A/n: This is the product of binge-watching the Soul Eater anime like five million times. In my opinion, Shinigami age differently than humans, so that's how I based my timeline. Spoilers from the manga. Please enjoy and review.
Disclaimer: I don't own Soul Eater; I could never make something that good.
He stands on the brink of the abyss. He guards the powerless from evil. He is the protector of order. He shields the human souls from outside corruption. He is a God that provides balance to the world.
He is the overseer of souls, guiding them to the appropriate place; the humans go to the afterlife, the kishin eggs into the stomachs of his weapons.
He also is headmaster of Death Weapon Meister Academy, or DWMA for short; it's a school dedicated to raising and training young meisters and weapons, Death's soldiers against chaos.
He is both feared and loved by the humans; many years ago he had to adopt a goofy manor and change his mask just to prevent children from crying at the sight of him.
He loved children, but they would grow into adults, eventually dying and turning to dust; it was the price of an immortal to be forever alone, mortals being doomed to die from the beginning.
Despite knowing better, he became lonely. He wanted to have companions; he had comrades who lived long, but they would all die in the end. Just like everyone else.
Once, he thought that he needed no fear, that it was useless and unfit for a God. He cast off his fear as a fragment, and it gained life of its own. Two birds, one stone.
His fragment was fully grown from "birth," if one could call it that. He was strong, and he was a god like him; surely, his fragment would never leave him.
He was wrong, though. His fragment, due to his haphazard creation, was driven insane and succumbed to the madness. His duty demanded that he kill him, but he couldn't bring himself to execute his creation even though it threatened the balance of the world.
So, he sealed him away where he could do no more harm at the price of binding his soul to Death City.
After a few centuries, the loneliness returned. He founded a school so he could be with those children he loved so much, but it wasn't enough.
He had what he always wanted, but duty demanded he'd throw it away. He always wondered that if he had known fear at the time, would he have been more perceptive of the monster his fragment was becoming? Would he have been able to prevent all this?
He made a new fragment, this one cut from the part of his soul that upheld duty and order. This fragment was created with more care, to be more mentally durable than his predecessor.
This fragment was a baby when it was "born;" he wanted to have one of those children he loved stay with him forever. He raised the child as best he knew how.
Like the mortals, his child grew up as his power increased. But his child would never die; he would personally see to that. However, his son needed experience to grow strong, so he sent him on dangerous missions, with him watching from the sidelines unable to interfere.
He regained fear; he knew it had importance now. He learned his lesson.
His son returned from a trip to Brooklyn with new friends, and he knew pride again, only this time for someone else's actions.
He watched his son and his students from every mirror in the world, overseeing their progress.
Whenever one of his fell in battle, he died inside. Was preserving the order of the world worth the lives of innocent children?
Selfishly, he was glad it was only some student who died; he always feared that one day it would be his child that shared their fate.
His name is Death.
He is strong beyond measure, but he is still uncontrollably afraid; no matter how many fears he puts to rest, one way or another, even more keep popping up, like cutting off a hydra's head.
He spends his days in paranoia, the voices in his mind never letting him find peace. He can never fully trust anybody because that fearful voice in the back of his head keeps screaming at him that there's no guarantee they'll be loyal, that they won't betray him in the most violent and painful of ways. He lives in isolation. Eternally alone.
He doesn't sleep at night. Assassins strike in the dead of night, and his role as Death's comrade provides him with countless enemies salivating at the chance to put him out of their misery.
Every move he makes, he second guesses; he always imagines the absolute worst case scenario, always more painful and terrible than the actual result.
Fear dominates him; fear is in every step he takes, every thought he thinks, every breath he breathes. Fear consumes him, making every waking moment a living Hell.
The fear got so bad that he thought suicide was the only way to live without fear. He thought about it, long and hard; he came up with several different ways to go about it: hanging a noose on Death's gallow arch, stabbing himself with Vajra, even jumping off a cliff. Ultimately, he was too afraid of death; more accurately, he was terrified by the horrible painful deaths he imagined.
He lived in constant fear; he feared Vajra, his weapon partner, would betray him. So, he prevented that from ever happening.
To alleviate his fear, he willingly slipped into madness; it worked for a time, too, but the fear raised its ugly head every once in a while. But, it was worth it. A brief reprieve from the fear was all he wanted.
Death didn't see it that way.
Death ripped his flesh from his bones, sewed his skin into a bag, and stuffed him inside, like one would throw trash in a garbage bag. All to "protect the order of the world."
He was forgotten, buried under the foundation of Death's precious academy; the only thing he could do was think. Time lost all meaning there, trapped within an escape-free prison. For over 800 years, he thought.
He came to an epiphany: imagination was the source of all fear; without imagination, he would no longer be so afraid, no longer would the excruciating possibilities torment his mind. No longer would this world be Hell.
He hated Death for sentencing him to a punishment worse than death, for condemning his existence as "wrong." He hated him for throwing him away.
Especially since it was all Death's fault he was like this; it was Death's fault he had lived in constant fear, and it was Death's fault he gave into the madness.
Everything was Death's fault, and he hated him for it.
His name was Asura.
He was a perfectionist; he liked everything in order and everything in its place. Everything needed to be exact, symmetrical, balanced. Even as a child, he adored symmetry.
He was a fledgling god; too weak to be important, yet too inhuman to be forgotten. As a result, he set high expectations of himself; after all, he was beyond human, so his abilities needed to reflect that.
He set grand expectations; nothing less than perfection was acceptable. He pushed himself harder and harder, until his body ached and he passed out from exhaustion. He trained, studied, and practiced to become stronger, as strong as his father.
No body had noticed, though. Nobody noticed how his soul yearned for validation, for affirmation that he was worthy of his father's legacy. Nobody noticed how he pushed himself until his godly regeneration became the only thing keeping his body from falling apart.
After all, he lived alone. All alone in a giant house with his father visiting once or twice a month.
He was alone nearly his entire life. He had everything anyone could ever ask for, but that meant nothing because he was alone; he had wealth, power, education, immortality, and three square meals a day. Loneliness was a dark stain on his otherwise pristine life.
His father's reputation alone was enough to ward off any potential friends; people he met either avoided him or approached him only to use his power, status, or wealth.
When he was younger, his father sent him to elementary school like all the other children. Being the son of Lord Death earned him infamy from day one. But, even as a child, he was smart, smarter than even the teacher; that earned him a target on his back.
He was bullied. The teacher stood by and did nothing. Shortly after, he asked his father if he could be homeschooled instead. His father, always overeager to please him, agreed. Books became his companions.
The isolation allowed him to rearrange things as he pleased; everything in his presence was symmetrical. Precisely and exactly symmetrical. Perfect.
All except himself, of course. Those three damned lines of Sanzu that were only on the left side of his head ruined his symmetry.
He was a budding god, but he wasn't perfect; he could never be perfect no matter how much he tried. Everything he did was ultimately futile.
He would be engrossed a task then it would come, like an itch: the need to make things symmetrical. The more he ignored the urge, the stronger the urge got until it became unbearable. He would fix everything in his vision, precisely and exactly, until balance was restored. He would clean his large home spotless so that no stains or marks would dare spoil its symmetry, even until his fingers would bleed from scrubbing too hard.
The urge would be satiated then. Until he looked into a mirror, that is, and saw those horrid stripes...
He tried hair dye, but after a day the stripes returned. His perfect symmetry was forever out of reach; only now was he painfully aware of that fact.
He hated it. He hated it so much.
The time came when his father decided he should get a weapon partner; his father brought photos of weapons: rich, upperclass girls most people would have found beautiful. Not him, though. They had no symmetry.
He had heard rumors of the Thompson sisters in Brooklyn, twin guns who would provide him with his coveted symmetry. He had went to New York himself; it took single-handedly defeating a mob group and bribing them with cash to get them to agree to come with him, but it was all worth it. For symmetry.
For balance.
His name was Death the Kid.