Orion was a strange child. He never grew out of his quietness, at least when it came to interacting with other people. Humans were fragile and he walked around them like porcelain dolls balanced on high shelves. Angela was one of the few exceptions and for many years she found herself with an obnoxious shadow desperate to catch up to her physical and magical strength.
"Black or gold?" He asked, a scattered array of pencils beside him. He was watching her practice in the courtyard instead of seeking out his classmates. Just like she had been not so long ago, Orion found himself stuck at ten years old. To children, a growing gap of one or two years felt like an eternity.
"Black." She said. Even if she asked what for, he'd never tell her. Whatever he wrote in his battered notebooks was meant for his eyes only. He nodded, and assaulted the page with his pencil until the lead wore down to the wood.
"He would like that." Orion nodded to himself. Angela continued her practice swings. Through sheer power of his meister's will, Excalibur gained a soul, and she was determined to do it again. Mifune's old sword was harder to maintain than an ordinary weapon partner, but she was determined. "What kind of god was dad anyway?"
"He wasn't one." Angela answered easily, though her stomach flipped at how easily past tense came to her now.
"Liar." Orion's look of disbelief bordered on scandalized.
"Why would I lie about that?" Angela said. "He was human, they both were." She swore up and down never to lie to him about anything from the past, and yet there he was not listening to her again. "That's not a bad thing, plenty of humans figure out how to get crazy strong the normal way."
"I'm telling." In one ear out the other. He abandoned his pencils, but not his book, and ran up the steps of the school. In the hallways he was as quiet as a mouse and blended into the shadows. There were dozens of students milling about to plan for future missions or to work on group projects. For now he was content to pretend they lived in completely different worlds.
He had to remain impartial, especially when plotting out the many fates of the people around them. Which was already difficult enough without adding unnecessary emotions into it. After all, he had a very important job that only he could do. So how dare Angela imply that power was some kind of fluke and not a divine right or something similar.
"I know what people think," he could hear Chrona say from the other side of the death room, "but he wasn't 'bad'." Everything happens for a reason, even if that reason was a stupid as picking a random color. "It was complicated." So when a dark-haired weapon passed him in the halls, Orion risked coming out of the shadows to point him in the right direction. "We were just trying to survive; he didn't have a choice. Another appearing is not the end of the worl-"
"Uncle Skull," Orion burst into the death room like a second home, "Angela's lying again." Sure, he was probably interrupting something important, but if he didn't say something now, he was going to forget it. "She said dad wasn't a god, but that's not true, because you wouldn't let yourself loose to some human." He had heard the story a thousand times of his parents and their friends traveling through a magic book to save what he knew to be the one and only Lord Death.
"That's right." Kid said, despite Chrona's disapproving stare.
"Then what was he the god of?" Orion asked.
"Of... other gods." Kid said, as though the idea had just occurred to him. He had more experience interacting with children now, like putting on an old set of gloves. "That's why it was his job to go after them all the time."
"I knew it." Orion said and left the office as quickly as he arrived.
"Kid!" Chrona chastised.
"What's the harm in letting him believe a little longer?" Kid said. "It's not hurting anyone."
"Precisely!" Excalibur agreed. Chrona silently pointed at the holy sword with a dry look aimed directly at Kid. Child or no, they did not think exaggerating the truth all the time like this was a good idea. They had already committed to maintaining Santa for Maka's sake, they did not want to be responsible of keeping track of lies Kid told about someone that actually existed.
Angela was just about to finish her set when a slow clap jolted her out of her concentration. High up on the second-floor balcony, a dark-haired weapon with flat black eyes leaned over the railing wearing a wolfish grin. An immortal weapon with an icy soul wrapped in chains. Perhaps where he came from, bearing his soul like fangs was enough to impress people, but not Angela. She returned to practice, only to realize she lost count.
"I can see why you don't have a real weapon if that's how you say hi to people." She ignored him. Finding a weapon was easy, but making her own weapon the old way, that was an actual challenge. He hopped up onto the railing and leapt down in front of her, landing with a small crater beneath him. She didn't flinch, going through the motions of each strike. "Hey, I'm talking to you." The temperature around them dropped ten degrees, again with the intimidation tactics. Angela pointed her blade directly in his face.
"I don't care." She turned so he could see the large star branded on her shoulder. "I don't need a weapon to beat you, so why would I want one at all?" She resumed her training without a second glance. At first he laughed, but the longer she ignored him the angrier he got.
"Do you have any idea what you're dealing with?" Ice formed beneath their feet. A dull, almost audible wail rang in her ear, like a fly just shy of getting swatted. An eye with an ancient symbol opened in the back of his throat.
Angela vanished from sight, appeared behind him, and decked him with the dull side of her blade. He stumbled forward and she made a good show having her own illusions paint over the weird fear garden he tried to turn the courtyard into. Her entire life she'd been running circles around a growing god. She wasn't rattled by some punk who'd never met an actual challenge in his life.
"I'm dealing with a spoiled brat that waited three months to show up to Lord Death's summons." She said. "Here, you're just a weapon. No one is going to want to work with a weapon that's not here to learn. Only big-shot meisters get to do that, and you haven't even tried to transform yet. So, either you can't, or you look really stupid trying to do it."
His wrist split open. Black lightening jutted up into a glowing three-pronged blade before melting into a bloody puddle at his feet. Fat spatters of crimson that almost looked black, a heavy iron smell in the air, all punctuated by a dead look in his flat eyes.
"I can transform into any living thing except weapons, but..." He tapped the side of her blade. "Maybe that says more about them than me."
"So, you stopped trying?" Angela morphed into a comical parody of the annoyance she found if front of her. She held out her wrist, and made a white long sword with two black bayonets on either side, reminiscent of the stretched-out fork of a trident. "Was this what you were going for?" Of course he couldn't maintain it, the balance of the blade was all off. "You're trying too hard to make it look 'original'. If you're a sword, just be a sword. It's not rocket science." She shook off the illusion like a bad smell.
"How'd you do that?" He asked, for once his voice small.
"It was just an illusion." Angela shrugged. "Just think pointy thoughts, keep it vague. The more you force your expectations onto it, the more useless it gets. That's what Maka always told newbies." He turned his back to her and tried to hide his second attempt to make something. It was thin like a rapier, or a giant needle, the best he could do was something akin to an icepick. It wasn't the most impressive, but it was stabler than anything he'd tried at home. "See? You did it just fine." She said and went back to her own training.
"Fenrir." He snapped back, not wanting to show how startled he was. "My name's not 'you', it's Fenrir."
"Okay." She rolled her eyes. Orion needed a partner more than she did. A newbie weapon would just slow her down and she knew her brother wouldn't bother to ask someone to train with. Yet some how, this dumb weapon got it in his head she should be his meister. For the rest of the year, instead of one obnoxious shadow, she had two. The demon sword had picked it's next meister.
AN: It made more sense to break these two scenes away from the rest of the chapter. Too many time skips obviously, but also it's a bitter sweet note that I felt really brought everything together. The SE manga ended on a 'and life goes on' kind of note, and I wanted to do that.
Honestly, amazed by the response this had gotten not just here, but also on tumblr. I haven't been able to write a true long fic in a while, so having something flow like this was a real treat to write.
I have another long multi-chap fic in the works that I'll start posting next week that's a rewrite of the Salvage arc.