VII. Signature

It was obvious that something had been bothering Kid for several days now. He was in a constant state of anxious agitation, and when Shinigami had tried to engage him in conversation over breakfast, Kid's responses had been distracted and monosyllabic. He'd spent most of the time in his room and though the Reaper had never given a second thought to leaving him at Gallows Mansion alone, he couldn't shake the feeling that something problematic was going on right under his nose. Throughout the day he found himself checking the perimeter of the city (and his soul) but nothing registered.

Still, he thought it couldn't hurt to take a look into the manor through one of his mirrors. Just a quick peek, he told himself, thinking that the reassuringly neat rooms would put his mind at ease - just like it did for Kid.

So when he saw the complete bedlam through a broken mirror's surface, he nearly panicked.

Candles were dislodged from their holders, paintings crooked on the wall. The mirror's surface did not yield for him: shinigami were unable to travel through a broken mirror, only a complete one. A hundred frightening scenarios raced through his mind as he called up the rest of the house's portals, finally getting one in the library which seemed untouched and lunging through it. "Kid! Where are you?"

He found the boy huddled on the floor in the bathroom, surrounded by chunks of dark hair and splashes of black liquid across every surface. Kid was grasping his bangs with one hand and a pair of wicked shears in the other, thin body wracked with sobs as he desperately tried to line up the scissors with the white lines in his hair.

"Kid!"

Shinigami grabbed his son before he could make another swipe with the blades, separating them as the scissors went skittering across the floor. His hand closed all the way around Kid's body like a restraint, making the boy kick wildly as he fought the hold. His breath came in short, frenzied gasps. He was hyperventilating; Shinigami could feel the boy's heart hammering beneath his fingers.

"No! Let me have it back! I have to get rid of them!" Kid writhed, but there was no way he could break the iron grip that pinned his arms to his side. "I must... I have to... Father, please..."

Eventually he went limp, and Shinigami realized that his heart was still pounding, though for altogether different reasons than Kid's had been. Fear was not often an emotion he experienced. Worry, and certainly apprehension, but fear was something he usually caused, not faced. Yet seeing the cuts on his son's hands, realizing that had he not checked the mirrors at that very moment... Shinigami knew fear, and knew it too well for comfort.

When the only sound in the room was the steady drip-drip of liquid - hair dye, he now identified - leaking onto the white tiles, the death god gently unwound his fingers from the boy's form and set him carefully on the floor. Kid wasn't unconscious, the occasional hitch of breath and the quavering ripples across his soul told him so. But his son's head stayed bowed, the slashed mess of his hair hanging sadly askew, hiding his eyes.

He wanted so badly to ask what the hell were you thinking... but he folded himself down next to Kid and put one arm around his shoulder, leaning Kid against him. "Rough day?" he asked instead.

A noise between a laugh and a whimper escaped Kid's mouth, but he still didn't raise his head. Small fingers found the trailing edge of the black shroud and wound into it. "I'm hideous, Father," he mumbled. "These stripes, they're only on one side. I tried... to cover them up, but it didn't work. They stayed. They stayed."

"You're a god, Kid. You're not human. Your body is designed to reject certain things." He hadn't actually realized that it would balk at something as plain as hair dye, and filed that information away for later. Better to let Kid believe everything was under control. Better for him to believe everything was under control.

"I'm not even a proper shinigami," Kid choked and rubbed his sleeve across his face. "I can't even fix myself, how can I be a good son for you when I'm so unbalanced, can't even stay neat or-"

Anticipating a full breakdown being imminent, Shinigami tightened the hold on his son slightly, checking the distance of the scissors, but he seemed to have forgotten their existence. "... trash," Kid was saying. "Not fit to-"

"Don't you trust me?" the Reaper interrupted.

The question seemed to jar Kid from his self-loathing and his head finally came up. His face was pinched and pale, red circles around his yellow irises. "O-Of course I do..."

"The Lines of Sanzu are the mark of a death god, Kid. They belong on you because I put them there. Because you're my son, and the next Reaper. They're only half stripes because..." Shinigami paused, weighing his words. "Because you're still young, that's all. I don't want you to get so upset about them. I certainly," he touched the knicks in the boy's skin, "don't want you hurting yourself over them. Besides, I think they're cute."

Kid made a strangled noise; Shinigami chuckled and hugged the boy tighter. "So... do you think you can learn to tolerate them, as a gift from me?"

The subsequent silence almost made him hold his breath, but eventually Kid swallowed and said meekly, "Yes Father. I-I'm sorry for disrespecting you like that. I didn't... my actions weren't very..." His face screwed up. "They're not really cute though!"

"Perfectly cute. Just like the rest of you." Shinigami patted him on the head and shooed Kid away, waving off the protestations that he should clean up his own mess. This time at least, the Reaper would not mind the tasks of replacing the mirrors. It kept his hands busy, though his mind was far from the work at hand.

I didn't lie to him, he told himself. There's just more truth to it, for another time. A later time, when he's ready to hear it. Just... not now.

That time seemed farther away than ever.