[Closed]

[smokeeasy]

Characters: smokeeasy, its_a_hobby, and thedeathjr
Location: Shinigami's room, Shibusen
Rating: PG
Time: August 29, early morning. (Backdated.)
Description: After the failed attempt to burn the souls, Badou and Al take the best course of action they have left.


Anyone who thought that it was easy keeping an all night vigil in the desert had clearly never done it. It hadn't seemed right to just walk away and leave the souls burning behind them though. So the motley trio had sat down to wait.

Eventually, Badou had closed his eyes for three or four hours, but he hadn't really slept. Sitting with his knees drawn up and head resting on folded arms, he'd dozed, opening his single eye every now and then. Until he woke more fully to notice the fire burned down to embers, the sun's first rays just peeking over the eastern horizon, and one of their number having departed sometime in the night.

But when he and Al made their way over to the now-extinguished pyre, they found the souls still there, nested in little piles of ash which dusted their surface, still unmistakably round and red, even beneath their dusty gray frosting.

The ensuing silence was long and heavy with the weight of failure. But at length Al and Badou talked. They couldn't bury the souls now--that seemed even less of a solution than it had before. Merely entombing them underground would, it appeared, only preserve them their in their current state. And who knew who might come digging for them.

And so finally they settled on the only option they seemed to have left.

Weary, worn, and defeated, they collected up the souls and trudged back to the city, to Shibusen, where they headed to the entrance to Shinigami's room; the same place they'd been led on the morning of the Colorado mission.

Using one of their communicators, they rang for Death the Kid's attention. Not because they trusted him, but just because they had no choice, and the only thing that seemed worse than their situation at the moment would be to try again on their own and fail.

Comments

[its-a-hobby.livejournal.com]

Even without the physical effects of exhaustion, the night's venture had left Al feeling as mentally worn down as Badou looked. Maybe thinking the souls could be put to rest by normal means had been too much to hope for, but the fact that they were tangible enough to be touched and eaten had made him optimistic.

But perhaps what was most surprising of all was the degree to which Badou was willing to go to find an alternate solution. For the longest time Al had only had Ed to back him up in situations like this, but apparently his partner wasn't the sort to do anything important halfway. Not that Al disagreed; it wasn't enough to stand against the practice of eating souls without doing something about it, even if this particular something happened to have led them to Shibusen's doorstep with more questions than answers.

Al gave the souls he was carrying an apologetic look, holding them with the sort of gentleness he normally reserved for small animals. If anyone would know how to help them, surely it had to be the city's newly appointed 'god of death'. Until then he waited in silence. There'd be plenty of time to talk later, when, if luck was on their side, their options would look a lot less bleak.