Nothing In This World Is Strange.
(Title: Cobalt and White.)
Author's note: I do not own this. (Also, I refer to Liz and Patty as "twin guns" not because they are the same age, but because they look identical in weapon form.)
…
…
Kidd is looking over his reflection in the mirror above his bathroom sinks when she enters the room. He can hear the mechanisms inside the bedroom doorknob click as she turns it. Even the slight grind of the metal hinges reach his ears. Had he been completely human these sounds may not have registered to him.
Identical pale hands rake through black and white hair before he rests them, palms flat on the black countertop. The young reaper inhales once.
"You should have knocked first."
He has closed his eyes, tilted his head downwards. His shoulder blades pull the fabric of his suit jacket tight across his back. He doesn't need to see her to know she is grimacing at his observation of decorum.
The eldest weapon pauses at the threshold of the technician's bathroom. Cobalt eyes scan over the young reaper's frame. Her hands move to her hips and her fingertips tap the sides of her jeans before she stuffs her hands absently into her pockets.
"Why didn't you defend yourself?"
Kidd doesn't wince at the accusation in her voice. He holds still and waits, because she needs to have this conversation and he needs to hear it. There is a pause, then the heels of her boots on the white tile of the bathroom.
"You…"
Kidd is aware that should he open up his soul perception her emotions would likely bring him to his knees. He can all but feel her fear and anger coiling up inside his own stomach.
"You are more than capable, as a technician and a shinigami."
Her voice has managed to stay even, Kidd wonders if it is an act of mercy or cruelty. It makes it so much easier to hear her, to focus on what she is saying.
"Why didn't you defend yourself?"
Kidd's left foot slides out just behind his right one, his torso dropping slightly lower. Liz observes his shoulder blades rise higher beneath the lines of Kidd's suit jacket. He stays quiet, eyes closed and head bowed.
Kidd hears the quick clicking of her shoes, the coiling in his stomach becomes ice in his blood. He thinks, for one deranged moment, that she is leaving.
He inhales as the hair on the back of his neck stands upright, the young reaper's shoulders tensing just as Liz's hands fix them in a tight grip. She catches the reflection of Kidd's face in the mirror as she pulls him backwards across the floor. His eyes are wide and dull, his face is blank and resigned, empty of fear or self preservation.
He says nothing as he staggers, trying to keep his feet beneath himself. The eldest pistol is side stepping around him, one had closing on the front of his jacket and the other pushing his shoulder back. Her eyes are fixated on a space left of the young reaper's ear. There is a sharp crack as Kidd's head smacks into a white tiled wall. The sound is followed by Kidd's loud exhale.
There is a moment of electric rimmed anger that soaks into the silence between them. Liz notices that he still isn't looking at her. She fixes cobalt eyes on the dull liquid gold of her technician's and finds him fixated upon the ceiling. The grip on his shoulder tightens up and she tugs his whole body forward only to shove him back again. The dull look in his eyes stays.
"Tell me, why didn't you protect yourself?"
Her voice does not stay as even as before.
He knows he cannot avoid her, not when she is so adamant in her demanding for an explanation.
Kidd lowers his gaze from the ceiling to rest on the cobalt blue of his eldest pistol. Liz, in turn, slackens her hold on his front, dropping her hand from his shoulder altogether.
"Tell me why you didn't defend yourself."
The young reaper can hear the steel and even tempered fear in her voice. He keeps looking at her, nearly boring a hole straight through her with the intensity of his focus.
"It doesn't matter."
His voice is calm, quiet.
Liz growls slightly, the skin around her nose wrinkling up and her teeth flashing for just a moment.
"So you would have just let him."
Kidd blinks once.
"I could have killed him."
"He was some pathetic little-!"
"Elizabeth."
She falls quiet as his eyes fixate on the ceiling again. He inhales slowly before looking at her again.
"Human."
He murmurs the word.
"He was human and I could have killed him."
Kidd recalls the moment that Liz had broken through the crowd of students observing the small novice technician as he cussed Kidd out. The technician had already landed a few solid blows to Kidd's ribs and one grazing hit to his face.
The eldest twin gun had grabbed the younger technician by the shoulder and pulled him off Kidd, spinning the boy around to face her and leveling the pistol form of Patty at his heart.
"I could have killed him."
He already knows she is capable of such a thing. Kidd doesn't smirk, his face stays blank as Liz steps back.
"Unlikely. Patty would have tempered the shots."
Liz is arching a brow at the young reaper.
"I had a gun to his chest and you are worried that you could have killed him?"
Kidd nods.
"Yes."
The eldest pistol looks around the bathroom before raking a hand through her hair.
"You didn't even touch him Kidd. Maka would never just-"
"He wasn't fighting Maka."
"No, he wasn't fighting anyone. He was hitting you."
"Liz, please."
"You didn't even block him Kidd."
"Elizabeth."
"How long would you have liked us to wait?"
"You do not understand."
"Until he broke all of your ribs? Until he cut you open and let you bleed out on the hallway floor?"
"It doesn't matter."
The eldest pistol is silent, standing in the middle of the bathroom floor as the young reaper casts a lifeless stare into the mirror behind her. He still looks refined, every inch death's only son despite the black eye that has spread across his cheekbone and the cut on his lower lip.
She relents, deciding to let this particular break in Kidd's morality code slide for the moment. Liz hasn't gotten a good look at him and feels the slightest pang of concern that the bratty-bastard of a young technician had given Kidd more than a black eye.
He hears her let out a sigh before taking a step closer to him.
"Come here."
He steps back, instinctively.
"Kidd."
She is frozen in place, one foot behind the other and an arm halfway through the act of reaching for him.
"Kidd."
He blinks slowly before closing his eyes.
"I am not mad."
"I am aware."
Another click, she has put her arm down, slid her foot forward and is staring at the young reaper with fierce intensity.
The young reaper waits, aware that there are half a dozen questions bubbling inside of the eldest weapon. Liz is eyeing him over carefully, trying to find the proper words to snap him out of his sudden instability. Logically defensive she can understand, but this newly impassive fall from normalcy is most surely not the Kidd she knows.
She changes tactics.
"Kidd, what is wrong?"
His head bows again and he winces ever so slightly -but she catches it.
"Tell me."
A series of quick clicking sounds fill the room and suddenly the young reaper is panicking at the idea of her getting closer.
"Liz don't."
His frame is shrinking into a crouch, trying to vanish into the white wall behind him.
"Kidd."
Elizabeth stops mid-step, her arms dropping to her side as her skin tingles. There is a low hum of electricity in the air and Kidd's eyes are open, blankly fixed on the floor between them as his hands brace against the wall.
The room is getting brighter, the humming electric sound is nearly a tangible thing, vibrating inside the marrow of her bones and she watches with wide open eyes as Kidd's face becomes a mix of stoicism and unrestrained fear. She can see the outline of skull insignia on the floor, a bright blue white plasma of energy. The edges of the insignia blur upwards and the room is sparking with excess energy, bolts of it jumping across the walls and the surfaces of the counter, licking up the mirror's edges and scuttling along every available surface.
The young reaper's grip on the wall is white knuckled as he tries to keep a hold of the excessive amounts of energy trying to course through him. Liz is staring at him, cemented to the floor as the familiar surreal black phantoms of energy begin to string themselves together, snapping at the air with their snakelike forms.
The young reaper pulls in a ragged lungful of air.
"Kidd."
It is a whisper against the chaos, but he hears it and fixes liquid gold eyes on her.
"Kidd."
Her voice is forced calm and he grimaces at the sight of the uncertainty just behind her eyes.
Eighty four one hundredths of a second pass, a short lifetime in the eldest weapon's perspective and Death the Kid screams.
The young reaper is staggering forward as the room becomes impossibly bright, Liz feels a stinging in her retinas as Kidd's arm encircles her stomach and she finds herself unable to move. The young reaper has his other arm extended, palm pointed at the floor. There is a slight ripple of air that pushes outward from them, a small shockwave. Liz has her forearm pressed against her eyes, and feels Kidd inhale quickly as his arm tightens around her.
Kidd clenches his jaw as a shudder runs up his spine and forces his head to tilt upward, he can feel the blue-white sparks running over his skin and jolting inside his system. His open palm is itching for the weight of Patty even as his brain replays every memory he has ever had layering them together with the death of every person that has ever lived.
He feels the energy leave him a moment before it actually does, it gives him enough time to pull Liz against his collarbone and flatten her body against his ribs, his arms twining across her back tightly.
The energy is breathtaking in magnitude.
It drains from him in a rush and expands outward like a nova, radically expanding as it moves further away. It is destructive, disassembling everything, taking the doors off hinges and carving fractures into the mirror and the bathroom tile, leaving pieces and fragments of objects hovering mid-air. It is constructive, re-assembling everything just moments after it had been reduced to its basic parts. It is balanced. Electric blue sparks crackle over the fractures in tile, the breaks in the mirror. In it's wake the room is in perfect repair.
Kidd stands on unstable legs as the energy slows its expansion and comes to a stop before moving back toward him. The shockwave force of it contracts back, folding inward like origami before entering Kidd's body all at once. The young reaper fights for air as an energy he has never known settles into his muscles and weaves into his spine. He can feel it, coating his bones, liquid in his veins and marrow if he focuses on it.
He remembers the look in Liz's eyes as she held the gun form of her younger sister to the technician. He is positive that the only thing preventing her from pulling the trigger was his near-immediate utterance of her name. Even that had had not prevented her from pulling an arm back and punching the younger boy in the stomach.
When he says her name this time it is quiet. He sounds out of breath and her eyes scan over the profile of his face, searching for something. The young reaper blocks out soul perception because he already knows that Patty is running up the stairs, anxious, her soul battle ready and worried.
Kidd inhales a shallow pull of air.
"Kidd."
What Liz is not saying presses into him, snaking around his heart.
He forces himself to turn slightly, pivot and face her. He brings his eyes up from her left shoulder to look into cobalt blue and he finds her looking at the right side of his head. He already understands the blank shock in her face.
"I have gained a second sanzu line."
He breaths out the words.
The eldest weapon notices the young reaper's eyes flicker over he shoulder and land on the doorway where her sister stands frozen. Liz can feel her sibling pushing and pulling at resonance, trying to align the state of their souls. Patty is searching for the mechanism that would ensure them the slightest margin of normal. She is plundering through the eldest pistol's soul to see if they are all still okay. Upon finding nothing but confusion and dark respect Patty steps into the bathroom.
The clicking sound of Patty's footsteps pulls Kidd back into focus.
"Kidd."
Patty's voice is different.
"…Are you okay?"
Her voice isn't fear or judgment.
"Kidd…?"
The clicking stops and he feels the smaller, firmer hands of Patricia Thompson ghosting over the bruise around his eye.
"It is alright Kidd."
The young reaper bows his head a fraction, eyes already closed.
"We are here."
He cannot contain himself anymore.
He is already on his knees when he tugs open a resonance link and soul perception, eyes screwed shut as he cries and chokes on the force of their feedback in the link. Kidd is aware of the closeness of Patty, something he finds neither demanding or needy -the weapon is iron will and strength in this moment. Her hands are tracing his spine and tangled in his hair. He can hear her heartbeat and the sound causes him to search for Liz.
Reaching inside their resonance he finds her, slightly on edge and watchful. She is standing away from them, eyes trained on the smooth surface of the mirror. One fingertip is hovering over the surface. Kidd prods at her gently, worried and curious and still broken apart but mending. He needs her to say something.
She arches a brow before letting it fall back into place. Her face calm and blank as Kidd waits inside their link.
Her eyes shut and her hand drops to the countertop, head bowed she hears him laugh at her posture. It is hollow sounding and she flinches at his still shaken state.
"There will be a time when you believe everything is ending…"
Her voice is steel and liquid fire as it lights up their resonance, it echoes in reality as she whispers the words aloud.
"… and that will be the beginning."
…
…
Author note: If I had the patience to take on a huge (absolutely massive) writing project I would base it around this concept and quite possibly this piece. I had so much to think about as I tried working through the kinks and dialogue. As a whole, I am proud of this one and would still like to play around with it in the future. My only regret? That I did not get to work Patty into more of it.
I still have a few more ideas for chapters, so this collection isn't done.
I thank you for all of your patience with me.