A/N: I experimented a little with this chapter, because it actually covers a wide range of time, but you get to see a little taste of the abilities I had planned for Rei when I started this fic. Hope it works out and that you guys enjoy! (Yes, it's basically a chapter-long training montage with other scenes thrown in. One of the techniques that Rei learns in this chapter allows him to move very much like machines allow the main characters of a certain very popular not-Soul Eater anime to move, but I'll let you figure out what I'm talking about on your own~)

On Morgan/Morgana/The Morrigan: I'm taking some artistic liberties with Arthurian/Celtic mythology here. The original Morgana Le Fay was Arthur's half-sister, but her mother wasn't the Morrigan, it was just another woman. However, Morgana is often associated (wrongly, in many cases) with the Morrigan, and I ran with that association here and made the Morrigan her mother instead. In any case, while Morgan is related to Arthur, she's not actually related to his royal side and witches don't generally care who their fathers are, so Angela saying that was just a way to get Morgan riled up.

Review Responses:

God of Crossover, sorry, I think a part of your review got cut off. This is going to have some what? Otherwise, thanks for reviewing!

What2do, glad you like it! Yeah, Soul ended up stealing the spotlight for a bit. I guess I had too much fun imagining him as Rei's dad. Thanks for reviewing, and keep on reading!

AmyNChan, Rei is like Soul without most of the rough edges, lol. Just sweet and empathetic, although it embarrasses him when you point that out. About Kid, I don't think he realizes that many of the kids see him that way. He provides a place for them to live, feels some affection for them, and is proud when they do well and angry (rightfully so) at some of the things they've had to go through, but I don't think he's actually considered that yet. Not sure how he'll react if and when it's pointed out, but he does like Vayne and the other kids. And about Ayame's name, I actually never realized that! I knew I wanted a flower name for her and Ayame just seemed to stand out. Now I know why. But now that you've mentioned it, rest assured that Ayame is fully aware of it, and it will be making an appearance at some point! Thanks again for the review!

fanficlove2014, I'm glad you liked it, and glad you caught that hint! And yeah, Ayame loves her spotlight. Enjoy this chapter and thanks for reading!


CHAPTER THIRTEEN

The Bond of Partnership; Rei and Ayame's First Year


"Remind me again why I'm supposed to be blindfolded," Rei asked, tying the cloth around his eyes and trying not to feel ridiculous as he stood alone with Ayame in the desert on the outskirts of Death City.

"Because I'm an assassination weapon," said Ayame, with surprising patience for someone who had given the same answer about three or four times already. "Which means we can't expect to fight every single fight in broad daylight. You have to be able to use your other senses just as well as your eyes. Which means training blindfolded."

"Okay," said Rei, resisting the urge to lift the blindfold to take a peek. "But I can't even keep up with you without a blindfold, so how am I supposed to—?"

"Relax," said Ayame. "I'll go easy on you. Just work on blocking attacks for now. Okay, ready?"

"Wait, no—," Rei began.

"Set go," Ayame said all in one breath. Rei heard shuffling footsteps, a sound that was almost like the wind itself moving past him, and then Ayame was behind him, patting him lightly between the shoulder blades. Rei's eyes widened and he pitched forward, spinning around to face her, but before he could react, she had already moved behind him, her hand on his back. He turned, but she was gone, his fingers closing around empty air.

He sucked in a breath through his teeth as he heard her move around him, trying to turn to face her, but she moved too quickly for him. She closed in again, tapping him gently on the back of the head, and Rei almost shouted in frustration, spinning around to try to catch her. He heard her breath, heard the scuff of her boots on sand as she jumped back, but again, she was gone before he moved.

Frustration welled up inside of him as he stood there, doing his best to listen, to catch any trace of her. This was stupid. He was never going to be able to do this. She was too fast for him, too quiet, too practiced at this. Her hand came down again, tapping him lightly on the side and retreating before he could react to it. He would never be able to catch her. He'd been training with her for less than a month. He wasn't even close to reaching her level. He should just give up now.

No. Focus.

Rei breathed deep, trying to will the frustration away, trying to bring back some semblance of calm. He could do this. He wanted to do this, which was why he had asked her to teach him. He just needed to focus, needed to breathe…

He breathed deep and the world shifted, his soul flaring up inside of him like a candle fire. The ripples of his Soul Perception spread outward from him, faint white lines on the inside of his mind. They pulsed outward, rippling, until they touched her soul. It blazed in his perception, a bright blue color to his right. And then something happened.

The ripples came back, bouncing off her body and returning to him, and for an instant he saw her clearly. Not as he would have seen her without a blindfold, but something like the outline of her.

She was coming at him from the right.

He moved without thinking, his heart racing as he swept his arm down towards that bright blue point, towards that quickly moving outline. His hand brushed against her arm and closed around it, pulling it down before she could strike him. With his other hand, he lifted his blindfold.

She was staring up at him with wide eyes, her arm in his hand, her palm still pointing at the ground. Rei realized from the look in her eye that he'd surprised her, that she hadn't been expecting him to pick this up so quickly. And then he realized what he had done. He hadn't used his hearing, his other senses, the way she'd expected him to.

He'd used his Soul Perception. He'd used it in a way that sensed not just her soul but her body, her location and the way she was moving towards him.

And it worked.


"I'm not sure about this, Rei," Ayame said a day later, slowly pacing around him in the silence of their living room.

Rei sat on his heels on the floor, his eyes closed as he tried to focus on his Soul Perception, on the ripples that spread slowly outwards from him, bouncing off the walls and furniture of their living room and returning back to him with information, with the placement of things in the room and with Ayame's location as she moved, a ghostly figure with a flame at its heart, pacing slow circles around him.

"I can feel you with my Soul Perception," Rei said. "I'm just trying…" He trailed off, his brow furrowing in concentration. The information the technique was giving him was jumpy. One moment she was two degrees to his right, in the next she had crossed over to his left side entirely. But if he could make the ripples come faster—he gave them a little push with his mind, trying to speed them up—faster, faster, faster…

The room around him seemed to hum as he tried to speed up his Soul Perception, the ripples moving outward from him at breakneck speed. They wove together, putting the room into perspective for him, bringing more details into focus. The effort had caused an ache to spread from behind his eyes, a slow throbbing in his skull as he tried to hold it together.

But he could see Ayame now, could see her in fluid motion, her hands moving as she stepped, her hair falling behind her in a stream.

He opened his eyes.


"Short-ranged clairvoyance," Professor Stein said, when Rei asked him about it. He raised his hand to his mouth as if he was about to take a smoke, then paused, blinking down at it as if he was surprised and a little confused to find it empty. "You have the ability to sweep the area around you with your Soul Perception. It's similar to Azusa's ability, but much more contained. You use your own soul wavelength to generate the 'ripples' you describe, and absorb the information as it's reflected back to you."

He didn't have much more information than that, but at least it was something to work with, and Rei threw himself into his training with a drive that surprised even him. By the end of the month, he had managed to make the ripples appear with surprising frequency the first time around, had managed to keep a lower-resolution outline of the room around him in his head even while moving, had managed to pick out smaller and smaller objects, catch things that were moving with more and more speed.

It had been Ayame's idea to start throwing things at him while they were training, to see if he could pick out projectiles coming towards him from the air. The first time he managed to catch one, rather than dodge them or have them strike him somewhere on his body and leave a welt, he felt her soul flare up in response, almost as if in pride. He opened his eyes, baseball in hand, and found her grinning.


It had been eight years since Angela had lived in Mifune's small apartment not far from the DWMA, but she found when she tried the door that her key still worked. He wasn't home when she got there, despite arriving sometime in the late afternoon. Not having much else to do, she brewed a pot of tea, finding the intricate Japanese tea set exactly where it had been while she was still living here. That done, there was nothing else to do but pace the living room while waiting for him to get home, her eyes moving over the familiar books on the shelves, mostly martial arts texts. Her mind raced, trying to work out what she was going to say. She had spent the past few weeks since speaking with Morgan going back and forth on whether or not she should say anything at all, whether or not she could risk saying anything at all.

At the end of the day, she realized that she had a responsibility to say something, and if she could tell anyone at Death City without having all of this blow up in her face, it would be Mifune.

She turned as she heard the door open, facing it.

"…An?" Mifune asked, frowning at her as he closed the door behind him and took off his shoes. "What are you doing here?"

She put on her best smile. "Just stopping in," she said. She felt a surge of unexpected affection as he turned away from her and slipped off his sword belts, setting the blades aside. It was his usual routine after getting back from the DWMA, and it brought her back to her childhood in a way that coming here always did. "I wanted to talk to you about something, actually," she said, talking around the knot in her throat.

Mifune looked over at her, and although his expression didn't change, she knew that he had caught something worrying in her tone. "Yes?"

"It's about…a difficulty," she said, wondering how on earth she was supposed to warn him about impending war without actually talking about it so that the Morrigan wouldn't know they were onto her. And what he was going to be able to do with it even after she got her message across. She took a deep breath as his brows arched in question, exhaling slowly. "Do you remember the book you gave me for graduation?"

Mifune frowned at her, but nodded slowly. He didn't elaborate.

The book had been Sun Tzu's Art of War. A new copy, all of her own, because she had spent entirely too much time rifling through Mifune's old dog-eared copy of the same volume. She hadn't actually been interested in it at the time, not at first. It was just something she saw Mifune doing on occasion, so she had copied him.

"I've been thinking about it lately…" she said, carefully enunciating each word. "And…it's been…very useful. As a diplomat, sometimes I find myself unable to—to decide how to properly manage information. Particularly sensitive information that could relate to some of the, uh, particulars of that book."

Mifune raised an eyebrow.

"What I'm saying," she said, quickly, before he could interrupt her, "is that sometimes I find myself with sensitive information, and sometimes…because of the people that I deal with, even the act of discussing said information could make things, um…difficult."

He watched her in silence for a moment, working through what she'd said. And then, just as she was trying to come up with a better way to say it, he responded.

"You're saying that your current…diplomatic difficulty is related to one of those people."

"Yes…" said Angela, drawing out the word slowly as she tried to think of what to say next. "And while…of course as a diplomat, my job is to smooth over such…difficulties, sometimes taking certain measures might be prudent."

Mifune tilted his head to the side, and she knew he understood. "You can't actually discuss it," he said. It wasn't a question.

"I don't think so," she said, relieved that that much, at least, could be straightforward. "Not directly. Not without alerting…certain elements currently residing somewhere in Ireland."

"The crow witch?" Mifune guessed, and Angela was incredibly relieved that he didn't call the Morrigan by name, or identify her as what mortals commonly thought of her, a war goddess. But then again, Mifune had to have known the legends, having built so much of his life on war and the study of it.

"Yes," she said.

He nodded, his expression grave. "I'll…pass on the message," he said.

Angela exhaled, her shoulders slumping with relief. "Thank you."

"You don't have to thank me, An."


Ayame quickly learned that while it took a while to get Rei motivated to do something, he was very thorough when it came to things he actually wanted to do. To the point where she'd caught him closing his eyes on random occasions, never breaking stride or stopping a conversation, just trying to see what his Soul Perception could do. They trained together in the mornings (although getting Rei awake before he actually had to be was still a challenge on most days) and in the evenings: unarmed combat and wavelength control and cycling through weapon forms, learning the ins and outs of each one.

At some point, special weekly training sessions with Sid became part of their routine, mostly featuring learning how to move quietly and strike before being noticed. Rei, Ayame noticed, was incredibly quiet when he had to be, and was a lot more tactical than she had appreciated. She learned to love hearing the words 'I've been thinking…' coming from him, because those three words usually preceded some awesome application of her own weapon forms or their partnership that she hadn't considered it before.

"I've been thinking," he said one evening, as he was sitting cross-legged on the floor of their apartment, eyes closed as the two of them focused on keeping their wavelengths in sync, trying to maintain the form of the Cloak of Shadows. They'd figured out pretty early on in their training that the Cloak was too difficult of a form to maintain if both of them weren't focused on it, that it wasn't something that Ayame could do on her own. Part of the problem with the Cloak had been the amount of moving parts it had, its nebulous form making it difficult for Ayame to keep track of everything.

At Rei's suggestion, she'd tried cutting out non-essential things, like making the Cloak hover an inch off of his skin. Having it rest directly on top of him felt awkward, because she was practically hugging him like this, but it did give her the mental space to focus on other things.

"Oh?" she asked, her eyes closed from within her soul space as she tried to maintain the Cloak's form.

"We're supposed to be training for covert operations," Rei said. "So isn't having to speak to change weapon forms kind of…contrary to our purposes?"

She cracked open an eye, even though she didn't need to do that to see him in this place. "You've got a better idea?" she asked. "I can't exactly read your mind."

"Maybe," said Rei. He opened his eyes, and she felt his concentration shatter, the weight of the Cloak of Shadows falling back on her. It flickered unsteadily as he stretched out his hand. "Ninjato Mode?"

She shifted quickly, relieved to be something a little bit more stable. Rei's hand closed around the hilt of the shorter blade, and he held it out away from him, studying it. Then his thumb moved, tapping on the hilt.

"Can you feel that?" he asked.

Ayame frowned. "A little," she said. "It tickles…"

"How about this?" Rei asked, tapping out a distinct pattern, two knocks with his thumb and then a swipe across the hilt. "What if we say this pattern means 'Katana Mode'?"

"And make one for all of the weapon forms?" Ayame asked, following the thought to its logical conclusion.

"Hand signals too," Rei said. "In case I'm not holding you at the time."

She frowned, thinking about it. It would be more to memorize, but if their opponents didn't know what was coming…

"You know," she said. "That just might work…"


The months wore on, days and weeks bleeding into one another. Rei and Ayame went on a handful of missions, first with Clark, Vayne and the others and then increasingly, as they grew in confidence and ability, by themselves. Ayame left for Europe for the holidays—her parents had been transferred there suddenly, and because of that hadn't been able to make it back to Death City—and returned with an armful of ninja scrolls obtained from the Nakatsukasa Clan, which the two of them studied intently. Clark started special training with Stein, without Vayne, to master his own personal wavelength attack. Morgan, to everyone's surprise and relief, started opening up more around them, becoming almost talkative compared to how she used to be.

And then, on a surprisingly cold morning in early February, Richard came to talk to Rei.

"Hey," the other boy said, approaching Rei with a sheepish smile on his face. Rei jumped, but it was more out of habit than anything. Richard didn't scare him anymore, and the other boy hadn't given anyone any trouble in a long while.

"Hey," Rei said, turning towards him. "How are things?"

Richard looked embarrassed to even be there. He was dressed in clothes that resembled a school uniform now, like Rei himself and the majority of the N.O.T. class. "Things are going well," he said, giving Rei a strained smile. "Getting better. I—um—I have to thank you for that. I know you did something to convince Shinigami-sama not to expel me. I think that's the only reason I'm still here."

Rei looked away, uncomfortable. He rubbed the back of his neck. "I didn't do anything," he said. "Just told the truth."

"Still, said Richard. "Thank you."

"No problem," said Rei. He took a deep breath, still embarrassed at the attention, and changed the subject. "You find a new partner yet?" he asked, looking up.

"Nope," said Richard. "It doesn't really matter much for the N.O.T. class anyway. Thinking of going solo."

"Yeah?" Rei asked.

"Yeah," said Richard. "I mean, I'm a gauntlet, right? It's not like I'd do much more with a meister than I would on my own…" He trailed off at the end of that statement, his smile fading as he looked away. "Listen, Ev—Rei, about what happened…"

"Don't mention it," Rei said.

"But…" Richard began.

"Really. Don't mention it."

"Alright." Richard drew in a breath and then let it out, settling his weight as though he had come to a decision. "Alright. There's, um…there's actually something I think you should know about."

"Hmm?" asked Rei, looking up.

"I think Grayson was mixed up in something bad," Richard said. "Before…before all that happened, he started talking to someone online. I'm not sure how he got this person's information or anything, just…they started talking. I'm not sure what they were talking about, but Gray…changed. He started getting meaner, angrier. Started becoming more violent."

Rei privately thought Grayson had always been mean, angry and violent, but he kept that thought to himself. "This person was?" he asked.

"He never said," said Richard. "Gray just called him the Thief. He sent Gray a letter once, though. I never saw the letter, but this card came with it." He reached into his pocket, drawing out a rectangular card and handing it to Rei. Rei glanced at it, turning it over. On one side, the reverse side, there was a sun against a blue background. On the other side was a drawing of man, and a label: The Fool.

"A tarot card?" Rei asked, staring at it.

"I don't know," said Richard, shivering. "It always creeped me out. Anyway, now you know."

Rei looked up, about to ask Richard what he was expected to do with this and why Richard had given it to him, but he was already leaving, walking quickly away from Rei as if he couldn't stand to talk to him anymore.


"You're still thinking about that?" Ayame asked, frowning at Rei from where he was seated on the couch. Rei held the card Richard had given him in his hand, turning it over to study the back before looking at the front again. It seemed like an ordinary card, to his eye, but he couldn't help feeling like there was something he was missing.

"Richard seemed to think it was important," Rei said.

"Richard is trying to stop you from thinking that he's a worthless low-life," said Ayame.

"I didn't think that," Rei said, sitting up so that she could dust the lampshade beside him, "…much."

"Grayson probably just joined a gang somewhere," Ayame said, shrugging. "It's no big deal."

"Yeah," Rei said, studying the card again. "Probably."

The timer rang from the kitchen, an obnoxious beeping noise rising up from the room. Rei put the card away and got to his feet with a sigh, running to get dinner out of the oven.


They were training on the rooftops of Death City one day in April when Ayame first broached the idea of Japan. She was in Cloak of Shadows mode, the Cloak fluttering around Rei as he leaped over the narrow gap between two rooftops, landing with surprising silence on the other side. The Cloak muffled sound, an interesting property that Rei and Ayame had discovered during their training. He supposed that since it was supposed to be ninja garb, it made sense.

The Cloak's form wavered as Rei's concentration broke, then become somewhat solid again as he got it back. "Japan?" he asked.

"Yeah…" Inside her soul space, Ayame was blushing, although she knew Rei couldn't see her. "You know how my grandparents are part of this whole ninja clan and stuff. If you wanted to keep training, that might be a good place to do it. I was thinking we could go in the summer."

Rei frowned, considering this as he tried to gauge the distance between the building he was standing on and the next. He gripped one of the Cloak's tendrils loosely in one hand, spinning the kunai that formed at the end in slow circles as he thought about it. "For the whole summer?" he asked.

"Why not?" Ayame asked. "I like grandma and grandpa, and you're always talking about how you've never lived outside of Death City."

That was true. He had mentioned it, a handful of times. And he had to admit, spending a summer in Japan training with ninjas sounded…pretty awesome. But a whole summer with Ayame? Vayne would never let him live it down.

"Rei?" Ayame asked, frowning at him.

"I'll think about it," Rei said. "It sounds cool." He gestured at the building across from them. "Do you think we can make that jump?"

Ayame's frown deepened as she studied the gap. "Can I make this jump, or can you make this jump?" she asked. "Because no offense, Rei, but it's still a little wide for you."

"Yeah, I thought so," Rei said. He frowned, his eyes drifting from the kunai in his hand, connected by the tendril to the Cloak of Shadows, to the other shadow tendril that hung in the air just out within reach. Kunai were blades, but they were also climbing pitons, weren't they? And the way the Cloak connected to each of them more or less formed a rope, one that could become longer or shorter as needed.

"Rei…?" Ayame asked.

"I have an idea," Rei said. He grabbed hold of the other tendril, a kunai forming in his other hand.

He threw the kunai as he leaped, both blades embedding themselves into the rooftop of the building.


Summer came before either of them knew it, and the next thing Rei knew, he was boarding a plane to Japan, sitting next to Ayame and listening as his partner, dressed in her summer clothes of white shorts with a gold star on the left leg and a pink shirt that said 'ROCK STAR', went on and on about how excited she was that they were actually doing this and all of the cool things that they were going to do there. She fell asleep somewhere over the Pacific, snoring softly as Rei read a few more chapters of his book before deciding to join her. By the time they arrived in Japan, he was more than ready to get off the plane, but there was still a train ride and then a bus to go before arriving at Ayame's grandparents' house.

The moment they did arrive, and Ayame saw her grandfather waiting for her by the gate, she dropped her bag, leaving Rei to catch it as she let out an excited shriek and ran toward him with open arms.

"Grandpa!" she said.

"Ayame, is that you?" Sanjuro Nakatsukasa caught her around the waist, spinning slightly with her momentum before setting her down on the ground again. "You've gotten so big."

Ayame grinned, standing up taller as he placed his hand on her head and leaving Rei to pull her bag up the hill by himself, dragging it behind him with his own bag. By the time he arrived, he was sweaty from the heat and the climb, and still jetlagged from the flight. Not, in his opinion, the best time for him to be making a good impression on anyone.

But Ayame smiled at him anyway as he approached, taking hold of his arm and pulling him towards them. "Grandpa, this is my meister, Rei. Rei, this is my grandfather, Sanjuro."

"It's good to meet you, Rei," said Sanjuro with a smile, smoothly inclining his head in a polite bow. Rei felt intensely awkward for half a second as he tried to copy the movement. "Why don't you go inside and put down your things? We'll discuss training tomorrow."


The summer days quickly settled into a routine. Rei would go off with her grandfather or some of her other family members in the mornings to train, Ayame joining them on occasion or sometimes training on her own. In the afternoons, Rei would study something in the library, or help her grandmother out in the kitchen (Ayame was still hopeless in the kitchen). Ayame helped clean or had tea with her grandfather, telling stories about her parents and all the adventures they had recently gotten into.

On afternoons when they were both free, they went into town, or spent entirely too long exploring the surrounding countryside, catching fireflies and finding mountain streams and exploring old, familiar trails. They took a day off training to take a train down to the beach and splash around in the water (Ayame splashed. Rei sat on the sand and read until she dragged him in), and took another couple of days off to go see Tokyo and Kyoto, Rei dragging her along to see museums, shrines, and historical monuments and Ayame repaying the favor by forcing him to come along and hold her bags while she shopped in Shibuya. They ordered ramen from an actual ramen shop, and Ayame giggled at the embarrassed blush on Rei's face as he tried to talk his way through their order in his accented Japanese, which wasn't really as bad as Rei thought it was, but try telling him that.

"I'm a quarter-Japanese," Rei said, still red-faced as their ramen arrived and he hunched down over it, eating to hide his expression from her.

"I know," said Ayame, still grinning.

"I just never really picked up the language much," he said.

"I know," she said again.

Training resumed and increased in intensity, her grandfather starting Rei on a particularly evil training dummy with three rotating sections that spun when struck and wooden spokes sticking out of each section. It was meant to teach reflexes and good reaction, but Ayame could tell right away that it frustrated the heck out of Rei. She watched as the machine knocked him to the ground again and felt a twinge of guilt, wondering if she might be pushing him too hard, but he picked himself up off the ground without a word, a discipline that she hadn't seen from him even in their shared training sessions, and she smiled in secret pride. Life went on.

On the Fourth of July, her birthday, they took the night off to celebrate, setting off sparklers in the family courtyard. Ayame wore a blue kimono her grandmother had given her, pinning up her hair in gold chopsticks instead of her usual side-ponytail. Rei gave her a bracelet he'd spotted in Kyoto and blushed even darker than he had at the ramen shop as he did it, and Ayame found herself smiling as she put it on, her heart dancing a little jig somewhere inside her. Her grandmother cooked a traditional dinner for them and her parents messaged in to say hi and her grandfather had somehow managed to procure an ice cream cake that had fireworks on it because the Fourth of July was generally awesome and that somehow managed to get smeared on every possible surface except Ayame's new kimono, and all in all it was generally the best day ever.

She woke up on that night to the sound of muffled thumps and muttered curses and rolled over in her futon to find the sliding door spread wide open and Rei in the moonlit courtyard. He was fighting the dummy again, and she watched as Rei struck at it with the heel of his hand, causing the top piece to rotate, then ducked and let out a muffled curse when he ducked too late and one of the spokes clipped the top of his head. He straightened up, rubbed at it and tried again.

Ayame smiled, rolling over and going back to sleep.


It seemed like it would never end, and then suddenly it did, and it was their last day in Japan. Rei never did get the hang of the training dummy, but he had managed to get to the point where he could get a few strikes in before being clobbered, and Sanjuro assured him repeatedly that he was getting there. His wounded pride was slightly helped by the fact that the first time Sanjuro had called on Ayame for a demonstration, she swaggered up to the dummy, took a swing, and promptly got smacked in the face. She recovered quickly and kicked the dummy's butt the second time around, but still scowled whenever anyone mentioned that.

They spent their last day packing, shopping in town for any last minute souvenirs before heading back to the house for the evening. Rei walked around the grounds for a bit after dinner, and then not having much else to do, stepped into the kitchen to see if Ayame's grandmother needed any help with the dishes, but she waved him off with a smile and told him to enjoy the night. He ran into Ayame on the way back to the wide, open room that had been set aside for them and somehow ended up like this, sitting together in the grass fields behind the compound, staring up at the stars.

They were brighter here, somehow, away from the city lights. They reminded him of the stars all the way out in the desert, away from Death City, but not nearly as harsh. He sat there in the grass and watched the stars, thinking about heading back to Death City, about being second years. His parents had done a lot of things as second years at the DWMA. He hoped no one expected him to do the same.

"You're worrying again," Ayame said, from where she sat cross-legged next to him.

"I'm not," Rei said, frowning at her. "How would you even be able to tell anyway?"

"I can hear the wheels turning in your head," Ayame said with a playful grin, spinning her index fingers around each other. "They're going 'oh, what if I'm not good enough to be at the DWMA, and what if my parents disown me, and what if Ayame realizes I'm not as pretty and awesome as she is and walks out on me, wah, wah, wah.'."

He shoved at her, but without any real force. "That's not funny," he said.

Ayame snickered. "I thought it was funny," she said.

"Not even a little," Rei said, although a part of him did find it a little funny.

She shook her head with a smile, shifting so that she was sitting with her knees pulled up close to her chest. "Don't worry about tomorrow, Rei. Just be here, now. Isn't this nice?"

Rei frowned, but relented, looking up at the stars. "Yeah…" he said. "It is."

It wasn't easy to stop worrying. It was a part of who he was; he was always thinking about the future. But looking at Ayame here and now, watching her as she looked up at the stars with a small, carefree smile on her face, it felt a little bit easier. He found himself relaxing, his breathing evening out as he joined her.

"See?" Ayame asked, not looking at him. "This is much better, isn't it?"

"Yeah," Rei said, his eyes still on the stars.

She exhaled, and then, eyes half-lidded, relaxed into him, leaning backwards so that her head rested on his chest, some of her weight pressing against him. Rei tensed, his breath catching and his heart racing as all the blood flowed to his face.

"A-Ayame!" he said. "What are you—?"

"Shh," said Ayame, her voice soft. "Relax, Rei."

She closed her eyes.

He took a deep breath, and then he did.


A/N: The omake is here because it's a scene that I really wanted to add after the tournament, but forgot about, and it was too cute to pass up. So sorry about this: in a perfect world, it would be last chapter's omake, but hope you enjoy it anyway.


Omake

"As you know," said Shinigami, from the Death Room, watching Rei and Ayame as they stood there, still fresh from the dispensary, "The winner of the tournament is normally allowed to meet with me and request their prize. This is a little delayed due to circumstances, but is there anything you want as a tournament prize? Within reason, of course."

Rei shrugged. "I didn't really do anything," he said. "Maybe permission to borrow a restricted book from the library, somewhere down the line? I don't know. Skip me for now."

"Fair enough," said Shinigami. "Ayame?"

Ayame frowned in thought, thinking it over. She tapped her chin with her finger, considering. "Anything?" she asked.

Shinigami seemed to pale. "Within reason," he stressed.

She thought for a moment more, and then her eyes lit up. "Alright," she said. "I've got it!"


"Whooohooo!" Ayame yelled in delight, skimming the sky of Death City on a familiar skull-patterned hoverboard. She flipped over in the air, catching the board in one hand as she plummeted headfirst towards the ground, then quickly righted herself, throwing the board down and jumping onto it an inch over the ground, taking to the sky again.

"This is the life!" she shrieked, her words echoing across the DWMA's grounds. She pulled the hoverboard between a narrow gap between two spires, doing a figure eight around the towers before taking off towards the city again.

Rei watched her from the ground, openmouthed. "You sure this is safe?" he asked, turning towards Shinigami.

"Don't worry," Shinigami-sama said, frowning up at her. "It's only for twenty-four hours."

"Besides," said Vayne, hands in pockets. "It's gonna take more than a fall to hurt Ayame."

Morgan snorted softly from beside them, looking up at Ayame. "The stones she lands on are more likely to take damage from a fall than Ayame is."

Shinigami paled suddenly, his eyes widening as he looked behind him at the school, and at the very loud girl still zipping along through its spines and around its towers. Morgan frowned, looking over her shoulder at him.

"Was it something I said?"