A/N - Last chapter of this arc. *party horn* You know things have gotten a big dragging-along-y when even the author is like, "okay, let's wrap this up, time's a ticking."

Nothing much to say about this chapter, except that the payoff I've been promising in these last couple of chapters is finally here. *party horn again* That's basically it.

Funner note: We've hit over one hundred reviews, with Keyworks Kid being lucky number one hundred! That is like, ninety more than I ever expected to get, so a great big Black-Star-worthy "WOO HOO" to that! :D

Speaking of reviews, I'd like to thank DemonSessama, MegglesGG, little101, Keyworks Kid, Drachegirl14, and Kiitsu for leaving wonderful reviews! You guys are all fantastic!

To DemonSessama: Thanks for the lovely review! Although, I wouldn't exactly call the Kidlecto ship teasing "sneaky," per se. :P. It's less "ship tease" and more "crashing the ship through the side of your house screaming 'ALL ABOARD' while waving a captain's hat around because his is happening."

As for the manga stuff, well, I never said that I was completely averse to the idea of ever exploring the manga-specific stuff in TF continuity. I have ideas. For one-shots. And AUs. And stuff that wouldn't fit into the main story of TF. I might create a story to compile all these ideas together, so I can get them out of my head. But many of them are very TF spoilery, so that'll wait until later, if it ever comes into fruition. And yeah, Maka's fistful of courage was great. Just run up to the source of all madness and punch it in the face. That's definitely the sort of thing Maka "I Don't Give A Damn" Albarn would do.

MegglesGG: Haha, yes, excellent. Making people shamelessly fangirl is, like, a third of my goal as a writer. The other two-thirds, of course, is making you curse my name while screaming towards the heavens. Hehehehe what no I'm not planning anything why would you say that.

little101: Maybe. Maybe not. I'll get back to you at the end of the arc in question. ;)

Keyworks Kid: (The hundredth TF review! :O) Hahaha, I know, right? A pretty face and a fancy umbrella don't really stack up against a Soul Resonance between a junior death god and his weapon partners. All those literal bloodbaths didn't do you an ounce of good, Báthory. (To be fair, while the real-life Báthory was all about "bath in blood to become beautiful," I didn't want it to just be a vanity issue, which is why I added the bit about beauty being a sort of power in its own right. Am I putting way too much though into one-off villains? Probably! Do I care? Not at all! :D)

Drachegirl14: Thanks! And wow, I can't believe my fic's liked enough to have people coming of with Kidlecto ship names. I really like Timelessshipping, it's very appropriate for the characters. My sister coined the ship name "Dead Language" because Grim Reaper + Latin, which is pretty clever, too. (Also, I figured out why Alekid reminded me of a Pokemon name. It's because there's a pokemon named Elekid. Everything makes sense now, I can finally rest easily.)

Kiitsu: Thank you! Too be fair, I do in fact have someone who betas my fics and is there for me to bounce ideas off of. To also be fair, my beta reader is my little sister. (I'll have you know she is very good at weeding out plot holes. She actually weeded out a bunch on this chapter.) As for the fighting thing, I'll give you that one for sure. I was a little baby writer back then, and was terrified of overstepped imagined OC writer boundaries. Now I just don't care. I'll cross those boundaries all over the place. Well, not all of them. I'm not going to give Alecto the final killshot on the Kishin or anything, that'd just be silly. But I do intend on having Alecto take on a very proactive role in the next canon arc with a fight scene in it. Which, according to my outline, will be on arc… 17. For reference, we're wrapping up arc 11. Uh. Shit.

Well, the focus of this fic is less "Alecto Bellatore and Tempus in the plot of Soul Eater" and more "Alecto Bellatore and Tempus in their own plot and also the plot of Soul Eater running alongside each other," anyway.

Notes and translations of the Latin will be at the end of the chapter.

DISCLAIMER: Soul Eater is the intellectual property Atsushi Ōkubo. I have no intention of monetizing my fanwork, and this is merely an enjoyable passer of time.


Chapter Thirty-Nine - Countess of Blood - The Shinigami's Struggle Against Báthory, Part Five


Tempus loved his meister to bits and pieces, he really did, but if she didn't get her sleep schedule figured out soon he was going to have words with her.

Alecto had fallen asleep in her seat again, cheek pressed flush against the cold wood of the Crescent Moon classroom desk, a faint snore escaping her lips with each breath he took. Tempus thanked every lucky star he had and some unlucky ones for good measure that Stein hadn't arrived yet, because he sincerely doubted that the professor would take to kindly to people snoozing during his lectures. He'd nearly skewered two students with an expertly-thrown scalpel the week before for merely talking during class.

Tempus also thanked those very fortunate celestial bodies that Alecto had pulled an all-nighter not over a mission or training, but for normal teenager stuff. Or, at least, as normal teenager as a Latin-speaking vanquisher of evil with the ability to tell the laws of temporal relativity where they can shove themselves can be, anyway. Still, better to be tired because she stayed up until the early hours of the morning reading than to be tired because she was pushing herself beyond the natural limits of her mortal body. Hell, he'd spent a few all-nighters reading recently acquired books before. Glass houses, throw ye not stones and all that.

So he wasn't too concerned when he'd glanced over and saw her in her current state, instead opting to return his attention to his own book. It was an Isaac Asimov book, The Gods Themselves, about scientists messing with the fabric of both this universe and a parallel one just because they could. Oh, those wacky scientists, Tempus thought. Between this and Jurassic Park, won't they ever learn?

Out of the corner of his eye, Tempus could see the door swing open and hear the sound of a triad of footsteps. He didn't bother looking up, though. He was just getting to the good part, and there was absolutely no way that he was looking up for any of his classmates that weren't tiny and pink-haired, no matter who they were.

"Ah, hello Tempus, Alecto. Are these seats taken?"

Not even for the son of the school headmaster. "Oh, hey, you're back," he said nonchalantly, still keeping his gaze glued to the pages in front of him. "As far as I know, those seats are empty, so have at 'em, I guess. How was Hungary?"

There was a the sound of chair legs screeching against tile as Kid moved to sit down. There were more sounds of a similar nature emanating from the other side of the classroom, where Liz and Patti were making themselves comfortable in preparation for class's wasn't surprised that the Thompsons were choosing not to sit next to their meister; Liz had her eye on a particularly dashing classmate of theirs who just so happened to always sit on that side of the room, and Patti just liked hanging out with her sister. "It was trying," Kid sighed in response to Tempus's inquiry. "But successful in the end. The Countess of Blood won't be causing trouble for anyone else." Tempus could feel a citrine gaze turn on him. "What about you two? Did you go on a mission over the weekend?"

"Nah, we're taking it easy because reasons," Tempus said. "We did get a special lesson from Stein on how to better use our temporal wavelengths in tandem with each other. Also I learned how to protect Ally's soul with my own. We managed to learn something new and expand our skillset without risking our lives in the process, so I'd say that's a better net gain than any mission." He finally turned away from the book, lightly nudging his meister with his elbow. "Right, Ally?"

Alecto twitched and stirred awake, charcoal eyes cracking open as she peeked up at him. "Quid tu loquerēris?"

Tempus was a little surprised to see her wake up this easily, given how little sleep she'd had the previous night. "Ah, nothing," he said. "I was just telling Kid about our extracurricular lesson the other day." He jabbed a thumb in Kid's direction for emphasis. Alecto perked up slightly at the mention of the young Reaper, peering at him from around Tempus's tall, lanky form. Naturally, Tempus thought, resisting the urge to give a good-natured roll of his burnished eyes. Ah, but here was nothing more precious than a baby crush, fresh out of Cupid's womb.

Okay, wow, that metaphor went someplace real weird real fast. It was times like these where Tempus was glad he had a functional brain-to-mouth filter

"Oh! Salve, Kid, I didn't know you were back from Hungary," Alecto said with a small smile, sleep still slurring her sentences slightly. "I take it eh-werything went well?" With her mind and her focus blurred by sleep, her accent was starting to slip through her carefully-maintained attempts to mask it.

If Kid noticed, however, he was polite enough not to comment on it. "As well as it could," he said. "We got the soul of the Countess, though there were some… complications along the way." He didn't sound like he was particularly interested in elaborating. "Along with something that was a little disconcerting."

Alecto blinked, resting her head back against the desk and staring up at Kid with a perplexed look upon her face. "How so?"

"Well," Kid said, "Do you remember how during the mission in Fall River, Borden mentioned a redhaired woman who told her that she could do whatever she wanted?"

Alecto nodded. Tempus found his curiosity piqued as well. The Lizzie Borden mission hadn't been that long ago, but such minor details felt like a distant, insignificant memory, like what kind of pizza he'd had at the Plenitude the other day (bacon cheeseburger pizza, good enough but the weird, ridiculously American kind of food that made him feel gross just thinking about it). Why was Kid bringing it up now?

Tempus didn't have to wait long for an answer, as Kid was quick to elaborate. "When I was confronting Báthory, she also brought up a redhaired woman. This time she said that the woman had told her of my arrival before I'd gotten there. I doubt that's a coincidence. I'm starting to think that there's more going on here than just some Kishin Eggs."

"Well, it's not like there's only a single redhead chick in the entire world, Kid," Tempus pointed out. "There's nothing really connecting Lizzie and Báthory, is there? Except for the first name, I mean, and Elizabeth is a ridiculously common name so that's a moot point to begin with. 'S probably nothing." Still, he couldn't help but shake the feeling that maybe the short shit had a point.

He didn't like that. There were already enough weird conspiracies and forces moving against the DWMA as things stood, what with the Demon Sword that had nearly gutted Soul and the witch souls that MAka had sensed in the damn city itself a few days ago. The last thing he needed was another wrench in the metaphorical gears, because if it turned out that there was something to this whole redhead thing than Alecto would almost certainly want to abandoned the plan of resting easy until the twelfth and hop onto the "what the hell is going on" train, and that was a train he'd be happy to let pass him by.

"Maybe," Kid said, not sounding especially convinced. "Still, even if it is a concedence and these are two separate women, it's unnerving that this woman knew that I was going to be there and be the one to claim Borden's soul. I've already reported this to my father, but I want to do some extra research of my own, see if there's anything linking Borden and Báthory together."

"Well, good luck with that, Encyclopedia Brown," Tempus mumbled. Then he remembered something. "Hey, not to pull a one-eighty on this conversation or anything, but didn't you two have some sort of date planned or something? Or some date-planning being planned, anyways."

Surprisingly enough, it was Kid whose face reddened ever so slightly at the mention of the word, "date," and Tempus could have sworn he saw the younger boy glance at Liz and PAtti and back. Then he cleared his throat and composed itself. "Ah, yes. I was thinking maybe this Friday at eight? I could meet you at your place, if you'd like."

Alecto didn't answer for a few seconds, and Tempus checked to see if his suspicions were correct. Sure enough, she'd dozed off again. He kicked the leg of her chair, and she jumped up. "Dies Veneris. Hōra octāvus est. Video," she rambled. "Sounds great. Sorry, I, uh… didn't get much sleep last night."

Kid raised an eyebrow. "I thought you said you were taking it easy?"

"We are," Alecto said. "It's just that I was reading a really good book, and, well, tempus volat."

"Oh? What book was it?"

"Children of Men, actually. Pretty good, but a little dismal at times."

Tempus rolled his eyes. "Of course it was dismal, Ally. All your books are friggin' dismal, that's what happens when your tastes are limited exclusively to miserable dystopian sci-fi."

"Yeah, well, maybe I like my miserable dystopian sci-fi," Alecto shot back. "Mo-wie was better, anyway."

"Blasphemy."

"Tempus…"

"Blasphemy, I say!"


"Leo sum, lee leo."

Well, Panthera Leo thought, as she treaded through the small Hungarian village on bare feet, her shoes slung over her left shoulder to make navigating the unstable terrain easier and the brisk nighttime winds whipped through her cinnabar-hued hair. That could have gone a little bit better, really. I was a fool to think this could have gone any other way.

Looking back, she really should have expected her plan to backfire. During its construction, her scheme had been so simple; first, she would inconspicuously tip off the Academy about a dangerous - but not too dangerous - Kishin Egg. This was risky in itself, however, because she'd have to slip into Death City under the protector clock of a Soul Protect and find someone who deliver her letter without her running into Medusa on the way. The snake witch would have surely revealed her for who she was, had their paths crossed. Luckily she'd found the perfect messenger: a strange, purple cat with a great deal of magic. All she had to do was bribe the little feline with some tuna, and off her letter went, straight to the nearest meister.

Then, she would tip off the Kishin Egg about her to stack the odds against the latter, and wait for the time meister. Then, she would sit back and hide, watching the ensuing fight to get a sense for the time meister's potential and see this "raw strength" Medusa spoke of for herself.

Hindsight was twenty-twenty, however, and she really should have seen a different student showing up. There were hundreds, if not thousands of meisters and weapons across the world, many of them working for the DWMA, and the odds of the time meister and her partner (whoever that may be) showing up to take care of Báthory were slim to none at best. Not too mention, Báthory had practically ratted her out. Panthera cursed the Countess in a slew of foreign tongues out of frustration Now I will have to be more careful than ever to avoid suspicion. This will make things very difficult.

Still, she mused, it was not a complete failure. The boy who'd arrived in the time meister's stead had been none other than the youngest Grim Reaper, the son of Lord Death himself. There was certainly something to be gained from knowing where he'd stood in terms of power, so she'd proceeded to observe as planned, hiding in the shadows and staying just out of the boy's sight. He was a strong one, he'd found, able to wield two weapons at once and had managed to take out not only Báthory but her servants with ease. He was also perceptive, dangerously so; Panthera didn't like how he seemed to notice her presence even with her hiding behind a Soul Protect.

So this experiment was not a success, but it was not a complete failure. And at least one thing made perfect sense. When she'd first arrived at the castle of Nagyecsed and requested an audience with the Countess, she'd received a very strange answer from her Seneschal.

"I'm sorry, miss, but do you have some sort of affliction hampering your memory?" he'd said. "You just informed my Mistress of the danger from the Academy quite recently. She's already preparing herself."

To say that Panthera had been left confused as the Seneschal shut the door in her face was an understatement. Why had she intercepted her own message before she could deliver it? What wrench had been thrown into her plans? No matter how much she persisted, they wouldn't let her back in, and she'd been forced to scales the walls and drop in from one of the many gaps in the decrepit castle's ceiling in order to observe and understand.

Now, as she approached the towering ruin of a fortress, everything made sense. After all, she'd gone to the castle first with the intention of warning Báthory about a time meister, and the egg would certainly be on her face if she were to deliver that warning only to have a Grim Reaper show up. She climbed up the stairs leading to the grandiose front doors and knocked, each gentle tap turning into a gong-like hum that echoed across the area.

There was only a brief pause before the door cracked open, revealing a very tall and very round man dressed to the nines in fancy silks with slicked-back dark hair. "Yes?" he asked haughtily. "What would dare bring you to my mistress's abode at this time of night?" He peered at her, running a confused gaze over her lean, tan-clad form. "You are not one of the villagers," he said. "You seem… different. You do not stand in fear, and your soul is unlike anything I have seen."

"Correct on every account," Panthera said, dipping into a low bow. "I apologize for the intrusion, but I must speak with the Countess immediately. It is urgent, a matter of her safety." She hated playing the sycophant almost as much as this man surely loved it, but she had to get her message through. The observation wouldn't be nearly as interesting if the deck wasn't at least a little stacked in Báthory's favor.

The man's eyes widened, and he jerked open the door a little further on reflex. "What?" he hissed. "What sort of news? Explain, now!"

"Gladly," Panthera replied. "I come to you now because the Death Weapon Meister Academy is aware of your mistress's existence, and they will soon be sending the son of Lord Death to claim her soul. Please, for the Countess's life and continued rule, I beseech an audience with her."

The Seneschal hesitated for a moment longer before nodding and using his control over the inner workings of the castle to forced the doors open completely, inviting her inside with a sweep of his arms. "If what you speak is true, then very well." he said. "My mistress awaits."


A/N - Well, that was certainly a thing that most definitely happened! The plot, she thickens. I feel like now is a good time to mention that I've put up a visual reference for Panthera on my profile alongside the other TF visual references.

And with the promised payoff, that's the end of this arc! Next arc will be getting back to Alecto and Tempus, pretty extensively, too. I'm pretty excited to write it out!

And yessss, the first date's, well, date has been determined. Oh, wait, sorry, it's not a date, it's a "friendly meet-up over tea." *whispers* That is a lie it's totally a date.

Latin time! God, I've missed the Latin so much.

Quid tu loquerēris?: "What did you say?" I'm not sure if the tense on that verb is correct, but I did the best I can with the resources I have. It's been a few months since I had to write in Latin, gimme some time to readjust.

Dies Veneris. Hōra octāvus est. Video.: "Friday. The eighth hour. I understand." or, more contextually-slash-colloquially, "Friday. Eight o'clock. Got it." Knowing basic Latin makes certain words hilarious. Like video, for example. Literally, that's the latin word for "I see." It's a first-person present verb, not a noun of any sort. We named our moving pictures "I see." English is such a clusterfuck, I love it.

Tempus volat: "Time flies." I know people think that "tempus fugit" means time flies, but that actually means time flees. The full saying is "Tempus volat, hora fugit," which means "time flies, the hour flees." *The More You Know star*

Chapter forty (:O) will be up soon, and will herald the coming of a new dawn! I mean, arc. In the meantime, feel free to rate and leave a review!

-Diana "Nocte"