A/N - Chapter seven and the beginning of episode four gave me a little trouble with the timeline when it came to Sid's death, I figure an estimation of about a month between episodes three and four isn't... too ludicrous? Someone review and help me out here.
Speaking of reviews, thank you to Carolinefdq for the review! I'm glad that you like how I wrote in Alecto and Tempus. And trust me, Kid and the Thompsons will show their faces in a few chapters. Though, knowing me, that'll probably be another 10-15 thousand words.
Notes and translations of the Latin will be at the end of the chapter.
DISCLAIMER: Soul Eater is the intellectual property of Atsushi Ōkubo. I have no intention of monetizing my fanwork, and this is merely an enjoyable passer of time.
Chapter Seven - Graveyard Shift? Extra Classes for the Meisters? Part 1
Tempus was starting to worry about Alecto.
It had been several weeks since she'd finally recovered enough from her head wound to take on missions again, and she was throwing herself into it with the fervor of a fiery sun. Night after night the two of them had gone out to hunt down Kishin eggs across the state. They'd even pulled more than a few one-nighters, relying on their temporal desynchronization just to get back to Death City before school started.
To Tempus, it wasn't a big deal. He could thrive on three or four hours of sleep a night; he just slept the usual eight hours because he enjoyed it. But Alecto wasn't like that. He could see her stagger as she fought, her focused blurred by mental and physical exhaustion. He'd even caught her napping in class once or twice, and had to break a few rules and desynchronize time for the two of them so that she could get the rest she so desperately needed.
Whatever was driving her to these lengths, it was beginning to affect her in both classroom and combat, and Tempus knew it was only a matter of time before she ended up getting hurt again, worse than last time.
So when he woke up that morning at six o'clock sharp and wandered into the living room to find Alecto curled up on the sofa, her pink curls a chaotic and tangled mess and her arms thrown haphazardly across the throw pillow, he was very tempted to just let her sleep and make up some sort of excuse for her. But he knew that at this rate she would probably wring his neck if he did that.
So, putting on a mask of early-morning glee, he leaned forward and pushed Alecto's shoulder. "Ally," he said, his voice reaching a singsong falsetto. "Ally, wakey wakey."
Alecto groaned in her sleep and rolled over. "Accedas ad curiam," she murmured, still clearly lost in whatever dream her subconscious had cooked up. Probably a dream about fighting Kishin.
"Okay, I have no idea what that means, but I'm sure it was something strikingly witty and profound or whatever." Tempus grabbed the throw pillow, wincing as he caught a glimpse of its embroidery. Seriously, he thought in disgust, whose idea was it to let six-year old me get a "Hang in There" pillow. I would so throw that out if Alecto didn't think that it was adorable. With a firm tug, he yanked the pillow out from under Alecto, letting her head collide with the couch cushions. "I said, wakey wakey!" he shouted, injecting as much joy and enthusiasm into the words as he could manage.
Alecto opened her eyes and blearily glared up at him, the flat black of her irises even flatter and blacker than usual. "No," she harrumphed. "No wakey wakey. Go away, I was ha-wing a good dream."
"Oh? What was it about?"
"Courts and stuff. Only it was a lot cooler and all the bad guys got thrown in lion pits."
Tempus's train of thought immediately barreled off the tracks and crashed into What-the-Hellsville, killing hundreds and hundred of innocent little thoughts along the way. "That… sounds like a blast of a dream," he managed to say.
"Yeah, and I'd like to finish it. So, and I say this out of my love for you as a friend, tace atque abi." Alecto rolled over so that her back was to him.
Tempus didn't quite understand the last part of that exactly, but he got the general gist, and he figured that she needed the rest anyway. "All right," he said, acquiescing easily; he'd wanted to let her sleep from the get-go anyway, after all. "I'll tell the people up at the DWMA that you're sick or something." He straightened up, throwing the throw pillow over his shoulder casually. "Actually, the way you've been working, it's not that far a stretch." He turned away, leaving Alecto on the sofa.
He got ready for school, taking his time to make sure that his tie was straight and that the buttons on his copper-brown vest were all aligned correctly. Despite his diligent preparations, however, he had to admit that school had been a lot less enjoyable lately. The relatively recent death of Sid Barett still hung over the students like a smothering cloud, and Tempus kind of missed the dude.
Death wasn't exactly a great rarity at the DWMA. In this line of work, danger was omnipresent, and everyone had to be prepared to accept that a teacher could be there one day and gone forever the next. But Sid hadn't died bravely facing off against a Kishin or a Witch. From what Tempus had heard, he'd died when a figurine of the Statue of Liberty had found its way into his skull.
"Lady Liberty is a bitch," he muttered half-facetiously as he put his suit jacket on, straightening the lapels to his satisfactions. He raised his voice, calling out to his meister. "Ally, I'm heading off to school now! You just rest up, okay?"
No answer. She's probably fallen back asleep, Tempus thought, giving himself a final glance in the mirror before heading to the door. He was quite surprised, then, to find Alecto standing there, her hair immaculate and tied back and her eyes still bleary, but bleary in a bizarrely alert sense. "Uh," he said flatly. Train of thought number two joined the first, exploding for good measure. "I, uh. Thought you were going to dream about lions and lawyers?
"I'm not going to miss school because I'm a little sleepy," Alecto told him, a disturbing determination dripping from her words.
Tempus opened his mouth the point out that the last time she got a good nights sleep, she was sleeping off a solid steel chain to the cranium, but something in the way she looked at him told him that would be a very bad idea. Instead he nodded, making a mental note to keep an eye on her. If she started snoring, he was going to desynchronize time for her, no matter how much trouble it would land him in.
A weapon had to look out for his meister, after all.
Before class started, Crescent Moon was always abuzz with whispered gossip and idle conversation, and today was no different. Making sure to keep the corner of his eye trained on Alecto, Tempus leaned slightly forward and focused on the words and sentences forming around him. It was rude to eavesdrop, yeah, but that didn't mean that he wasn't going to do it.
Unfortunately, the topics of conversation weren't exactly of great interest. Mostly just people talking about their nights and whatever missions they were on. Tempus heard one girl mention how she'd manage to collect twelve souls, and he noticed Alecto visibly tense up at that.
He couldn't help but felt bad for her. Despite all the extra work they (well, mostly she) had been putting in, they had only managed to get one more soul to show for it, a Kishin egg of a soul that had belonged to a casino owner turned killer in Vegas. And even then, that had taken them a week and several events that Tempus preferred to forget about forever.
Honestly, he was still pretty disturbed about the blackjack table.
Regardless, the dismal ratio of work-to-reward was clearly taking its toll on her emotionally. Tempus wondered what had triggered this sudden bout of determination. Alecto had always thrown herself into her duties as a meister, but this was ridiculous.
In an attempt to ease his mind a little, Tempus focused on the people around him again. In the seat in front of him sat Soul Eater, who was leaning his chair back and had his hands behind his head in a cool and casual position that the buckler spear would have almost envied, if he didn't think he could pull it off better. Tempus considered leaning forward and scaring the white-haired boy just for the heck of it, but before he could, Soul spoke. "So, Maka."
"Quiet, please." Maka was sitting next to him, her nose buried in a book. Tempus wondered if it was one he knew. "Can't you see that I'm reading? Don't interrupt me." She was more belligerent than usual, and Tempus wondered if the two of them had gotten in a fight or something. It wouldn't surprise him.
"I don't get what you're so mad about," Soul said. "It's just a stupid book."
Now Tempus definitely wanted to scare him. And while he couldn't see Maka's face to be sure, if the way her shoulders tensed was any indication Soul was about to be on the receiving end of a full-force…
"Makaaaaaa Chop!"
Yup. Tempus held back a snort of laughter as Soul reeled from the after effects of the Maka Chop, falling forward and hitting the desk in front of him. He held no pity for the boy in front of him. Teach you to diss literature like that.
"Was there something you wanted to say?" Maka asked, returning her gaze to the pages of her book, her voice clinically scrubbed clean of any emotion.
"Yeah," Soul groaned, his voice strained. "It's about this rumor that's going around. You know that one teacher we used to have? The one who died? They found him with a Statue of Liberty sticking out of his brain."
"Yes, thank you for reminding us all about the gruesome demise of a relatively beloved teacher," Tempus said flatly, causing both Maka and Soul to jump in their seats. "I'm sure everyone here appreciates it, really."
"When the hell did you get here?!" Soul snapped.
"I've always been here," Tempus said, propping his elbows on his desk and his chin in his palms and smirking down at the two. "It's not my fault that you were merely unobservant." His smirk fell. "What's this about Sid?"
"You mean you haven't heard?" Soul inquired. "They say there's some weird dude that's been coming after students from the Academy lately. I guess some kid in the next class over got messed up pretty bad. The point is, everyone who's seen this dude, they all say the same thing." He arched his fingers into claws and opened his mouth in a sharp-toothed and wicked grimace, his voice dropping into a dark baritone. "They say he was a zombie who had a hole in the middle of his forehead!"
Tempus had to give the boy credit for his theatrics, even if all it earned him was another Maka Chop. "Did you really have to hit me again?" Soul winced into the polished wood of the desk that his face had become intimately re-acquainted with.
Maka ignored him. "So, your theory is that the zombie is Sid?" Her voice was laced with disbelief, and Tempus didn't fault her for it. "Please. It's only a story that someone made up to scare everyone."
Tempus had to agree. He tried to imagine Sid as a zombie, with greyish rotting skin and bits of his brain visible through a gaping hole in his skull. He tried to imagine Sid attacking DWMA students. He tried to imagine Sid as anything other than how he was when he was alive.
It wasn't working. And Tempus was pretty sure he was getting a headache from the attempt. As he rubbed his temples, forcibly shoving all ideas of undead teachers out of his head, the classroom door swung open, revealing a horrifyingly familiar face and the mane of crimson red hair it was attached to.
Tempus had never had any personal negative experience with Spirit Albarn, but as someone who considered himself to be friends with Maka, or at the very least good acquaintances, he felt like he should hate him on principle. Maka and her father were… not on good terms. While Tempus didn't know every detail, nor did he particularly care to, he knew enough about Spirit's adulterous escapades to understand and sympathize with Maka's distaste.
So he couldn't help but shudder a little when the red-haired Death Scythe called out (to a fairly quiet classroom), "All right kids, quiet down. Class is about to start." He walked to the front desk in a suspiciously professional manner. "I'm not going to bother taking attendance," Spirit informed the stunned class, pointedly placing the evaluation clipboard down on the desk, "but I will tell you one thing. Anyone who thinks the bell decides when class is over is wrong. I do. Clear?"
Wow, Tempus thought, when the hell did Maka's dad become such a serious hardass? As he glanced around, he noticed that everyone seemed just as confused as he was, with the exception of Kim Diehl, who was reading with a rather bored expression on her face.
In front of him, Tempus could hear Maka tch in disgust and Soul say something quietly. "Hey, is it just me or is that stupid father of yours making that goofy face right at us?"
Looking closely, Tempus realized that Soul was right. Spirit was staring at his daughter her weapon with a grin that could be most charitably described as "the ludicrously pitiable attempts of a guy trying way too hard to reconnect with his estranged daughter."
"I think it's just you," Maka said, though she didn't seem to wholly believe it herself. "And please, do not refer to him as my father."
Soul stood up a little, leaning over the desk with his palms flat against the wood. "What's up with this, Death Scythe?" he said. "Are you supposed to be our new teacher now or something?"
"I'm just a substitute until they find someone who can fill Sid's position permanently," Spirit explained, having picked up the eval clipboard again and was looking over it with sharp blue eyes. His voice took on a vaguely threatening tone. "But that still means I'm in charge of this class, so as long as I'm here…" he glared up at Soul, though it wasn't quite as intimidating as he'd probably meant it to be, "... you will call me Professor Death Scythe."
And then, so quickly that even Tempus was left reeling, Spirit's demeanor changed to something considerably more friendly. "All right, then. Let's take attendance."
"You said you weren't going to take roll!" Soul pointed out through gritted teeth.
Spirit waved off his words with a cheeky flick of the wrist. "I'm not going to take attendance for the guys. But I think I will for all the ladies."
Okay, maybe 'friendly' isn't the right word, Tempus thought, suppressing another shudder. "Sleazy" was more like it. Whose idea was it to let this guys teach?! He turned to Alecto, trying to gauge her reaction the all this… only to find her asleep in her chair. Well, that's not surprising. He hoped that his meister's impromptu nap would spare her from having to deal with their substitute's bullshit.
On the other hand, he could really do with some Latin profanity right about now.
Soul seemed to share his sentiments. About Spirit's bullshit, not about Latin profanity. "Damn it, quit being a creep!"
"Oh, please," Maka muttered in a that'll-be-the-day tone.
Spirit scowled at Soul and scribbled something onto the eval clipboard before casually tossing it back on the desk and stepping forward, clapping twice. "Okay, let's get this class started!"
"Hey, old man, what did you just right down there?" Soul had practically climbed onto the desk at this point, with one black-and-yellow sneaker placed firmly on the flat surface.
Spirit turned to face the chalkboard. "Oh, that reminds me," he said. "Maka, Soul, Alecto, Tempus..."
"Bwuh?" Tempus's blood turned to ice as his name was called, and out of the corner of his eye he thought he saw Alecto twitch in her sleep when her name was called.
"What is it now?" Soul growled.
"Lord Death wants to see you in the Death Room."
"Quid?!" It was Tempus's turn to nearly jump out of his skin as Alecto, who was somehow suddenly wide awake, lurched forward in her seat, slamming her hands against the desk with wide eyes.
"You've been excused from class, so get going," Spirit continued, ignoring her sudden and unexpected outburst. "Shoo, shoo!"
"He wants to see us?" Maka and Soul said in unison.
Alecto sank into her seat, clutching her head and muttering in what Tempus assumed to be Latin, but it was so muted and incomprehensible that it could have been some completely made up language for all he knew. She seemed absolutely horrified at the idea of talking to Lord Death, and Tempus would give everything in the world to know what he was thinking.
Well, he thought. This day is shaping up to be just fantastic.
A/N - Yay, the main plot's here! After over 20K words. I don't actually have that much to say about this chapter. I think I had something planned for this bit, but for the life of me I can't remember it. I already mentioned that I think the timeline is bizarre and that it's difficult to write down in fanfiction format, especially when ones characters are supposed to be all about the temporal bullshit. Something's slipping my mind, but I can't pin it down. Damn you, terrible memory!
So, let's talk about Tempus's throw pillow. You know that picture of the kitten on the branch and the cutesy "Hang in There" motto, right? From what I gather, that's kind of a staple of everyone's childhood. What's even the deal with those? Every one of my friends had at least something based off of that hang in there kitten. Did anyone even buy those, or do they just appear in people's houses? Is there a little Hang In There fairy that leaves her merchandise in you guest room? What is the deal?
Oh, right, this is the author's note of a Soul Eater fanfiction. I should probably get back on topic. Here's the translations for the Latin used in this episode.
Accedas ad curiam: Means "You may approach the court." Alecto's probably having some messed up Phoenix Wright dream or something. Man, imagine Phoenix Wright, only the accused got dangled over a lion pit instead. That'd be awesome.
Tace atque abi: Pretty much means "shut up and go away." Alecto is not a morning person.
Quid: As mentioned before, means "what"
Chapter eight will be up soon. In the meantime, pretty please review and let me know what you think!
- Diana "Nocte"
