Disclaimer: I don't own Soul Eater or Mockingjay. Both belong to their respective owners, Atsushi Ohkubo and Suzanne Collins.

A/N: Alright, a more standard-sized chapter. As in, not nearly as long as the last chapters. /sweatdrop/ On the other hand, the last chapter took me about four weeks to write, so that's why it's a rambling, never-ending horror. As for this chapter…I'm really excited to be on DTK again, but I feel this writing doesn't do him justice (I never feel like any of his chapters do him justice, honestly). I wrote this chapter under weird circumstances – trying to work around a holiday weekend and my sister's birthday – and I ended up staying up late after a family party and then waking up early the next today to finish it up, so of course I hate it, but I'm never happy with any of my chapters, so…/sighs again/ I mean, I've had certain scenes in my head for AGES - particularly the scene between April and Kid that follows - and I'm just not sure it came out how I always pictured it in my mind. I think its just because Kid is such a headcase (in both the show AND this story, haha).

But I had fun with the dream sequence, as I always seem to like dreams more than the realities in my stories. /headdeskplz/

I just want to take this moment to THANK you guys for sticking with this story and sending me such inspiring reviews. You really keep me going! As always, I'm going to give individual thanks, but as usual I'm pressed for time right now, so I'll later repost the chapter with those comments attached.

Once again – THANKS! I LOVE ALL YOU GUYS!

"The dead. The ones I loved fly as birds in the open sky above me. Soaring, weaving, calling me to join them. I want so badly to follow them, but the seawater saturates my wings, making it impossible to lift them."

Suzanne Collins, Mockingjay

Chapter Sixteen: GLASS and Gashes and the Finest White Porcelain?

A perfect flower.

Behind them, somewhere, the voices echo, a chorus of ghosts: "Kid!" they sing, mystifying, an ethereal interweaving of shouts and laughs and breaths and calls, "Kid! Kid! Come in! Come in!"

Kid. He remembers this. He remembers that title, if it counts as one. So arbitrary, so generic, such a nameless name, Kid. That could be anyone, he could be anyone, anybody's kid – and it suits him, now, in this moment, because he really is no one but a kid in a garden, no more than a small child in a field of blossoms, and when he smiles it is light and bubbly and fills his soul with an airiness that makes him float like the sun that lies in a golden haze around him.

"Kid, Kid," the voices still call, and the sound of them stirs up in a buttery-yellow wind that caresses his cheeks and kisses his eyelids. He lets them call, not knowing what they want. Kid, Kid. But he is someone special, they tell him. He is someone unique. "Kid, Kid!"

A perfect flower.

He stands in a pretty garden made just for him. It's a circle, and he adores circles because once in the center he can walk in any direction and the path will always be symmetrical. Symmetry, a new word, sweet on his tongue. Melts like sugar in a teacup, a warm spot in the center of his chest. He's just learned the word for it, but he's always loved it, a deep and true and natural love for all things that stand balanced and beautiful on either side, making the whole world even, complete. This completeness. The garden is complete, a flawlessly constructed circle with hedges and flowers and trees planted at strategic locations: the lilies on the right shake their drowsing petals to the lilies on the left; the willows on the left creak their snaky wooden boughs to their weeping brethren on the right; and the white roses on the right laughed in their bushes and mirror the perfect square hedges of the left, the sweet slender tree all full of cherry blossoms mimes exactly her sister on the other side, shedding a confetti of pink leaves like enchanted rain.

He stands in the middle of paradise with the cuffs of his trousers carefully tucked up, away from the soil and the things that crawl in it. He kneels and touches the edges of the perfect flower, counts all eight petals, silken and rustling in the light breeze.

"Hello, Mr. Flower. I am Kid. I am Death the Kid. I am named after someone very special – Father. Did you know Father is a very special person?" and he leans in and breathes the delicate perfume and feels the slippery softness of the petals at his fingertips; a confidential whisper, "He is very tall and very important and wears a mask and long black clothes that go all curly at the ends. He lets me play with it when I see him, but he never lets me play with his mask."

The voices behind, echoing. "Kid! Kid! Kid!"

He pets the flower with a tiny hand, "Father says he loves me. He's a very special person, you know. He goes away for a very long time and I don't see him very much, but that is because he's doing very important things for other important people," the petals quiver in a luxurious wind that smells of earth and grass and blossoms and honeysuckle; he imagines it shakes for him, cries for him, "Don't be sad, Mr. Flower. Father says he loves me. I thought maybe I would see him today, but he is very busy. He gave me this nice garden instead. And you're in this garden, and you're very pretty because you have eight petals. Won't you be my friend, Mr. Flower? I never had any friends before. I would like to be your friend, Mr. Flower. I am Kid. Death the Kid."

Who is Death the Kid?

What is Death?

And then the footsteps come and he's tangled up in voices and arms and faces of people who work for Father but aren't Father himself. There's a woman here, with hair as thick and rich and gold as honey, and a midnight-colored patch over her eye, and he ducks from her because she always showers his face in too many kisses and it's not dignified, not proper at all. And then there's the man, the one who stands besides Father so often, the one he holds a little black spot in his heart about – because the tall man with hair like a cardinal's feathers gets to be with Father all the time, and he only sees that very special person with the curly black clothes and not-allowed-to-be-touched mask in brief snatches, sometimes in sneak-peeks in mirrors or diamond-hard glass.

"I want to stay here," he informs them, but the take him away, and then the dream changes.

The air is dark and cool and smells like summer twilight, and there are streamers everywhere, half-twisted paper things that hang between turrets and windows and lofty tree branches, and a thousand candles aflame and shining regally, and a million crystal glasses shimmering on outside tables, rich with amber liquid, and the sky above a brilliant burst and shock of fireworks, an explosive array of raw color, blue and white and green and RED, a billion little sparks of light that blaze then flicker and curl and die to smoky nothingness before they rain to the ground.

He sits by the window because he is too small for parties even though they say he's special.

The fireworks splatter hue against the casement like blood and rotten fruit.

And then the dream changes again.

He sees the world die.

What is a SHINIGAMI?

"Kid! Kid!" The voices echo again, but this time they are a chorus of ghouls, the sky above slashed scarlet and scabbed black, and his garden is nothing but a blasted circle. No flowers, all gray. Up and down, up and down, on someone's shoulder, wriggling and screaming, but the air tastes like poison so he closes his mouth and tries not to breathe. Showers of dust that rise up like wraiths with each subsequent footfall. He must not breathe. There is a RED light in his eyes, in everyone's eyes, a lurid haze that passes around him but kills everything it touches, transforming splendid homes to tarnished relics, collapsing huge structures of glass and marble, sparkling tumbles that cry like broken spirits, scarring and moldering and clotting filth in the grandiose spectacle that is his home, a school. All the candles snuff out. The streets are slick and wet with blood. People scream, a shrill sound. In his head a blankness spreads over, like it's stuffed with quiet white fabric. The cry for Father dies on his lips, because Father is a very important person, and Father is a stranger wrapped up in midnight funeral shrouds and skeleton masks, and he doesn't know Father, and Father probably does not really love him, anyway. And he doesn't really know who he is either. Kid. A nameless name, but he's too young to think like that.

"Kid! Kid!"

Falling.

He sees blood and blackness and pain and a dancing massacre.

He sees a face with serpent eyes, a smile that dangles charming over him. Eyes that are a thousand years old. Eyes that do not dream dreams, but nightmares that are real.

Wait. Stop. Pause. Rewind.

Repeat.

Repeat.

Play it again, like a video. Like a reel of film.

How'd he get here? What was going on?

Play it again, again.

Stop. Rewind. Repeat.

A perfect flower. Somewhere. In a garden.

Go back – back – back –

But he can't possibly go back because he can't possibly remember his name.

When Death the Kid awoke, it was not to roses and silk cushions, but silence and a blank chamber.

He tried to grasp the dream, but it was already fading, leaving an imprint of blood and faery-dust on his mind. He had been saying something in it, repeating something that might have been considered important in the many absurd yesterdays that was childhood. Back when he would speak. Before the long slimy tunnels and the rickety wooden stage with its audience of squealing rats and lecherous criminals, its performers consisting of grimy-fingered hawkers and man-sized birdcages made of black iron and shackled chairs like some sort of inverted throne. Before the deadness settled quiet and cold in him, the chilly porcelain stillness that both stole and saved his life.

I am Kid. I am Death the Kid.

But who was that?

In his hollowness, the question stirred.

He did not speak anymore. He did not do much of anything, anymore. He was surprised that memory still existed in the frozen darkness of his subconscious. The dream was smudged vague and golden, but still it was there, a sputtering candle in the night. He could see the garden, though it was blurred, half-remembered, half-imagined; he could see that tiny quivering blossom, its perfect eight petals; he could hear his own voice, high and prepubescent:

I am Kid. I am Death the Kid.

The voice haunted him. Harrowingly, the little boy said it, repeated it, again and again, until echoes overlapped echoes and a whole crescendo of names rang in his ears. And he was dead and still, barely moving.

Who are you? Who are you? The voice and the dream and the memory seemed to ask, beneath the jumbled repeats of I am – I am – I am – the question rose snakelike and slithered over the emptiness that was his soul, devouring it: Who are you? Who are you? Who are you? Like shouts on a mountain, ringing and cascading: Who are you? Who are you? Like a lone whisper in a dark cave: What are you? What are you? What are you?

Something broken.

The answer was a wisp, a hollow rattling of thought, barely there at all. He did not have the energy to speak it, but still it lingered there over his lips like a phantom of breath. He was no one, nothing. He was a doll. He remembered without effort the stitched smiles of teddy bears sitting all around Miss Tara's tea parties; he remembered shiny button stares, tiny heart-shaped heads made of plastic, blank glass eyes that watch forever and painted lips fixed in pleasant arches when she slit his skin over lace tablecloths. He was like that. Like them. If you cut him, he would not bleed, not really; he would fall to dust and plaster, weak old china; you would find nothing inside him, nothing, nothing, only a bit of broken porcelain and an echo of a whisper – I am Kid. I am Death the Kid.

And maybe you would bury him, the shattered remnants of a doll. Maybe you'd think enough to topple his pieces into a ditch somewhere – (an act too kind, really) – and even though he would be dead, he would be alive too, because something that's not alive can never truly die, and his grave would be a hollow in the earth, a blasted garden where a little boy lies, a carcass of a death god dreaming of eight-petaled flowers and skeleton masks.

Was this feeling? Was he feeling something? A tightness in his throat, a noose around his neck; he couldn't breathe. He lay there on a strange surface in a strange room and he did not breathe and he did not think and so he did not react.

They put him someplace clean and bare. It was an accidental mercy, certainly, but a mercy nonetheless. The monotonous walls rose up brown and comforting on all sides, completely identical, a balm on jagged nerves. The floor was a consistent gray, unbroken by cracks or fissures, a solid ice-cold slab of stone that stretched from one end of the room to the next.

Other than that, the room was empty. The wretched Thing that brought him left a puddle of blankets in a corner, and in his spare time Kid took to folding them, admiring the neat, careful creases he made in the fabric, perfect stacked squares. The motion was thoughtless, instinctive, something that existed deep within the vacant confines of his body, like a doll on strings.

He was kidnapped often. The BLACK MARKET expected it. He would sit on a chair entwined with dead roses or in a wrought-iron cage stuffed with rotted silks, and some rich faceless person would see him and love him and snatch him away from his leering hawkers. Then he was subjected to an assortment of horrors, all unique in their own ways: a madman made him the centerpiece of occult rituals, slicing his skin and forcing him to drink his own blood; a woman in ruffled dresses used to drag him across an old ballroom in some strange dance, the walls covered in mirrors, call him her pretty boy and then beat him the next day; a family that always dressed in identical satins would place him in labyrinths of filth and watch as he screamed and struggled and sobbed into the debris, a pitiful manacled thing, unable to fix the asymmetry he saw all around him. There were many others, all a blur of whips and dirt and smiles and blood and kisses and other things. There was Miss Tara and her tea parties, and her mother and her drawling laugh, and then there was Noah and his eyes in the dark and his breath tickling the nape of Death the Kid's neck.

Something clotted in his throat, a gob of nausea. The room shuttered for an instance, a sudden darkness; a crawling sensation soaked his skin, wriggled into his core.

Then he realized his eyes were closed.

He opened them.

Death the Kid never tried to escape. What did he have to run to? Golden-smudged memories that might not be real: a lofty bedroom higher than the clouds, long since withered to tarnish; a perfect round Eden decayed to a blasted heathen circle; the blown-away ashes of an eight-petaled buttercup, possibly dreamed-up; and the haunted phantom of a no-show father in a skeleton façade. He moved vaguely among these half-remembered things and wondered their reality, pushed past their screaming nightmares and doubted the names they called, the secrets they whispered in his mind. He did not understand memories and dreams, and certainly if he ran to reveries they would turn to rust beneath his feet, and he would fall through its corroded floor into a pit of madness.

And long ago they told him what he was, while he stood shivering in the shadows of a stage – waiting for the curtain to rise. He stood there, young and fresh, all done up in a fine ebony suit and silk bowtie, and his hair combed down smoothly, and his skin scrubbed milk-white, and they told him he was a doll, frail and small and pretty. They told him he was a doll and he remembered the sharpness of the seller's nails cutting into his shoulder and the raucous screech of the buyers stampeding toward him and the disturbing cracks of the stage and the cobwebs in the curtains and the hot bitter lash of the whip when he said get away, get away, get away, and it was all so solid and so very real, and it the golden-smudged dreams fell to useless glitter and a nothingness took over and he knew what they told him was true.

Death the Kid was a doll.

So he was not necessarily disturbed about the kidnap.

Oh no, no, no. It was not the kidnap that bothered him.

It was that THING.

He did not have words to describe it, a monster foul enough to stir the horrors in the cold porcelain of a doll.

He did not have words to describe it: a monster foul enough to stir the horrors in the cold porcelain of a doll. Ogress, fiend, demon, nightmare, monstrosity, devil – a patchwork of pure terrors – a disfigured stitching of human flesh – a mismatched assortment too disgusting to fathom; two nauseatingly disjointed eyes, a crop of dreadfully dual-colored hair, horrific spikes jutting hideously on one side of its face, the other half mutilated by a bulging black mole. It was as though someone had sewn two different people together, as if a mad scientist reached into a depraved mind and yanked forth the epitome of asymmetry and unleashed it onto reality – took a needle and purposely matched two uneven sides in some hellish, grotesque, wicked intent!

And it…had…touched him.

A blood-flavored vomit shoved up his trachea, blocking his airway.

Okay, okay. It was fine. Dolls did not need to breathe.

But he could not look at it. He could not suffer that again.

It – (or she? He thought it might be female) – brought him to this place with the heavy coils of the chain still wrapped around his shoulders. She had not been clever enough to pick the padlock at his throat, so instead she simply bashed away at the spot in the wall where his leash melted into wood until the entire structure fell free. Then she must have scooped him up and made away with him, but thankfully a blackness had invaded his mind and he tumbled into oblivion before her crude grasp sent him into throes of panic.

He woke up sometime later in the plain room. A girl with a pinched, hungry face and a swath of brown hair fiddled with the padlock at his throat until it clicked open and crashed to the floor like a leaden heart. He remembered the quick way her fingers moved, fox-like over the lock; the upturned eyes that stared at him foully. He did nothing as she freed the weight from his neck, though those few times when her calloused touch accidentally collided with his skin caused a clang of disgust deep inside him.

A boy entered the room to collect her when she was done. He called her Jacqueline.

And he was alone again.

Until now. Presently, a door swung open on shrilling hinges and a nightmare stepped into the room.

Don't move. Don't breathe. Don't look.

But a doll's eyes are made of glass, still and unblinking, a forced stare that cannot be broken until some masterful hand brushes it shut.

She tromped into the room with a bowl full of greasy liquid. Vacant, vacant, soulless as a doll, but still Death the Kid felt her wretchedness claw over his brain, the taste of total repulsion pervade his tongue.

"Here."

There was a clatter as she dropped the bowl to the floor, its contents sloshing.

"Food. Eat it."

Something frail and pretty, meant only to sit stiff on a throne of flowers, dressed and petted by others. He sat now, white jaw clenched, his eyes like dim glossless suns that lay sunken in his sockets, his mind full of cobwebs. And somewhere behind it all a horror, an unspeakable fear, a revulsion that welled up and twisted and rattled the emptiness inside of him. Think of something else. Anything else. Look at something else. The walls, all even on either side, perfect symmetry. The staid sameness of the floor beneath him. Just don't look at the thing in front of you, just pretend it isn't there. The number eight. A little buttercup with eight petals, quivering in the breeze. Shivering for him. Mr. Flower, in a garden shaped like a circle, and once in the center you could walk in any direction and the path would be symmetrical. Symmetrical. Symmetry. Symmetry.

There were three stripes in his hair and they had nothing to do with symmetry.

Oh god s–!

He was as blasphemous as the thing before him.

'So beautiful,' Noah used to murmur, cinnamon fingers buried in black hair, his voice a balmy breath, 'So beautiful…so perfect.'

He wanted to die.

The embodiment of asymmetry turned on her heel, leaving the food about a foot in front of him.

Death the Kid stared at it and did nothing.

She came back about an hour later and he still sat there, drooped on the ground, looking past the grease and the bowl and existence.

"Hey!"

Her voice cut through his hollowness and reeled him back from the dead void where he slept, thoughtless and uncaring, a porcelain thing without a soul. No, no. Her voice sawed through him and her face brutalized him yet again, panoply of horrors, sickening enough to crush air from lungs that should not breathe because he was a doll and dolls did not live, do not live, do not live –

{But a SHINIGAMI is a doll that BREATHES and MOVES and TALKS!}

Asymmetry took a step forward and nudged the bowl with her foot. Okay. He could look at her foot. The shoe was filthy, scabbed in muck and dirt and blood, and that would make him nauseous, but its filth stained it a congruous brown hue.

"You didn't eat."

Silence.

"You have to f—king eat."

That shoe was pretty symmetrical in relation to the rest of her body.

"If you don't, you'll die."

He wanted to die.

She left him again, and the wet slops in the crude bowl, but he did not touch it. He could already tell what sort of kidnappers they were – they certainly did not want to keep him for themselves. He could tell in their actions, in the careless way they threw him in this sparse chamber, rather than deck him out in fastidious costume and arrange him on a feathery shrine. There were no jewels or flowers or silks or cushions. No. They were merely harboring him because he was a COLLECTOR'S ITEM, intent on feeding him so he did not return to the BLACK MARKET as a spoiled good.

Death the Kid stared at the even creases in the folded blankets and fell back into dust and cobwebs and the stillness of porcelain marionettes.

And what – what is a SHINIGAMI, really?

What is Death?

Asymmetry returned sooner this time. A half hour. Why does she keep coming back? Why must she torture him so?

Why can't he just die?

"You still didn't f—king eat!" she grumbled and kicked the bowl nearer to him and he sat motionless, like a pretty plaything. He heard her without wanting too, "You know – see if I f—king care! Die! No f—king skin off my nose."

It was appropriate that Asymmetry would have such grotesque language.

Fifteen minutes. She was back. Somewhere, somewhere, a demon in a skull mask jeered at him, laughed a silly laugh while the essence of his fear stalked over the threshold and surveyed him with hideous mismatched eyes.

"I told you I don't f—king care if you die or not. I mean it."

She walked out.

Ten minutes passed.

The bowl was untouched.

She returned, foot in the doorway. "I mean it!"

She left.

Five minutes.

"You're gonna f—king die."

He thought about dying, about white porcelain bits tipped into a ditch that was a blasted garden. In a hole with a lonely little boy that talked to flowers and had a very important father and a room higher than the clouds and heaven – and you know what? That little boy might not have been real at all, a memory constructed from faery-dust, an insidious thing spun on a spider's web, an imaginary carcass of an imaginary boy, faded to imaginary ashes.

But how the dirt would close over him. Then he would not have to see her disgusting asymmetry.

Gone again.

This time she only turned on her heel before returning.

"You really will!"

Was this some disturbed nightmare?

"What the f—k's wrong with you?"

I'm broken.

And then something truly horrific happened. Asymmetry scowled and stooped and lifted the bowl and a wave of total panic disintegrated his consciousness into buzzing spots of color. Because Asymmetry pulled a wooden spoon from her pocket and plunged it into the bowl and then shoved the barely edible grease between his lips.

He would die – he would die – he would DIE –!

He was already dead.

{but how does something that never lives die?}

"This is the last f—king time I force-feed you –"

Oh gods! Oh gods! Gods! Gods! And what were gods anyway? Was there not a pretty little nursery rhyme about SHINIGAMI and did not say that they were pivotal pretty things that sat in polished palaces and precede life and death with a toss of the hand? And wasn't that foolish? Wasn't that a massacre of truths? Didn't he sit here, as he sat in thousands of rooms before thousands of horrors, a pale and princely and useless thing with blood welling in the back of his throat and fire burning at the dull golden gems of his eyes and every nerve in the vacant brain of a doll screaming at the knowledge of this asymmetry, right here, right here, right here –?

'So lovely,' Noah used to whisper. 'So fine.'

The grease slid down his throat and his vision flickered.

Symmetry…symmetry…symmetry…?

What did it matter? What did any of it matter?

If only he could find symmetry.

"Oh shit –"

He did not feel the blood leak over his white lips.

"How easy is it to f—cking break you?"

How easy is it to break you? How easy is it to break you? a mantra, a song, a running chorus slipping through his mind, a rickety, unhinged tune, How easy is it to break you? How EASY is it to BREAK you?

'BREAK, BREAK, BREAK!' a boy once said that, a boy he once knew, in an attic somewhere with rose petals strewn across the floor and cobwebs in his mind and the boy had a symmetrical design on his vest and a mad look in amethyst eyes, and he had a blade clutched not-so-coyly in his hand, and he was digging its smooth kiss into Death the Kid's cheek, drawing ugly RED lines on one side, one side, only one side of his face –

But wasn't he already broken?

'Precious,' Noah used to breathe, like a spice rolling off his tongue, infecting him; 'So precious.'

If only he could find symmetry.

The world must have darkened.

He must have fallen into a sleepy oblivion again, because now the shadows recede and his mind returns to a swift and painful clarity. The chamber around him was a blur of dull colors and the back of his throat sandpapered, the taste in his mouth heavy and glue-like. He can already tell from the stiffness of his limbs and the prickling behind his eyes that a faint had snatched him from reality, and it's with a languid air that he returns to this nightmarish realm that was his life, a mechanical flick of dusty white lids, a revealing of bejeweled eyes beneath.

And he realized he was not alone.

It wasn't Asymmetry who stared down at him, thankfully. But it was clearly someone who thought himself the height of fear, the very pinnacle of terror and madness. A boy around the same age as himself, clad in ragged clothing, his skull dominated by spiked tufts of blue hair, culminating in a massive point at the center of his head. Pretty symmetrical, so Death the Kid didn't bother himself much with feeling much alarm.

A boy around the same age as himself, clad in ragged clothing, his head a spiked fortress of blue hair, all culminating in a massive point in the center. The look was pretty symmetrical, so Death the Kid did not rouse the dust motes inside his porcelain self into a frenzy. No panic punctured the stillness that was a lovely glass doll, even when the figure above bore down on him with blood in his eyes, his mouth a wiry rip of a smile.

Did he think he might perhaps shake? Did he think might squirm underneath the heaviness of that gaze, like a worm beneath a boot?

Death the Kid rolled china-fine eyes away from him in apathy.

There was a disgruntled sound. Two calloused hands gripped his collar – it was still the loose, unbuttoned collar he donned at Noah's mansion; his wardrobe still the slippery RED clothes that man swaddled him in – and slammed him into the wall behind him with enough force that paint and stone crumbled into a crater, a neat sprinkling of dust rained from the ceiling and painted sable locks a ghost-whiteness.

But he was limp in the stranger's grasp, a fragile thing often manhandled by a multitude of hands. Huge hands swelled with fat and encrusted with rings, small hands skinny as bones and sharp as pinchers, hands with cracked fingernails and sweaty palms that made him fall into himself, hands that were cold and tough as ice, and hands that skittered over him like the creep of a spider, soft and insidious as the brush of insect legs, possessive and violating touches that caress his cheek, his hair, his lips –

The room crumpled at its corners, a dark, blurry place.

In that brief second, Death the Kid thought himself bestrewn with lovers' petals again – choked in the blood-colored leaves of roses – and he sensed the hot breath of his owner at his neck, and inside him was nothing, nothing, the haunted vacancy of a doll, a groomed marionette made of glass and gems and hollowness.

'Lovely,' the lips would speak, while he sat in perfect stillness, 'So lovely.'

"So – you're the SHINIGAMI, huh?"

Half his consciousness returned, eying dully the boy before him, looking past dimness and quietness and chilliness and not caring what he saw. The words were guttural, a growl that assaulted lily-white ears, but Death the Kid was an unstrung puppet in a murderer's hands and his delicate eyes tilted daintily at the threat.

And – what was a SHINIGAMI, anyway?

What was Death?

I am Kid. I am Death the Kid.

And he was borne into nothingness, and didn't much care who that was.

"Look at me!" the boy shook him, clamped dagger-like fingers into frail and slender shoulders, but he slumped there like a listless plaything, dead, dead, DEAD. He watched imaginary dust motes float past his golden gaze as his tormentor screamed in his face: "How dare you ignore the great Black*Star? How dare you not tremble in fear!" Something weighty as a boulder hit his midriff, and Death the Kid doubled into himself like a doll sewn from velvet, a glitter of scarlet on porcelain lips and lifelessness in dreary yellow eyes: "Don't you know who I am? Don't you know what's about to happen to you?"

He leaned there, cradled in craters, not watching him.

The boy called Black*Star clutched a hand at his throat and the white flesh burned beneath the touch.

"I'm gonna fight you. And win."

No, no. That wasn't right at all. He was not a toy soldier, not a creaky, oily little mannequin that could be cranked with a key into a suicide march with a flailing paper sword. He was nothing, nothingness. He was hollowness. They told him he was a doll, long ago; they told him to sit pretty and not smile and be still as they showered him in flowers and thorns and perfume and bloody kisses.

"So – fight – BACK!"

A strong arm flung him across the room and he landed hard, bruises like blue roses blooming in the snow.

"FIGHT BACK!"

The sable hair was gripped, jerked back so lightless eyes fell to his face. He saw a demon with stars devouring his pupils. But Death the Kid was nothing, nothingness. He was hollowness. He was porcelain in an oversized birdcage, stuffed with rotten silks. He could not move, he could not act.

"Is this the great SHINIGAMI? The gods of this world?"

Gods fell to dust and ashes and slipped through the fissures in a BLACK MARKET in his brain.

"Lemme tell you something," and a hand grabbed his jaw, twisted it left and right, and it was grimy and filthy-nailed and calloused as a hawker, but then it was all wrong, all wrong, all wrong, because he was a china doll, not a toy soldier, "I'm the Big Man – and you can't look at me with those eyes, bastard. I'll tear you to pieces. I'll show you what it's like to be afraid. You think you're bigger, don't you? That's why you won't fight back? That's why you keep looking at me with those stupid eyes? You're the smallest thing I've ever seen! I'll kill you! I'll KILL YOU!"

He could have cracked to pretty splinters in that grasp.

All wrong, all wrong, all wrong.

Didn't he know he was a doll? Didn't he know he was silk and black satin and fine glass and pointless golden-smudged memories that dissipated into glitter and then nothingness? Didn't he know all he could do was sit still still and beautiful in a wreathe of roses on a stage writhing with rats, while the eyes cascaded over him, while the fingers touched him, while the seller shrieked his prices and the buyers dripped their lascivious smiles all over him? Didn't he know he was hollow? Didn't he know he was dust and stiffness and painted loveliness in a dark room, that he was blood and a knife and a wound cutting asymmetrical grins into his cheek, that rich men murmured luxurious sins into his ears and he was a silent victim as the world broke apart into a million pieces because a doll has no soul and no mind and no body? Didn't he know he was dead, dead, DEAD? Didn't he know he was never ALIVE? Didn't he know what a SHINIGAMI was?

Didn't he know what a SHINIGAMI was?

"Yo – hey, Black*Star. What the f—k are you doing? What are you doing with him?"

A SHINIGAMI was – a SHINIGAMI was –

"I'm gonna kill it. I'm gonna kill it and show Mifune I can surpass gods."

A DOLL!

A DOLL!

A DOLL!

Stitched smiles and button stares and glass eyes at a tea party.

"Black*Star –"

There was a shiver in his core and a shaky black film over his eyes and he couldn't see Asymmetry.

Thank you, thank you, thank you, he whispered to an imaginary god in a skeleton façade in a rosy-hazed memory that was probably a dream, Thank you, thank you, thank you.

"Shut up, April! Or I'll kill you too!"

The hand at his throat was a noose that throttled blue-purple flowers in snow.

"But if you kill him – it now – it won't prove anything. It's not at full strength. Anyone could beat down a shell of a god. Don't you wanna fight the real thing?"

The hand loosened and breath slowly crawled into his lungs.

"…of course I'm gonna fight the real thing, April."

All wrong, all wrong, all wrong.

"Then leave it for now. Let it get stronger. Prove that at full power a SHINIGAMI is nothing compared to you."

He saw stars. They roved over him, a brutal constellation, sizing up the thinness of his paper limbs in RED silk clothes, the frailness in a parted mouth that bled scarlet beads. Then he was falling, a tumble of porcelain onto the floor or maybe even into a ditch where a little boy who talked to flowers might lay, blue-lipped and decomposing. And a whole galaxy seemed to burst overhead as pale lids dropped over glass-golden eyes and a foot jived into his midsection and a very different whisper scratched in the darkness of his mind:

"Get stronger, SHINIGAMI. Get stronger so I can kill you."

But Death the Kid did not understand, and as he descended through airless galaxies and murderous stars and blasted ditches and imaginary little boys who talk to flowers and an ancient stage where a single chair sat, showered in roses like a throne and wretched Asymmetry held him captive and murmurs in night crawled all over his flesh, his brain could only repeat the same line, over and over again:

All wrong, all wrong, all wrong.