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Moth orchids and bluebells, tightly wound up bundles of cellophane and tissue. Madonna lilies. Rosemary.
Trinkets, too - a ring or a coin. Gathered up like a crow’s nest. Little human things that are both totally meaningless and of vital importance.
Kid wonders what his father would have made of it all. He’d have probably tilted off to one side, and clapped once, and said it was all very nice. He never was very adept at handling the reverence of humans.
The steps of Shibusen are a sprawl of remembrance and pollen. It’s slightly nauseating; unbalanced and disarrayed.
(Not quite true - everyone agreed to place their tokens here, and everyone agreed that anyone with something to gift will get a little slice of space on these steps in which to give it. That’s the kind of order that he knows will be the way forward in this new world. Would it have killed them, though, to put those bouquets of chrysanthemums opposite one another?)
“There you are!”
She’s flushed - cheeks pink like her soul. She must have run all the way here.
“Liz?”
“I got up for a glass of water, and you weren’t there. So I, y’know…” She huffs. “I’m just here to make sure you’re keeping out of trouble.”
A silly thing to say, and she knows it. What she means, what her wavelength gesticulates, is the biggest thing that ever happened to you was only a couple of days ago and then your dad died.
“It’s a weapon thing,” she says sheepishly, brushing it off with a flick of her hand. “You wouldn’t understand.”
(After the Book of Eibon the girls wrapped him in a tight hold for a long time. It was humbling. Patty had looked at him, bright eyed and overjoyed, and said “I beat up Black Star! Are you proud?” To which Kid had said that he was immensely proud, and he only wished he had been there to see it.)
He can feel their souls now, within and actually in his own, and it is soothing. It eases the white noise of the other souls in the city, and the space he now fills where the wavelength of his esteemed father used to wash over and through him, now like a phantom limb. No longer in the squishy flesh between his knuckles, crafted so human-like to avoid—
“Hey,” Liz says softly, looping an arm around his elbow. The sisters know the ridges of his brain better than anyone. “Wanna talk about it?”
Kid unsticks his tongue from the roof of his mouth. Tilts his head back and up towards the moon that sits in the sky like a fat drop of ink. Of black blood. “I don’t know what I’m going to say.”
She hums. “You still have a few days. Patty and I will help, if you want.”
“I’ve tried to write something, but it all just sounds so… disingenuous. What do you say at the funeral of someone you killed?”
Liz runs a hand up and down his forearm. Her head drops down to lean on his shoulder, and she pulls his elbow close to her chest, a gentle tug of the mooring. “Oh, c’mon. You know that’s not really true. Or it’s not, like, the truth truth.”
They stand there for a few moments. Her hair smells like shampoo and sleep, clean and soft.
“You could just wing it?” Liz suggests. “You always seem to know the right thing to say, recently. You’ve really… I’m really proud of you.”
“Why didn’t he tell me?” He asks, surprised by how strangled it sounds.
“Kid,” and she’s almost scolding, now, a big sister at heart. “Did it need to be any harder than it already was?”
He knows she’s right, and he’s told himself as much already, but hearing it still feels like wrapping his hands around a hot mug of tea. “There’s things I’ll never get to say to him now, too.”
“Maybe you can say them at the service, then. Or you could say them to me, or Patty, or you could write them on a piece of paper and ball it up and throw it away, or fold it up and bury it somewhere…” She starts counting the ways on her fingers. “You could breathe on a mirror and write it in the fog. Or put it in a bottle…”
“Okay, okay.” He bumps his shoulder against hers gently. “I get it.”
“Do you think you had something to say that he didn’t already know?”
Kid pauses to think about it.
“I think he knew.” Liz says.
He ends up with some bullet points, which he asks Maka to proofread. As it happens, he mostly just says what feels right in the moment. It seems like the way his father, who was never one for formalities, would have related to the most.
After, Kid finds himself in The Death Room, because he’s been in orbit around it since he left over a week ago wrapped in his father’s shroud (his father’s title, his father’s eclectic legacy). He feels a bit more settled now, a bit more like himself. More firmly rooted back down his body with room under his ribs for his lungs to expand, however pointless of an exercise it is.
It’s raining, but his hair and the ground remain dry. The air feels sodden and humid regardless. The Death Room isn’t of the world, but it is a mirror of it.
There are footsteps (tipsy, off-beat) walking beneath the guillotines and growing steadily louder, a bass line to the gentle cadence of the downpour.
“When you were born,” Spirit says, arriving by his side. “There was an eclipse.”
They stand next to each other and look out at the endless sprawl of crooked graves and sluggish clouds. Spirit takes a swig from the bottle he’s holding between the tips of his fingers, makes an aborted gesture to offer it to Kid before either preempting being turned down or remembering that Kid is sixteen.
Kid says nothing, which Spirit takes as space that he can fill.
“Maka was only a few weeks old. She had these tiny little fat fingers, and I remember holding her and holding onto her chubby little hand. She’d woken up in the middle of the night, cause you know, that’s what babies do. A lot, actually, it’s kind of a pain in the ass. Anyway, then I looked up out the window, and suddenly there was this bright glow. It was like the middle of the day, at night! It was crazy. I’d never seen anything like it. And I thought, hey, that’s cool. Then nothing more of it.
“And then the next time I was in here, reporting to Lord Death, he was like, ‘here, let me let you in on a little secret, Spirit, it’s just the most amazing thing, Spirit,’ and I was like sure, of course, and there you were. Teeny tiny, like Maka, and you looked at me, and then just started— we were looking at one another, and all I’m thinking is, wait, Grim Reapers can have babies? Do I organise a baby shower? So I’m like, questioning everything, and then you start just fucking wailing. Screeching. And I thought oh, fuck, I’m about to get fired, cause suddenly Lord Death has a little baby, a little son, and if this little guy doesn’t like me then I’m fucking out of here, right? But he just calmed you down and said anyway, here, can you look over this mission report for me?”
Spirit sniffs.
“Yeah. Anyway. When you were born, there was an eclipse. And now the moon is black.”
“Sounds like a bad omen.” Kid says.
“Really? I dunno. Feels kind of symmetrical to me.”
Kid looks at Spirit, then, searching. Spirit just smiles crookedly and lays a firm hand on his shoulder.
“Anyway. Take your time. All your Death Scythes, we can hold the fort. And we’ll be ready when you are. We all… We know that you’re gonna be really good. So did your dad. And he… He really did love you a lot, sometimes maybe too much. But that’s just what being a parent is like, I think.”
Spirit takes a slow look around, then back to Kid. Nods once, pleased with himself, and begins to leave.
He’s stopped when Kid speaks. “You knew this would happen when I awakened, didn’t you?”
He sighs. “Yeah, I knew.”
“Did you know,” Kid asks, “about my brother?”
Spirit sways a bit, perhaps jarred by the lack of sentimentality he’s received in return for his own. His mouth opens and closes a few times while he picks his words. “Not exactly. Not the whole truth of it. But I guessed as much, once I put two-and-two together.”
Kid frowns.
“Don’t let it—. Don’t think less of your dad. He already suffered enough for it, we all have. Personally, I don’t want to suffer anymore by holding a grudge. It was a different world when he did what he did. And I think he apologised by creating you.”
Spirit raises his bottle up and tilts the neck of it towards Kid.
“Apology accepted,” he says, and takes a swig. His eyes are a bit glassy, but so are Kid’s; neither of them are embarrassed.
Spirit does leave then, finding a winding route down the straight path, and Kid thinks.
The rain slows to a drizzle.
Back at the manor, there is a card on the doorstep. It’s hovering in midair, sleek and luminescent.
It reads:
Condolences.
Mabaa.
Kid reads it twice. Then a third time. He reaches to pick it out of the air, but it curls and melts in on itself, burning away into nothing with a lashing of deep violet flame. His hand falls and he stands there dumbly for a moment before he has the sense to whisper a quiet thanks.
It’s such a genuinely remarkable sentiment that for the first time he feels a complete and utter surety beyond the blind faith he’d held onto, white-knuckled, in that capsizing blimp.
It truly is a new world. A shrieking and screaming newborn of a world.
The moon may be black, but for now, the sun laughs and laughs.