A/N: Not sure about this, but it popped into my head and wouldn't go away. I decided to skip all the stuff that took place during Liz and Patty's rehabilitation - that was pretty well explained in Soul Eater Not! so this takes place at the end of the events in that series.
Their first dinner as formal partners wasn't off to a good start. She was running late and she could hear Patty screaming all the way from the top of the stairs.
"Damn." Liz hissed under her breath.
Why did her sister have to start trouble on their very first night back at The Gallows? Things had been going so well. They'd helped the little NOT class girls from the cafe nail a witch, and three days later she and Patty were released from their rehab program by Kid's father. Apparently anybody who'd participate in a witch murder was fully rehabilitated in Lord Death's book. This morning he'd moved them out of their halfway house and back into his home, but Liz knew that one wrong step could land her out on her ass.
She followed the hollering to the dining room, arriving just in time to hear Patty repeat her ultimatum.
"I am not going to eat this!"
Kid sat at the foot of an enormous table and Patty stood to his left, eyeing the plates on it suspiciously. A worried-looking maid hovered uneasily near a door at the back of the room.
"What's the problem?" Liz tried for a bright tone, but was struck a little dumb by the size of the room. Patty was either taking it in her stride or was too pissed off to notice it was bigger than the average Brooklyn apartment.
"The problem is that you're late, and Patty can't sit down until you do, or the balance of the table will be off." Kid replied, pointing to the chair on his right.
"I don't want to sit down! There's fried lettuce for dinner! Slimy fried lettuce with white things on it!" Patty screeched, jabbing her finger at the offending vegetable and giving it a mutinous glare.
Kid honestly couldn't see what the problem was. "It's just kale," he told Liz, feeling bewildered, "with minced garlic on it. It's good."
Liz closed her eyes and tried to work up some patience. Neither of them understood where the other was coming from, that's all. She didn't particularly feel like playing peacemaker, but as usual, it was all on her.
"Patty's never had kale, Kid."
"And I'm never going to, either! It's disgusting!" Patty kicked the table leg for emphasis and Kid jumped out of his chair.
"Well maybe if she'd been raised properly she'd eat something other than junk food and know better than to put dents in the furniture!" He snapped. He was already at the breaking point because his silverware wasn't symmetrical. Whoever set the table had forgotten that he needed two of everything, arranged in mirror images on either side of his plate. Dealing with unbalanced table kicking was more than he could handle and he tried desperately to keep his hands from shaking. His new weapons knew he had issues with symmetry but he'd managed to keep himself under control in front of them so far. Not on their first day as my partners, please...
Now Liz was angry. She'd done the best she damn well could to keep her sister fed, and this spoiled little shit was going to tell her she hadn't done a good enough job?
"Is that so?" she snapped, "Too bad we weren't raised in a freaking mansion with a jillion servants to wait on us hand and foot and make sure we ate three to five servings of vegetables a day! I don't know how you're going to eat that crap either. Look at it! Those leaves are about as far from symmetrical as they can get."
The maid, sensing impending doom, ran for the housekeeper.
Kid looked down at his plate and felt his stomach roll. She was right. Not one of the glistening kale leaves was like the others and the bits of garlic weren't uniformly distributed. Worse yet, there was no way to fix it. Kale would always be disorderly. Why hadn't he noticed it before?
"You're right!" he skittered away from the table and stood near the door beside Liz, practically hyperventilating, "I can't eat that garbage. It's disgusting. Disgusting. Disgusting."
Shock zinged down Liz' spine as Kid slid right down the doorframe and sat on the floor, hugging himself and rocking.
"What the fuck?" she asked Patty, who was laughing her head off.
"Look! You made him go crazy, sis!" she giggled, "Just by saying kale isn't symmetrical!"
"Don't talk about it!" Kid screamed, bursting into tears, "It's disgusting. Awful, awful, disgusting, unbalanced, disgusting..."
The door at the back of the dining room opened and a somberly-dressed older woman bustled toward them.
"Oh, my dear," she sighed, kneeling beside Kid, "It's not as bad as all that. Come on, let's get up off the floor."
Kid just rolled up into a ball and upped the wailing. The housekeeper looked up at Liz.
"Meal times are hard for him," she sounded apologetic, but there was a hint of steel behind the words that warned Liz against making it any harder in the future.
"You mean this is normal?" Liz thought hard, but couldn't remember a single instance when she'd seen Kid eat anything. Not that she'd ever given him a chance to order anything when he came into the cafe to check on her and Patty; she'd been too busy throwing cups and silverware at him to ask if he was hungry. He was awfully thin, come to think of it.
"I wouldn't call it normal," the woman replied tiredly, "But it isn't unusual. Why don't you and your sister sit down and eat before everything gets cold and I'll see what I can do with him."
That put an abrupt end to Patty's giggling fit. "I told you I'm not eating it! He's right, it's disgusting!"
She got down on her hands and knees and crawled over to Kid, where she rocked and repeated "disgusting" with him in perfect rhythm. Obviously that was how you got out of eating yucky food around here, Patty thought, and it was kind of fun, too. Relaxing, really.
The door at the rear of the room opened again, this time with a slam, and a tall woman in a chef's coat stalked in. Her blonde hair stood up in spikes above glittering gray eyes and there was an enormous knife in one of her clenched fists. She was easily the angriest-looking person Liz had ever seen, and she had seen a lot of angry people in her time.
"I have had it with this!" the woman's bounced off the cavernous ceiling and put all the other yelping to shame. Patty stopped in mid-rock and her mouth fell open. Liz hurried over to put herself between the madwoman and her little sister.
"This is Nadine, " the housekeeper said calmly, "She's our chef."
"Nadine has a big fucking knife and she looks like she's gonna cut a bitch." Patty replied, peeking over Liz' shoulder, "Should we shoot her?"
"Go right ahead!" the chef hollered, "It would be better than working here! And now I hear I've got two maniacs to deal with."
She turned steely eyes on Liz, "W about you? Do you have any dietary issues that make you fall out of your chair and cry?" She had some kind of accent, but Liz couldn't figure out exactly what. Nor did she care to try at the moment.
"No. And don't call my sister a maniac. You should totally talk; you're the one screaming like a goddamn lunatic!"
The housekeeper got up and disappeared into the hall, leaving them to their fate. The chef advanced and Liz tapped Patty's arm three times in quick succession; their unspoken signal for transformation. The familiar weight of the gun in her hand gave Liz all the confidence she needed. So what if they got thrown out? It was better than getting slashed to ribbons by an unhinged cook.
"Gun trumps knife, bitch." she snarled, "Stay back."
Nadine gave a short, barking laugh. "You've got balls. I like you. I'm not going to hurt you, I'm here to deal with him." she stuck her thumb out at Kid, who was still senseless on the floor.
"You're not going to hurt him, either."
"I'm not going to stab him, I'm going to make him eat. I was chopping up chocolate when you little brats started up...just forgot to put the knife down." she dropped it on a sideboard and Patty relaxed back into human form.
"Oooh! There's chocolate? Can I have some?"
"Later, if you don't cause any more trouble." Nadine replied, bending over Kid.
The housekeeper ushered Lord Death into the room just in time to see his son picked up by the scruff of the neck and shoved bodily back into his chair. Kid barely seemed to notice the manhandling; he was too busy trying not to look at the scary kale.
"Now you look here, little mister," the chef grabbed Kid's chin and turned his face up to hers, "You are going to sit here, and you are going to eat this and you are going to stop acting like something that just escaped from the circus, do you understand me?" she shook him for emphasis and his head banged against the back of the chair.
Patty objected to that. "You said you weren't going to hurt him. He's our Reaper, not yours. He's kind of broken, but he's still ours and you leave him alone!"
"Well, it looks like dinner's turned into an interesting event!' Lord Death said cheerfully, and Nadine turned on him like a wild animal.
"Interesting? You call this interesting? You don't deal with this every night. I have to use a ruler to make sure the green beans are all the same length. I have to put mashed potatoes into a mold so they're circular. When's the last time you even ate in here? You lock yourself up in that office and don't give a damn what goes on in the rest of this place." She gave Kid another shake, "This poor little bastard is such a mess that he's practically starving himself and you haven't even noticed!"
If Kid minded being called a poor little bastard, he didn't show it. He looked defeated and miserable, and nobody really seemed to care about anything but the inconvenience of it all. The thought of him eating all alone every night in an enormous room meant for parties, and laughing and life made Liz' heart go out to him. She took the knife off the sideboard and grabbed Kid's plate. Everybody looked on in silence as she carefully slit the kale into even little strips.
"Here," she said, giving the plate back, "It's symmetrical now. I can't do anything about the garlic, so you'll just have to deal. You're not allowed to be pickier than Patty. You're just not."
"Thank you Liz." Kid had gratitude written all over his face, and Liz resisted the urge to wipe the tears off his face. It didn't seem proper somehow. Wasn't her job, anyway.
"It's fine," she said gruffly, handing him a napkin, "Sit down and eat, Patty. Right now."
"You too." Nadine said firmly, shoving Lord Death into the chair beside Patty's, "You're going to sit down and eat with these kids and act like a bloody parent for one night. Gretchen, you sit on the other side of the big girl so the table's balanced and we don't have another meltdown. I'll send Jennifer out with more place settings and Kid's extra silverware and everybody had better behave while I'm gone!"
The housekeeper sat down uncertainly next to Liz, who didn't care for being called "the big girl", but wasn't going to argue with a pissed off Amazon; especially one who'd just taken her big-assed knife back.
Across the table, Patty had decided not to push fate, or her sister, any longer and was chewing with gusto. She gleefully elbowed Lord Death, who sat beside her in shell-shocked silence.
"Kid was right!" she told him with her mouth full of kale, "It's yummy. Can I have some more?"