A/N: Ah! Sorry it's been so long guys! My parents have kinda cracked down on homework and school...I had some pretty bad grades and had to bring them up so I didn't have time to edit and post.

BUT NOW HERE IT IS! GOOOOOO READ!

Black*Star #2: Determination

I want to hold you high and steal your pain

'Cause I'm broken when I'm lonesome

~Broken; Seether

"We're doing it again. Tsubaki: kusarigama," Black*Star commanded. He was dripping in sweat, but he couldn't even remember the last time that stopped him from doing anything.

"Right," Tsubaki panted, transforming. She had yet to get used to the assassin's incredible stamina. Sure, she was the Magic Dark Arm, heiress to the Nakatsukasa family's many weapon abilities and forms, but she wasn't a meister. She could wield numerous non-living weapons, but never a demon weapon.

Black*Star proceeded to run through a complex series of training maneuvers. Sid had given him one set to learn for each weapon form Tsubaki had. They required quick thinking, concentration, coordination, and cooperation between meister and weapon.

Even though neither of them would ever admit it aloud, both were certain that lack cooperation was the problem. They couldn't seem to make it through more than five steps of the kusarigama mode without Black*Star ending up tangled in Tsubaki's chain.

Or use ninja sword mode without slicing his arm with the blade.

Or use smoke-bomb mode without him having a coughing fit.

Or use shruiken mode without her arcing around to strike him in the back.

Tsubaki knew it was killing Black*Star to fail like this, day after day. She had lost track of how many nights they would stumble home, both of them completely covered in bruises: he from the weapon's direct harm; she from transforming in midair, or without being truly prepared to, in order to save his life.

They had yet to do much more than sleep and—when Black*Star stayed awake long enough to annoy Tsubaki about it— eat in the miniature house her father now paid for every month. Tsubaki had wanted—still wanted—to write him a thank you note for arranging for the home so quickly after he heard about Black*Star's prison-bedroom, but she never seemed to be able to stay awake long enough to do so.

"Urk!" Black*Star grunted as, once more, legs and arms were ensnared by the chain. He teetered for a weighty second before he began to fall towards the scythe blade, threatening to impale himself on impact.

He landed on an unconscious and battered Tsubaki, her long ponytail twisted gently around him. He refused to relax; he onto the image of how, seconds before, that soft hair had been an unbreakable chain nearly sending him to his death. Something like that couldn't happen in battle.

Black*Star extracted himself carefully, mindful not to yank his weapon partner's hair. He turned to rouse her so that they could try again, but what he saw stopped his hand before it reached her shoulder.

When was the last time he'd paused to look at her? He was so lucky she'd signed on to be his weapon, how could he have been so negligent?

How had he not realized the toll all this practicing was taking on her? He traced the cuts and new scars with his eyes, took stock of her bruises and how dark they were. He could see how frail she was; how underfed. They had been missing so many meals and her gaunt face showed obvious signs of it. And even though they were skipping food in preference to sleep, she had enormous dark bags that mirrored the color of the eyes they sagged beneath. All of this because he kept pushing, pushing, pushing. He could hear his voice echoing in the vacant gymnasium.

"Again. Tsubaki: kusarigama."

"No breaks. Let's go, ninja sword mode."

"Come on, Tsubaki, get up! How am I going to surpass God with you just sitting on the floor like that?"

She had always transformed for him, always gotten up when he asked it of her.

He stood and bent over, gathering her softly in his arms. He jogged home, keeping his breathing steady and his pace smooth the whole way. Even after his shoes began to squish with sweat, he didn't slow down—he wasn't about to stop training just because Tsubaki was done. It was his duty to stay in shape, his dream to transcend even the gods, and you can't do that if you skimp on practice.

He laid her down on her bed when they got home, placing her on top of the covers as gently as he could. It was summer, and he knew better than to put her under the blankets.

"I swear I'll be a better partner from now on," he whispered to the unhearing girl. Then he went off and worked on his martial arts.

The next day, Tsubaki drug herself to school. She was utterly embarrassed for passing out in the middle of training, but Black*Star hadn't brought the subject up so neither did she. She did notice, however, that when Black*Star entered the classroom with a bang and a shout about his greatness, it was diluted. He was far less of a handful than usual as they walked to their seats, in front of their friends'.

They were friends with two other weapon-meister teams in this class. Kari, demon club, and Locke, her meister, were almost disgustingly obvious with their romantic relationship. They weren't being so bad right now, Kari was only sitting on Locke's lap, but Tsubaki had heard far more than she wanted to from those two.

She hoped she would never be the most lustful in her group of friends.

And then there was Lee-Anne, demon dagger, and Penny. They bickered, a lot, but they were insanely inseparable. It was unthinkable that you'd see one without the other.

"Hey guys!" Tsubaki leaned forward to join the girls' conversation while Black*Star dozed. He didn't seem to mind having a simple friendship with Locke, and often the two boys would just sit in silence or mutter a few words before parting ways.

The girls looked at each other meaningfully before responding.

"Hi Tsubaki," a couple of them responded in unison. It was like this more and more often, but Tsubaki never got used to it. She hated days where they acted this way.

"Oh, well, I've got to study for the test today. Just wanted to say hello." Penny nodded her head in acknowledgement of Tsubaki's excuse and Lee-Anne flipped her hair imperiously over her shoulder. Kari had yet to even glance at her.

Tsubaki turned back to the front of the room, resting her head on the table, close to tears. She was still exhausted, and now she had to deal with her friends' rejection? The only reason she was even in school was because of Black*Star. She didn't want him to skip school to stay home with her, and he wouldn't learn anything if she wasn't there.

The school day passed all too quickly, and she couldn't hide behind her meister any longer. He was in the bathroom, and she was waiting outside in the hallway, praying that they wouldn't find her.

But they did.

Of course.

"Hey Tsubaki, heard you couldn't handle your own weapon form last night." Lee-Anne laughed sardonically. How did she find out? Tsubaki couldn't imagine Black*Star telling anyone, but then who had told her?

"Yeah, I heard you passed out while your meister was still trying to train. How does it feel to be that incapable of…well, of anything?" Kari rolled her eyes as she ran her fingernail along the arm Locke had wrapped around her.

"You know what? I bet Black*Star isn't the reason they keep failing. It's Tsubaki; Black*Star's too great a meister. It's got to be her fault." Penny commented snidely.

"No, that's not it at all! We've been training a lot, and I was just really tired! I've got too many weapon forms, and—" a hand on her shoulder cut her off.

"You don't need to explain yourself to people who are smaller than you, Tsubaki." Black*Star moved in front of her, putting himself between her and the "friends" in front of them.

"Look man…" Locke started, but Black*Star wasn't in the mood to let him finish.

"Don't. Even. Try." he growled. It worked, and Locke stopped talking.

"Black*Star, chill. We weren't even doing anything." Penny snorted delicately. She opened her mouth to speak again, but she didn't get the chance.

"And what would you consider 'doing something,' Penny?" he demanded. She didn't speak, but at the menacing tone of Black*Star's voice, she did automatically hold her hand out for Lee-Anne to transform. She stared at him defiantly from behind the blade.

He shoved his face even closer, risking the girl striking out with her weapon in an attack that even he wouldn't be able to block quickly enough.

"I said, what have you been doing to Tsubaki, you infinitely little piece of scum?" She still refused to answer, but she did slide backwards, away from him, much to Black*Star's vindictive satisfaction.

"Tsubaki, kusarigama." The assassin child muttered. Tsubaki looked at him fearfully.

"We can't fight with that yet!" she whispered fretfully. Black*Star shook his head at her words.

"I'll do it, Tsubaki; I can do anything. You'll see. So now I'll ask just one more time: Tsubaki, kusarigama." It was the closest Tsubaki had ever heard to him saying "please."

"Right!" She was determined to mirror his confidence. If that's what he wanted to base this fight on, then that's his choice as meister; now, as weapon, it was her duty to follow his lead. She will make the kusarigama mode work, and she willdo it now.

"Hie-yah!" Black*Star spun to deflect Lee-Anne as Penny stabbed out with the blade. He landed a sharp blow to the meister's wrist before he hit the ground again, but stumbled as the chain moves where he was not expecting it to.

"Let's take this outside," Locke instructed Penny. Kari, his weapon, couldn't transform in the hall; she was too large and bulky. Trying not to be herded, but unable to find any way out of it, Black*Star continued to slash at Penny, glaring, as she drew him outdoors. As soon as they made it out, Kari was also able to transform.

The demon club was in her weapon form in an instant and Locke attacked, flying across the gap to join Penny. Black*Star easily knocked the wind from him by applying a strong side-kick to the club-meister's stomach. He collapsed, and the dark assassin turned his attention to the dagger coming up on his side.

He skipped to the side, avoiding the across-slash that Penny aimed at his torso. He pulled Tsubaki up to block, but her chain gathered around his foot. Without hesitation, the quick-thinking meister called to his weapon.

"Tsubaki, Smoke Bomb mode!"

She exploded out into impenetrable clouds of cream-colored fog. She could feel everyone in the smoke because they were touching her, for she was the smoke. She felt Black*Star roll away at the last second, and she sensed Penny's stab as she tackled empty air.

And then, on the other side of the opaque fog, she felt her meister double over a split-second before she heard his wracking coughs. A forgotten component to the battle stopped, listened, and stalked silently towards the sound, any footsteps drowned out by Black*Star.

"Black*Star! Behind you!" He barely managed to spin away and catch Tsubaki as she transformed back into a kusarigama, placing her between himself and Kari as Locke swung her down in club-form, trying to smash him.

"Sorry, I can't let you do that," Black*Star casually informed, and slammed his weight against the opposing force, so that they flew backward. "You see, I'm too big to be crushed into little pieces!" He whipped around to face the last team still standing. Now that he was in full visibility, he couldn't run from them any longer. They'd already played the smoke-bomb mode trick, and the other team knew now that all they would have to do would be wait and listen for Black*Star to start coughing.

"Watch closely, Tsubaki." An image of Lee-Anne reflected through the dagger's blade as the two meister sized each other up. "This is how weapons are supposed to work with their meisters."

"Shut up!" Black*Star soared through the air, ready to pummel the pair in front of him to a pulp. And somewhere, in his rage, he and Tsubaki found what they had lacked all along.

It wasn't some complex, intricate thing that needed deciphering. It wasn't ancient Egyptian voodoo or anything like it.

It was, in the very sense of the word, simplicity. It was simple friendship and general acceptance. They were not going to be able to predict the other's next move, so they had to just take everything as it came.

Neither Tsubaki nor Black*Star really understood what happened next. They both came back into themselves and out of the Black*StarandTsubaki all-in-one being right around the time that Penny fell to the ground, defeated.

Black*Star waited a couple of seconds before holding Tsubaki out to transform.

"Come on," he stuck his hands behind his head and sauntered off. He didn't need to check and make sure Tsubaki was coming, he knew she was. He had a lot more confidence in their bond now that he had worked so close to her soul. "Let's go find you some new friends."

Tsubaki giggled.

"Not just me, Black*Star. You need some friends too." Black*Star looked at her sideways, betraying nothing.

""kay…" he kept walking.

True to his word, though, Tsubaki found herself with two amazing friends by the end of the week, and she didn't even know how or when she had made them. But best of all, Black*Star enjoyed hanging out with them too. So even though the bookworm named Maka and her musically-talented "cool" scythe named Soul were tremendously different from their old friends, Tsubaki couldn't have felt more at ease.

And now she finally felt like she could finally call herself her meister's weapon. They could fight with her kusarigama mode, and she was sure the rest would come easily now that they held the key.

Many years, and one soul, later, Black*Star stands on top of Lord Death's mirror.

"Thanks to that soul we bagged, Tsubaki's got a brand-new mode! Let's show 'em, Tsubaki!"

"Right!" She runs to him, because even though she knows it's going to be hard to use the Enchanted Sword, she believes that maybe her meister knows what he's doing.

And because she owes him a tremendous amount. He wouldn't believe it if she told him, but she knows to truth. So she's willing to risk any pain that might come out of using the Enchanted Sword mode before they're ready.

"Enchanted Sword Mode, let's go!"

He lasts surprisingly long, but Tsubaki is so concentrated on not devouring or taking over his soul that she isn't able to catch him before he face-plants on the ground.

And as she transforms, all she can think is or maybe he didn't know what he was doing.

But she knows, as she holds him and he complains that the times can never keep up with him, that they're actually both thinking back to the day they finally learned to use the kusarigama mode.

They both know they'll get the Enchanted Sword. It'll just take practice and incentive.

It'll take determination.

A/N: So that's all for this chapter! Again, sorry it took so long!

I always wondered why there didn't really seem to be bullies in Shibusen. So I created some. :P I'm so mean...

Anyways, I don't see Tsubaki really standing up for herself in one of those situations, and I don't really see the Thomspon sisters taking much crap anyways (although they don't enroll until later anyways!). So really this was the best set up.

And I really love that scene with the Enchanted Sword transformation. Makes my day, every day.

So that's all for now! Hope you all enjoyed! (and I AM continuing to work on the next story as well, so don't worry, this should be posted in more regular time now)

Stay tuned! R&R!

~Rhythm Weaver~