Running with Scissors

Written for the Soul Eater livejournal prompt community, 42_souls.

Pairing: Kid/Liz/Patti. Prompt: Leave

Right from the beginning, their hair would drive him crazy.

"But you'd look great with short hair!" he said, as if the pleading compliment in his voice could somehow cancel out the fact that he was chasing Liz around the room with scissors, like some sort of psychopath. "You have the perfect face for it!"

Liz backed away from him again. "If you don't stop waving those scissors in my face I swear to God, Kid, I swear to God I will take Patti and walk right at that door and never come back!"

"But I'm just offering--"

"Are you always going to be this creepy? Is this going to a thing all the time?"

He stared at her, bewildered. "I'm not being creepy." Then he got defensive. "I'm just trying to be nice!"

"Then why do you have a pair of scissors in both hands?!" She took a few more steps back, putting a safe distance between her and him. Liz didn't fear that he was actually going to hurt her, at least not on purpose. She had good instincts for sensing genuinely dangerous people. That was why she and her sister had managed to survive – and avoid predators – for so long on the streets. She had never gotten that dangerous vibe off of him, which was a good part of the reason that she had agreed to become his partner in the first place. (Also a good part of the reason that she had at first tried to make him her prey. But that was in the past now, and they were letting bygones be bygones.) Still, even if Kid wasn't intentionally dangerous, Liz realized now that she was clearly dealing with somebody who had a very, very warped concept of what being nice entailed. "And why does it even matter to you if I have longer hair than Patti?"

"Because that's asymmetrical."

"So?"

"So asymmetrical means unbalanced. And that's bad. Things are supposed to be balanced, so… you need symmetry. Symmetry is balanced."

"What?!"

"A reaper's job is to maintain balance," he said, pedantically, as if repeating something that he'd learned from a book. "I have to worry about balancing the whole world. How am I supposed to do that if I can't even balance my own weapons?"

"Good lord," Liz said. "You're an idiot."

His eyes narrowed. And then he actually did look a little bit dangerous. The scissors in his hands, unfortunately, only added to the overall menacing effect. "Beg pardon?"

"Because you're going about this completely ass-backwards!" Liz snapped. "Symmetry isn't balance. Symmetry means having the exact same thing on both sides. Balance means having differences, but making sure that those differences are in... in... oh, what's a good word... equilibrium. Yeah, that."

He stared at her.

"Am I getting through to you?" She resisted the urge to march across the room, grab him by the shoulders, and shake him silly. "At all?!"

He looked down at the scissors in his hands again, then up at her. She met his eyes and then realized with dismay that he wasn't even looking at her face, he was instead staring at the ends of the locks of her long hair. "I really do think you'd look better with shorter hair," he said. "Let me just--"

"That's it. I'm leaving."

"You can't leave." He sounded more surprised than angry. "I'm trying to cut your hair!"

"Yes, I know, that's why I'm leaving. The next thing I know, you're going to be freaking out about me being taller than Patti, and then you're going to come at my legs with a chainsaw! Or something."

"Liz, you know I would never use a chainsaw," Kid said. "It would be asymmetrical. Also, extremely messy. A machete - or two, really - would be far superior in terms of being able to slice cleanly through flesh and bone without leaving behind a significant amount of--"

"Aaaaaand you just keep giving me good reasons to walk right out that door."

"You can't!"

"Watch me." She marched out of the room and up a flight of stairs. "Patti!" she shouted. "Patti, pack your things, we're--"

"WAIT!"

Kid's shout was melodramatic enough that Liz couldn't help but turn toward the sound of his voice. He was standing at the bottom of the stairs, the scissors finally gone from his hands. "You can't leave," he tried again, "because I have to do some thinking about what you said."

"You weren't even listening to what I said."

"Yes I was!" He stomped his foot angrily, every bit the spoiled child. "I was listening and now I have to think about it, all right? Because maybe it kind of makes sense, I don't know, I haven't had time to think about it properly yet. But it's like…" He furrowed his brow, pondering deeply. "It's like what Father always says about good and evil. And having to balance them. But I guess good and evil aren't the same thing, well not most of the time anyway, so they can be balanced but maybe not…" He grimaced, as if finishing his thought was actually causing him physical pain. "Not symmetrical," he finally managed to breathe out through gritted teeth. "Because they're not the same. That's why they have to balance in the first place."

Now it was her turn to stare at him, slightly stunned.

"I'm still thinking about it, though," he said.

"So think about this," Liz said, taking a few cautious steps down toward him. "Patti and I are different, but we balance well. Maybe we could even get used to balancing against you and your black vortex of negative-energy suckitude. But we're never going to be symmetrical, and you can't make us be symmetrical."

He blinked at her. "My black what of what?"

"Never mind. The point is, you can't cut my hair."

"But you would look so cute with short hair!"

"Nuh-uh, no way." She shook her head, letting her hair fly for dramatic measure. "Patti does cute. Me? I do gorgeous." She flipped her hair over her shoulder. "Think you can learn to live with cute and gorgeous, instead of just one or the other?"

"…I don't know."

Liz rolled her eyes. "Then how about this? We'll compromise. You can't cut my hair, but you can complain about it as much as you want, and I'll just ignore you. How about that?"

She'd meant it as a joke. Unfortunately, at the time, she hadn't yet known him long enough to understand that he had a broken sense of humor. "Yes," he said, nodding solemnly. "That sounds like an excellent compromise."