academy. Even his eye-marked hair is no stranger than Kid's immoveable stripes. The horror that starts to flicker in Spirit makes no sense, this should be a comfort rather than more frightening than the alternative, but the pure ordinariness of the enemy in front of him is somehow worse than some monstrosity. The Kishin could be anyone, maybe was just some student, some meister back before. What pushed him over into a vessel for Madness?
There is a connection there, a reason for the panicked horror in Spirit's heartrate, but he shoves it away. There is no time for that, there will be time later.
"Unfortunately for you, the moment you were swallowed and trapped in my Death Room, the winner was already decided." Lord Death's voice vibrates down his arm, his gloved hand, through Spirit's handle and out to the razor edge of his blade. It steadies Spirit's frantic breathing, calms him into focus. "Well? What do you say? Shall we end this quickly?"
Lord Death's wavelength expands out from the center of his black cloak, sweeping towards Spirit, and Spirit can't see it himself but he feels it like an oncoming wave, like electricity tight in the air, and he relaxes, shuts his eyes as it comes. It is easier when he relaxes, he has found. Resisting just makes it worse.
Then it hits, and there is a moment of total disorientation. He is a scythe, he is a meister, he is more than he ever has been and more than he can handle but he has always been this, a shadowy form draped in black and white and holding a scythe, hundreds and thousands of years of history pouring into a head too small and too human to handle them. He gasps for air he doesn't need, flails for oxygen with lungs that don't exist, and then the onslaught stabilizes, an infinite ocean instead of a crashing wave, and he is Spirit Albarn, Lord Death's Death Scythe, and he is suspended inside Lord Death's wavelength, blended into it like sugar into tea.
Lord Death holds up his hand, and Spirit can feel the impact of Asura's attack hit the palm, a distant pressure. It flares hot, rises like an oncoming burn, but then the heat drains away before any lasting damage is done, and the beam cuts off.
"Hm." Lord Death burps a mouthful of smoke. Spirit can just taste it in his own mouth, sweet and salt and bitter all at once, like nicotine cotton candy. "Nice try, but it looks like the next move's mine. What do you say, Spirit? You ready?"
"Whenever you are." He has been ready for months, been waiting to be here and now and in this fight ever since he wasn't, since he was in Stein's hands instead of where he was supposed to be. But he is here now.
"Then let's end this traitor. He's lived long enough!"
Lord Death comes forward, gliding more than stepping; it is easier to not think about how he moves, Spirit has found. The swing is slow, deliberately testing, and the Kishin easily leans out of the way. Lord Death swings again, Spirit gliding rather than cutting through the air, and Asura steps back once, twice, again, leaning barely out of the way each time. Then Lord Death accelerates, swings a little harder and faster, and Spirit feels the give of...something. A chunk of hair flies free, a shirt separates, but the sensation of tearing doesn't match with the feedback from his eyes, it feels more like the delicate resistance of a thread than the tug of skin and muscle.
"This doesn't look right," Spirit thinks aloud, and then realizes. "It's a decoy! Damnit!"
The pieces of the body in front of his evaporate into smoke as Lord Death looks up at a red disc bearing down on them from the Kishin's actual position. Spirit flinches away from the attack but Lord Death throws up a hand instead, a golden mask expanding out like an umbrella over them. There is the crackle of electricity, the taste of metal in the air, and then both shields shatter into smoke.
"Is that the best you can manage?" Lord Death asks. His voice is seeping into mild frustration, now. "Maybe you should have rested up a bit more before taking me on!" The last comes out strained by motion, Spirit arcing through the air between the Reaper and the Kishin, but Asura dodges again, flips over in midair like he has momentarily freed himself from the bounds of physics..
"Can you do me a favor? Stop talking in that dumb voice. It's incredibly annoying." Asura continues to sound calm, relaxed, not at all like he's dodging for his life.
"If it bothers you so much, let me kill you quickly!" Lord Death offers. "Don't worry, I'll make it painless!" The tone under that last word is familiar, linked to a distant memory, but Lord Death is swinging again and Spirit loses his focus on the past in favor of paying attention to the present. It doesn't make a difference; he misses again, Asura sliding away before the blow is even particularly close and floating down to land lightly on the ground below.
"Why don't we have a little chat about the past instead?" he asks. "You see, I've had an awful lot to think about ever since you locked me up."
Lord Death settles down to the floor as well. Spirit can feel the hesitation in his thoughts, the weight of uncertainty in his motions. Is he actually thinking of delaying his attacks?
"There was no escaping it," Asura continues. "When you're sealed inside a bag of your own skin, there's only so much you can do. Your mind starts to wander."
The last word comes out saturated with pleasure, dark and bloody, and Lord Death's hesitancy snaps into resolve. His grip on Spirit firms as he spins the scythe.
"Yeah, sorry about that." His voice is level, flat as Spirit has never heard it before. "It won't happen again. This time you'll be good and dead," and he sounds like Stein, all the violence of Spirit's meister pouring over into a voice that has never been anything but cheerful in Spirit's hearing.
Spirit hisses in alarm. I know he's the Lord of Death, but I've never heard him sound so murderous before!
The vicious underpinnings to the sentence don't get so much as a blink out of the Kishin. He continues to talk in that same even voice. "Sitting there in the dark, I had the chance to think about a lot of things, including the nature of the world itself. And after lengthy consideration, I realized something. When all is said and done, this world is an unknowable place. On the surface all appears rational, orderly, but what lies beyond that thin veneer of reason? Stability and reality, or chaos and Madness?"
Lord Death is still, listening to whatever secondary layers exist in the Kishin's voice, and Spirit is trying to pay attention and trying to stay battle-ready, but that voice is soothing him into complacency, the total lack of threat makes it hard to stay on edge, and the words themselves draw his attention, catch his imagination in spite of his best attempts.
"What are we really made of in the end?" The Kishin goes on. "Is there truly any meaning to the lives we lead? Or are we nothing more than hollow vessels? These are questions we can never answer, because we cannot hope to see beyond the world's fragile layer of skin." Stein's scarred face flickers in Spirit's head in spite of his attempts to suppress it, green eyes vacant and lost, a mask of control slipping sideways and away. "So we live our lives filled with uncertainty, never knowing who or what we truly are or what the future will bring. All we can do is imagine. Life becomes an unsolvable mystery with any number of twists and turns awaiting us. And that's enough to fill any soul with terror."
Asura's chin is tipped down. Spirit can't see his face anymore, just the red eye across his forehead. The outline flickers, and what he thought was a tattoo takes on a shimmer of depth, of reality that he can't shake. But the words are comforting in a way they weren't intended to be, the promise of change, the promise of future possibility warm with potential, and Lord Death's words come just as Spirit's emotions snap back and away from the call of despair under the Kishin's claim.
"So much time to think, and that's all you could come up with?" Love and friendship and children and all the things that Spirit would never have guessed he would have but would never give up now, all rush past him too fast to quantify but in such abundance that they counteract the Kishin's attempted argument. "You're really pathetic!"
When Lord Death moves, Spirit is leading the way, cutting at the lies from Asura's mouth as much as the Kishin's physical form. Asura stumbles back but Lord Death is swinging around to circle him already, transferring Spirit to his left hand as he swings directly at the Kishin with his right.
"Reaper Chop!"
This attack connects. Spirit can feel the true impact jolt up Lord Death's shoulder, can see the Kishin fly backward and slam into the ground with such force that dust rises to obscure him for a moment.
"It's not necessarily the uncertainty that makes us fearful," that voice continues as if it had never been interrupted. "It's more than that. The answers we imagine are what really frighten us." And it's back, fear rushing back into Spirit's head as fast as he can see it coming. Maka lying cold and still, Stein laughing hysterically and lost forever, everything he has ever worked for destroyed and himself alive, able to appreciate his own failure. He sucks in air, hissing in panic, and when Lord Death speaks he barely hears the words.
"Let me get this straight. You're saying people would be happier if they stopped imagining altogether?"
"Imagination is where all our fear originates." Asura offers back, voice low and pleased. "It is the mother of terror and mankind's greatest weakness."
"I always thought it was humans' greatest strength, what separates them from animals," Lord Death says aloud. Spirit, he says into the weapon's head, and the word cuts past the panic like the comforting touch of a parent. It will be alright, and Spirit breathes, slowly, in and out and in again, and the panic fades off to manageable levels again.
Asura rises in front of them. He is speaking again but the words are less loaded, coming through the filter of Lord Death's presence in Spirit's head. "What you offer is order and authority. Which gives humans the illusion of security and peace. But what truly lies under the thin layer of rationality you attempt to impose on the world?"
"Who knows?" Lord Death is offhand, barely listening anymore.
"Exactly. Maybe there's nothing under there at all."
"I think I've just about had it with listening to this meaningless chatter." Lord Death steadies himself; if Spirit were entirely sure he had shoulders, he would say the Reaper was squaring them. "Ready, Spirit?"
He is ready. "Yeah, let's do it!"
"Let's go Soul Resonance!" they say together, and Spirit's own vision flickers bright and then out. This is nothing like resonating with Stein or with Kami; Lord Death swallows him up, the Reaper's greater awareness subsuming Spirit so there is nothing for him to do but cling to the shred of reality that is left to him. Maka. His daughter. The one good thing he has had all these years. And Stein, now, Stein lost but maybe coming back, Marie going to collect him. The fate of the world, all the sanity and goodness and bright shine in life resting on Lord Death's shoulders, in the Reaper's gloved hands.
The conversation continues, the fight continues, but it is at a great distance, an image projected on a far-off screen while Spirit floats in warm darkness. It is a comforting sensation, if deeply disorienting; the first time Lord Death wielded him, he came out of it sobbing, panicked and lost and unable to quite remember who he was or what had happened. But now it is easier, a standard oddity in his life, and the steady calm of Lord Death's emotions is a welcome reprieve from the constant flux of his own. Spirit shuts his eyes, let the peace seep into his exhausted mind.
The panic when it comes is as strong as the calm, slamming into his head so his eyes come open with a strangled gasp. Terror pours through him, worse than what he felt before, worse than what any mortal should ever feel, god-strength fright crammed inside a head too fragile to contain it. Spirit screams, shrieks in animal fright, but Maka comes to his mind as if dragged there, paternal protectiveness echoing the unbelievable power coming off Lord Death, and he knows what is happening although he doesn't understand how.
Then there is pain, fire scorching hot into Lord Death's senses for a moment before the Resonance is cut off, and then there are only Spirit's own perceptions to handle. The blade of his weapon forms heats red-hot, pain courses all across his skin, and he doesn't know what it feels like to be burned alive but this must be something similar, but he can't fall unconscious, he can't drop back to human form or he will actually die, but the pain is surging higher and he is losing everything, he can't remember his name, and when the blackness takes over him the last thing he feels is regret for disappearing possibilities and lost laters.