Nothing In This World Is Strange.
(Title: Never let you down.)
Author Note: I do not own Soul Eater.
…
…
Ten hours ago Spirit was all polite duty, eyeing over the three matching backpacks they had strapped to their backs. The red-haired weapon had wished them well and sent them on their way. It had felt colder than previous interactions with the death scythe, in Kidd's opinion. The young reaper did not voice the fact that he would rather Maka and Soul be present to see them off. The edge in Liz's body language told him that she felt the same way.
Patty, as usual, was enthusiastic enough to ease all the tension out of their departure. The blonde was all motion and wide-eyed glee. In the wake of the youngest sibling's bright energy the other two had taken their seats inside the small skull emblazoned plane.
Liz shucked off her backpack and left it in a heap opposite her, instantly settling in to try and catch whatever sleep she could. Kidd eyed the window as the plane heavily took off, the lurching in his stomach as the aircraft climbed to altitude and banked to get on course unsettled him.
…
They had found their mark on accident.
They had days worth of compiled intelligence that placed the witch thirty two miles from their position, her foothold was somewhere in a completely inaccessible portion of India's forested region. They had calmly set out for a trek straight east after checking in with Lord Death shortly after the plane set down.
…
Kidd had, out of a sense of thoroughness, thrown his soul perception open and left it humming along their spider-silk-thin resonance link. It was this and this alone that gave them warning, helped level the playing field and caused Patricia Thompson to shudder.
…
The blonde froze mid-stride, eyes dilating as she grasped her elder sister's wrist and swore. Liz, who could feel the panic of her sibling through their link and tone of her voice, shifted into the heavy metal of her gun form and settled into the palm of Patty's hand.
The younger weapon had taken a battle stance, eyes fixated on a section of trees and thick underbrush as Kidd forced his Soul Perception to focus, pushing their joint awareness wider before contracting it down again.
It was then that the witch appeared, a mess of thin leather colored skin coated with dust and streaks of mud. She looked wiry in build, her hair was windblown and matted and fire red, full of leaves and small twigs. Kidd's eyes could easily pick out this much as she broke through the trees sixty feet in front of them.
She was fast.
Patty neatly fired a set of eight shots at her as she took off into a dead sprint for them. The bullets missed their mark, rare for the pistol siblings. Liz is confused for a moment, sure of her aim and surer of Patty's. Their mark should have fallen, one shot from their barrels could kill any normal human.
The young reaper is in motion now, closing the three feet of space between himself and his weapons in a quick stride. His voice clicks into their resonance link with two words and the sisters both rest in his palms a moment later.
This is not fast enough.
Kidd is closing off parts off their link, separating his mind from theirs enough to give him room to think clearly. All the while he binds his soul tighter to theirs and feels the tight steel and fire-ice sensation, a completing wholeness that comes only with resonance.
Liz is asking why the shots didn't land on their mark, when the witch is upon them, throwing a sharp punch at Kidd's ribs the reaper can only just avoid.
Patty supplies the answer as their technician spins around to place a barrel on the temple of the witch.
She is fast.
The witch ducks out of the barrel's reach and in a blurry instant is ten feet to Kidd's right. Her arm pulls back and her fingers spread wide before she pushes her hand forward and a cruel grimace breaks across her face. Somewhere in their link Patty is registering that they need a more defensible position as Liz feels Kidd pulling open his soul to that its diameter is miles. A fast heartbeat later Liz feels their technician forcing his soul tightly inward so that it surrounds them like a tangible thing, she understands that this is his shield belatedly.
The witches motion is force, raw and bitter and enviable. She puts magic behind it, there is sound that shreds at Liz's eardrums as leaves and twigs and small pebbles become metal coated and rise from the forest floor. They hover in the air for a minute, almost liquid in their polished stillness.
Inside their resonance the siblings pick up a tint of Kidd's thoughts and a fraction of his interest in this opponent's skill set. She is proving to be more than expected. Especially when the floating debris stop hovering and proceed to come at the trio with the relative force of a round exiting a semi-automatic.
It is Patty who fills the blank quiet of their resonance with the a humorless observation. The frost coated voice of their technician is right inside their minds, a calming stereo effect that reaches into their souls. Kidd is pulling at threads of power connected to the darker places inside himself, closing off his mind to the pistols and gritting his teeth against the hail of impromptu bullets.
None of the metal coated debris pieces find their mark. They stay stuck in the layers of Kidd's soul shield, until he expands it a fraction and they fall like dust to the earth. The witch is right there, undeterred, reaching for Kidd's throat as he pulls down the shield and dodges.
They are a dance, a collection of motion and counter-action. They are speeding up when a screeching cry escapes the throat of the earth-witch that threatens to split the very sky in two. The witch is frozen for a second to long as she screams and the young reaper wheels around quickly, landing the butt of Liz's gun form squarely on the witch's ribs.
There is force behind the blow, the witch is a tangle of limbs and anger and red-fire hair as she is sent seven feet backwards into the trunk of the closest tree. Kidd is there as she begins to stand, leveling out the sights of both weapons as the witch casts her gold-green eyes behind the young reaper and to his left.
He moves backwards and to the right, raising soul shield just as something solid connects with the ground where he had stood.
It is a tree, sharpened somehow into a point and missing its roots. It explodes into splinters and branches and knots of wood when it slams into the ground. The shards and pieces are compressing and getting liquid-y again, coating themselves in metal mid-flight as they direct themselves at Kidd.
Their technician is expanding soul shield, as Liz and Patty loose a few rounds toward the demonic-nature-sprite-witch. She is gone before the bullets reach her position, already summoning more stones and branches and leaves into shrapnel and sending it hurling at Kidd.
It is quiet inside their resonance link when Liz focused her soul and her anger into a fine point. She is gritting her teeth and bearing a proud smirk, every inch the hell raising defiant that made her infamous in another lifetime.
The young reaper is trying to get close enough to the witch to land a shot that cannot miss, all the while pushing soul shield between the three of them and the bits of shinigami-only-knows-what that seems hell-bent on shredding them into bloodied confetti. He has been clinical, logical and unshakably calm about the entire fight up to now.
Patty is right there, watching their technician give chase and defend against an opponent that needs to be defeated. She is opening up her own rage and fierce protectiveness. Her sense of duty and loyalty to both Kidd and her position as a death scythe allow her to focus her soul.
Together the sisters turn identical pairs of blue eyes upon their technician. Inside their link they narrow the world down to absolute silence and total peace. The young reaper focuses on them inside their resonance, in the world outside their trinity he is shooting and running after the witches fleeing back.
In unison that harmonizes and clashes, they tell him a single word.
Fight.
The young reaper feels all the words underneath and inside that single one. It is an order and a request, a wish and prayer both. They are his weapons and they stand behind, beside and before him. They always have. He smirks, easing into the world outside their unison souls. They are the best he could ever hope for.
He pulls down Soul Shield, re-directing the energy into the pistols in his hands, feeling them warm and click and shift into cannons. His soul perception is wide open now, all the tension gone from his body.
The witch turns and runs back at the young reaper, another shrill wail cutting through the sky. Both her hands are tense, fingers wide as she steadies her course and keeps coming at them. Kidd hesitates, Liz and Patty are falling out of cannon form and settling into heavy pistols as he tries to pull up Soul Shield to deflect whatever is coming.
The witch is fast. She is jumping into the air as Kidd stands in place, both barrels fixed on her as she launches. The gunfire screams inside their link, one hundred and twenty eight shots fired in the span of four seconds.
The world tilts on its axis and goes dark, their resonance link shudders and Kidd is blindly trying to throw up as many walls between his mind and his weapons as he can, but they still register the pain that comes in flashes as bright white and faded yellow. It lights up their dark world for a moment.
Somewhere, dull and muffled inside their link, Kidd's voice is telling them to hold very still for a minute. To this instruction the eldest weapon panics and the young reaper only just contains his internal scream of agony as he repeats that they all need to hold very still.
Ten point seven three seconds pass and Kidd is forcing them out of resonance and gasping for air as the walls he hastily assembled between their minds and his own fracture and fall as the link fades.
Liz and Patty stand in place, back to back and frozen the moment they take human form.
For a short period of time Liz is positive the world has gone to completely up in flames, or that it was being torn apart and turned around and smashed into small pieces. For fifty feet in any direction the trees are uprooted and laying like huge spilled matchsticks. They have all been sharpened to points, missing their roots and seemed to fall from mid-air. Each of them were pointed at a spot not six feet from where the sisters now stood.
The place where Kidd lay.
Patty is blinking back into gun form as soon as they lay eyes on their technician, Liz's stance is all angles and fierce anger. They are over the body of their technician, Liz's eyes scanning the untouched brush and woods at the rim of their own personal circle of hell.
It does not register to either of them that Kidd is smirking, his face is too covered with blood and dirt to reveal such things. They are too absorbed in his many wounds to notice the body of the red-haired witch five yards away. All one hundred and twenty eight shots found their mark, the witch lies dead and presents no threat to them.
Their mission is complete.
They do not touch the young reaper, even after Patty blinks back out of weapon form. He hasn't breathed in at least three minutes, bloodied, still bleeding through most of his numerous wounds, they stand over him in total shock.
Liz feels his soul tug at hers, a request for resonance. She grasps Patty's hand and together they gently link with their technician.
His memories hit them before the link has the chance to stabilize, the witch had known somehow that she would lose. She had wanted to take them down with her. He is proud when he reminds them that they are nearly unbreakable in weapon form, satisfied in the knowledge that they would not be harmed so easily.
In other parts of his mind he is listing off the various injuries he had suffered when the witch's makeshift bullets found their mark. Liz hears his voice as he does this, the words woven underneath their link. Patty is asking Kidd if he can stand, if he is stable enough for transport.
He knows he is not. He tugs at the steel connections between their souls, stands like webbing that carry energy between them. He is asking for their forgiveness, because he needs to ask for their strength.
The two siblings are the Brooklyn pistols again, pride and fury and strength. Kidd is forcibly reminded that they are incredible as they are. That without him, they are still every ounce as strong , every bit as perfect.
They push energy into him, equally and evenly. He shudders as his lungs pull in air, blue electric crackling over his frame as the magic borne of his father sews him back together. It is a jagged and white-black highlighted electricity, and is hisses quietly in a metallic way as it runs over his body.
They watch as he is healed, aware of the fragments of bone knitting back into place, the veins that re-connect, the blood that becomes absorbed again and the fresh healing skin that seamlessly covers it all. It takes minutes for Kidd's ribs to place themselves where they rightfully belong. Kidd is biting down on his lip, nearly biting through it as his hands clench and his spine bends to the pain of himself becoming whole.
He fights back the screams that choke up his throat. Because he knows that Liz and Patty can feel some measure of this, he refuses to further distress them by giving his agony voice.
Later, after they pull their technician into his shaking legs they raise their resonance rate. He tries, between wincing as he places weight on newly mended bones and muscle, to tell them that he has the energy to get them home.
They shush him with a pair of soft glares. They are intelligent enough to see past his weak lie and they channel strength into him the same way they focus his rage in battle. It is from sensibility and protectiveness of their technician that Liz scoops up the young reaper's frame long before he passes out.
He sleeps on the eldest pistols back, her warmth seeping into his ribcage and arms as she carries him. It is in silence that the weapons sisters walk through the trees, westward, toward home.