XIII. Priority

His angry roar shook Death City from the spires of Shibusen down to the sewers.

But his next words were spoken with a frightening calm, made the air in the Death Room crackle with power as Shinigami issued a simple order to his best team: "Bring back my son."

Kid had asked - pleaded, begged - to be allowed to visit a butterfly conservatory in California and while Shinigami would've preferred that he stuck a little closer to home for his excursions, he couldn't prune the newfound excitement that the boy showed when he'd gotten Beelzebub to fly instead of just roll. Suddenly Kid was showing interest in things outside of Death City and besides, an arboretum seemed harmless enough. Don't smother the child, he'd told himself sternly. He needs some responsibility if he's going to grow.

That hadn't kept him from being glued to a mirror to monitor the trip... nor had it kept him from feeling like his world had dropped out from under him when he saw the small body crumpled in the street.

Now Shinigami was hovering around the bed in Shibusen's infirmary, waiting for Mira Nygus to finish bandaging, distractedly thinking he might need to hire another doctor; Nygus was often serving double duty as the on-call nurse and Sid's weapon on missions. Finally she stepped away and faced the Reaper. "I treated him as best I could, but by the time I finished splinting the broken bones, there weren't any broken bones," she said, a note of reproach in her voice that not many would dare. Shinigami bobbed his head slightly, so she continued, "I was worried about blood loss, but he seems to be... mostly healed."

"That's my boy!" the death god flashed her a peace sign with a lightheartedness he didn't really feel. "Thank you, thank you. We'd best let him sleep."

Nygus gave him a look that said that's my line but only nodded instead. "Yes, Lord Death. Excuse me."

After she'd left, Shinigami dropped his jovial exterior and settled in next to the bed. "When you wake up," he addressed the unconscious form beneath the sheets, "we're going to have a very serious talk."

Thus the afternoon passed quietly and he knew Nygus must've passed along the word because the infirmary stayed empty. If he concentrated, he could feel the students going about their usual business, attending classes, talking in the hallways. In just one more year, Spirit's daughter would be enrolling in Shibusen, and that rascal BlackStar would also be old enough. He'd always thought that Kid would ask to attend (and he believed that being around people his own age would certainly help) but the boy had never actually voiced the request and now, waiting for him to awaken, Shinigami was doubtful about that wisdom.

The sun was setting when Kid finally stirred, wetting him lips before managing, "Nnh... Father?"

Shinigami dimmed the candles in the room with an absent gesture, so as to not overwhelm Kid's eyes when they opened. Watching as hands and feet flexed cautiously beneath the covers, testing for injury and finding only lingering aches from what had been severe breaks hours earlier... never had the Reaper been so thankful that shinigami bodies were so resilient. "How are you feeling? Do you remember what happened?"

"I was... I went to the arboretum," Kid recalled, slowly easing himself up into a sitting position as he noted his surroundings before turning his thoughts inward. "I liked it a lot. I've never seen so many butterflies all in one place before. After I left I was hungry, and I was going to get something to eat before coming home."

Shinigami waited for a moment, and finally prompted, "Then what?"

An uncomfortable pause, during which he couldn't decide if Kid was having trouble remembering or simply didn't want to relate. But under his father's unrelenting stare, he resumed reluctantly, "I-I saw something, it bothered me. The lines, the ones they paint-"

"The lines painted on the street."

"Yes, those ones," the boy shifted, sheets rustling around as he folded his arms across his chest; the gesture was made in the attempt of self-comfort, not indifference. He licked his lips again, one nail digging into the seam of his shirtsleeve. He didn't look away from his father, but nor did he meet the god's unwavering stare. "The lines on the street, they weren't even you see, they weren't precisely parallel to each other, one sort of meandered and the whole thing looked awful-"

"Kid..." Shinigami began, but his son talked right over him, either not wanting to hear the inevitable reprimand or simply desperate to make him understand.

"So I thought, I should take the time to fix it, shouldn't I? It certainly had to be bothering other people as well, maybe they just didn't know what to do about it? I only needed to scrape some of the paint off, just to give it a clean edge-"

"Kid-"

Talking faster now, the words tumbling over each other, sentences running together as they spilled loose with barely a breath in between. "I swear, Father, I didn't mean to be so long coming home but I just couldn't leave it looking like that, I'd never be able to stop remembering it and I didn't want to recall anything bad about my trip because I really appreciated you letting me go! So it's not really a big deal..."

"You let yourself be run over by a bus!"

Silence.

Kid's protest had died mid-sentence, words lodging firmly in his throat. He couldn't remember if or when Shinigami had ever raised his voice at him before and the unfamiliarity of it left him shocked. "F-Father..." he stammered. "You're... are you angry with me?"

"I'm worried about you," the death god replied, not answering the boy's actual question. "I trusted you to act responsibly and you let this happen? It was paint, Kid. Paint! Was that worth putting your life in danger for something so trivial?"

A tiny hitch of breath and Kid's yellow eyes brimmed before he could look down and away. But I was only trying to make things symmetrical... to make a good balance, he wanted to protest, but his voice would not obey him. He could feel the heavy weight of his father's gaze upon him; disappointed, critical, perhaps even repulsed by his inability to maintain the order of a single street let alone, one day, the whole world...

Shirt material began to shred under duress as Kid's grip on his arms tightened even more, silently continuing to berate himself. It wasn't until Shinigami fitted one blocky finger beneath his chin and made him look up that the mental censure stopped. "I know you have your ideas of what's most important," the Reaper said quietly. "But all I could do from here was watch. I couldn't prevent it from happening, I couldn't come and get you. It was a bus, Kid. Between a god of death and a bus, the bus won because of some paint on the road. What am I going to have to watch if next time it's against a Kishin? Do you want me to have to watch you get killed?"

I wouldn't, Kid opened his mouth to immediately deny but slowly closed it again, realizing for the first time that maybe... just maybe... his father had a justified worry. It scared him a little; it must've scared his father a lot. "I'm sorry," was all he could say instead, but it bore repetition. "I'm sorry, Father."

Shinigami released a long sigh, wishing there was some middle ground between parenting and punishing in Kid's worldview. "I worry," he repeated. "How can I not worry? Stop making that face, I'm not mad now. Let's go home and you can tell me about the butterflies."

Kid nodded mutely, slipping from the bed and following his father from the infirmary. Although it was only from Shibusen to Gallows Mansion, and neither of them said anything aloud, Kid stuck close to the god's side and Shinigami was grateful for it.

Dear readers: I apologize, but I've had to disable anonymous reviews for the moment because of an extremely inconsiderate person signing their name as "disayen" who has been using them to harass me for updates.