Originally for last year's soulxmaka NSFW week. I have no explanation.

His brother is in a long distance relationship. It's a lost cause, Soul thinks– perhaps not doomed to fail as quickly as all of Wes's previous flings of varying romantic ineptitude, but it's still, inherently, fucked.

Wes noisily tosses various shoes, sunglasses, and other model-level swag ornamentation into his hardshell luggage. "I'll be out for the weekend. He's picking me up so you can use the car to go get laid or something."

"I'm not you, thanks," Soul says, leaning against the doorframe of his brother's bedroom. Also, he has a raid, tonight. "Isn't he like in his forties? What happened with that one chick you were crying about? With all the leather."

"Not cool to live in the past, bro. And anyway, this guy pilots jets. Looks real good in a flight suit," he says, grin wide, bright, and insured for at least thirty grand. To Soul's eyeroll, he adds, "Or would you rather I bring him here so we can make out and watch house renos on TV–"

"God, no, just go, friggin' dilf chaser."

"'Dilfchaser'. I like it. Sounds like a good name for one of your elf characters."

"Okay, one, I only play Tauren. Two, I would purposely shit myself if that name hasn't already been taken by some other creep like you," he replies, and this is when Soul's phone begins to sing in his pocket.

Wes, having recognized the tune, immediately blurts, "I'm not here."

Mom's ringtone: fifteen seconds of the opening to Gaga's Poker Face, 'mah mah mah maaah,' repeated in mantra-like, dance-pop chant.

Soul pulls his phone out of his pocket, watching his brother shy away from it like a vampire facing a rope of garlic. "Damn it Wes, what did you do this time–"

Mah mah mah maaah~

Wes speeds up the packing process. "Uhhhhhhhh, I may have forgotten about house-sitting?" He actually smiles when he looks up and finds Soul's flat, icy stare, which makes the eternal curse of getting the short end of the second-son stick that much more demoralizing.

Soul resigns himself to simply saying, "Man, fuck you."

Mah mah mah maaah~

"Little brotherrrrr," Wes pleads, wearing an ugly, spoiled face that would probably still land him at least a few modelling gigs. "But I hardly ever get to see my man! Please please please please take one for the team for me pleeeeeeeeeeeaaa–"

Soul's face pinches at Wes's ear-shattering plea. "STOP. FINE. FUCK. FINE." His kryptonite is loud noises – he can't think straight while listening to something hideous enough to make his skin crawl. "You owe me so much for this. Now shut up so I can answer the phone, asshole."

"You're my favorite brother, and I love you."

Mah mah mah maaah~

He scoffs. "You are, literally, noise pollution. Go away, use condoms, love you bye." Then, unlocking his phone, which displays one of his mother's many over-exposed facebook selfies. "Good afternoon, Matriarch."

"It would be," replies his mother in a smooth voice that soothes the damage Wes had caused, "if I could get a hold of my firstborn."

Soul waves his brother away for the weekend, who quietly oozes out the front door. "Sorry, Mom, but you'll have to settle for the spare. He said something about house-sitting before he took off for some… last minute thing." Closes his eyes, trying not to think about his brother and some dude nearly his mother's age.

Mom sighs, the sound of her Tesla spitting out its door handle for her in the background. "You keep letting him do that to you, you know."

"Yeah… He bribes me with expensive shit though. You know how it goes."

A self-indulgent laugh, for that one. "Yes. Yes I do."

\\

He's packing up his desktop for the trip to Mom's – hardcore raiding guild schedules aren't a joke – when someone Kramer's through the front door like they own the entire apartment tower.

Soul looks over his shoulder and tries his best Dad Just Found My Shitty Report Card face. "Why the fuck do they keep letting you in the building–"

"Such hostility, brosephina," Blake Strickland says as he jumps and sail-planks his way through the air to land in a heap on the living room futon. He already has his phone out and is scrolling through instagram before the furniture has settled. "Why're you still packing? We've been plannin' this for like two months. B-Star is not to be kept waitin'."

Blake, game name BlackStar, has hair as blue as his in-game character and is the only person in the guild Soul knows outside the game. The chances of this guy having been born with a megaphone fused to his windpipe are staggeringly high.

"I dunno what you're talking about, but what will it take for you to understand that I despise you?"

"Not being my facebook friend, for starters," Blake shoots back, unperturbed. "Gives a bro mixed signals."

Soul grits his teeth and unplugs his monitor. "Just tell me why you're here."

This, apparently, is offensive enough to cause Blake to look away from his phone. "IRL meetup? Vegas? We're staying at your mom's for the weekend. This has been discussed."

"Discussed? With who? I didn't agree to shit."

"Whom."

"Fuck you, you can't even spell."

"Is this about RNGesus deeming you unworthy last raid, because I can't help it when the heavens acknowledge me as superior, okay. Put some ice on your ass, let's go."

"No," Soul insists before blowing dust off his case fan. "I hate meeting people, I hate get-togethers, and I HATE being stuck in a car with you for four hours. Plus we have a raid tonight."

Blake scoffs and goes back to his phone. "Raid was moved to tomorrow for the meetup, noobert. And if you aren't going, why're you packing?"

"I have to house-sit for Mom over the weekend."

Soul gets a couch pillow to the face for that.

"Your mom's house, which is in Vegas. Where everyone else will also be." Blake momentarily pauses his ire to flex and take a selfie before continuing his tirade. "Did you have to take classes at Impossible Bitch School to get like this? Just fucking go to the thing! It's not meeting new people, it's dudes you've been talking to online for like two years."

"You know what's great about online friends?" Soul asks with a heavy sigh. "I can log off and they go away."

His best friend just clucks his tongue in disappointment. "Your loss. But you're driving me and letting me crash at your mom's."

"Fifty bucks."

Blake flips him the bird with both hands. "Suck me, I gotta explain to Reaper why you ain't going despite fuckin' around clown town ten minutes away."

Soul pauses in tucking his keyboard into a duffel bag, hands halfway buried in computer cables. Looks up and warily takes in Blake's self-satisfied arch in his thin eyebrows. "…Reaper's going?"

"The great B-Star convinced our silent main tank to attend, yes. The shit I do for you, seriously."

"Pfft– What do I have to do with anything?"

Blake rolls off the futon to swagger into the kitchen and check out the fridge situation. "Man, you and Reaper could be at opposite ends of Azeroth but whatever bullshit one of you is doing, the other is totally involved. It's like physics. Y'all are quantum buttbuddies."

Unable to process anything that has vacated Blake's mouth without triggering some kind of bewildered, brain-seizing meltdown, Soul scrunches his eyes shut with such force that he sees neon swirling on the backs of his eyelids.

"I hate you so much."

"Okay but consider this: if you go, you get to hear what Reaper sounds like."

\\

It is hard to resist that kind of bait.

The thing is, ReaperMan never talks in voice chat, only relying on lightning-quick responses via in-game text channels, and usually in raging capslock. Spartoi's main tanking death knight has one of the more rotten (and therefore entertaining) mouths in the guild, so Soul feels cheated, maybe even betrayed, when he learns ReaperMan's a chick and her voice is cheery.

And she could have played him so easily, knowing from the start that he would have no idea who she is, or that she's the one he's been bullshitting with four nights a week (or more) in private messages about how stupid pick-up-groups are. But she doesn't.

Doesn't beat around the bush. Just comes clean right at the start.

"Hi," she says to him after she ends a call on her cell and tucks the phone into her hoodie pocket. Waves with a blunt-nailed hand, voice bright as the sun. "I'm Reaper. Uhm, your cosplay looks great! Kaworu, right?"

He's sitting next to her in the booth, trapped against her, really – Blake has squashed the three of them together on one side of the table. This girl looks like she's thirteen, but he's not about to give her shit for it because when your guild's main tank is one of the best on the server, you try not to make her mad. Soul sends a withering glare over his shoulder at Blake (who ignores it as easily, if not more so, than his brother), and spreads complimentary pseudo-butter on his pancakes.

Who the fuck is Kaworu? Gotta be an anime thing – he's not sure he could repeat that name back without stumbling over his own mouth.

"This is my actual hair color, but I'm eight months pregnant, to save you from assuming anything else about me," he spits, feeling like the world's largest asshat for having equally assumed ReaperMan wasn't anyone but a man. "Why the hell would I cosplay at a friggen Denny's?"

He watches her blush red in his peripheral, which is more satisfying than he'd like to admit, but the overall expression on her face reads dawning recognition.

"…Because there's an anime con tomorrow-oh-my-god, you're SoulEater!" Reaper slaps her hand on the table, an old-man move so juxtaposed by its performer that it makes his head spin. Various tableware jingles at their booth. "Sorry, I thought you were like some 60's hipster Fifth Child. Now I see it's just the eternally grumpy music snob in the flesh."

God damn it, she really is Reaper. He's kind of pissed, but he's also amused despite himself because now he can put a voice to all the ridiculous snark she spouts to him in private tells, and it matches up too perfectly for him to stay angry. It's Reaper. His friend.

Soul waves at his model-brother-acquired, haute couture Ugly Shirt in nauseating neon. He likes directing as much attention away from his face as he can. "Paisley's coming back, okay? And when it arrives, I'll be wearing something else," he retorts with a confidence he doesn't actually have.

Reaper tilts her head back to laugh, a note to her voice that makes her suddenly nowhere near thirteen. Different and more base parts of his brain waking up now, on alert, which is something he'd wanted to avoid because that whole sublevel of social interaction is fruitless at best and tiring always. He didn't come here looking for cute girls. In fact, he'd wanted to get through this stupid IRL-meetup with as little effort as possible and maybe bullshit with Reaper as a bonus.

Except ReaperMan is pretty.

Soul concentrates intently on pouring syrup over his pancakes, but is interrupted by the continual focal point of his hatred for the evening.

"Attention!" Blake announces to the entire diner, hands cupping around his mouth."Professional bamf has entered the building!"

While Soul's sensitivity to horrendous noises is withering away in his soul, mortally wounded, ShadowStag waves politely from the front door of Denny's, clearly accustomed to her arrival being broadcasted on the regular.

Soul has never actually met her, but she's recognizable because she has a massive nerd cult on instagram. One of Reaper's IRL friends, she's also a hell of a druid, so adaptable she's practically nine players at once, and is therefore his class leader in raids. He actively tries to stay on her good side. Blake actively tries to get in her pants.

Trailing behind Stag is a type-A-looking dude Soul immediately and instinctually knows is the guild's raidleader despite never having seen him before. Death the priest is a stuck-up perfectionist jerkhole, and only the absolute dick who yells at them for hours on end throughout the week could have a resting bitch face like that. Meeting your raidleader in the flesh and watching him order a veggie omelette directly across from you at a Denny's booth is a surreal experience only comparable to seeing your mother without her bra on.

More guildmates show up in bursts, and the group takes over three booths and two pushed-together tables. They shoot the nerdy shit well past midnight, some people floating between tables to meet everyone and complain about how BlackStar seems to have bribed the server gods for his good luck on loot rolls.

Socializing with them is a lot easier than Soul had thought it would be, made more so by everyone else at the table being adept with all the back-and-forth conversation ritual that he had never managed to learn. He's easily caught up in their conversation, and it's a nice distraction from his online friend-turned-cute-woman sitting next to him.

"The more important issue at hand," Death says, carefully stacking tiny cups of half-and-half into a pyramid, "is that if we recruit any more recreational drug users, we won't be able to live through hard mode. Once they're high, our effective healing goes down by a third."

"Ohhhhhhh my shit," Blake whines. "The issue is that I don't have my extra bacon. Don't talk math at the table, I get enough of that from Reaper and her stupid 'optimal threat rotations'."

"I'll remind you that my math saves your dumb ass," Reaper chirps back.

Stag takes a mouth-watering insta of her crepes, fine-tuning her filters. "Well, we can either ban bongs on raid nights or start asking recruits if they get high, but once they realize the consequences, they'll simply lie."

Soul carefully accordion-folds his straw wrapper and doesn't look directly into anyone's face, because it's easier to pretend he's merely in voice chat and this conversation isn't something worth sweating nervously over. "Just start kicking healers when they can't perform up to standard."

"Right?" Reaper adds. "They don't wanna be replaced, so they'll either stop using or start playing better while they are. They could lick fuckin' toads as long as I don't die twenty times a night."

The absurdity of Reaper's girl-voice saying things like 'lick fuckin' toads' is problematic. Soul bites the inside of his cheek, stifling a laugh.

BlackStar eyeballs a heated carafe of artificial maple syrup for all of two seconds before pouring some into his coffee. "I'm glad we can have this super serious weed meeting over pancakes, but like are we gonna go drinking later or mayhaps do something actually entertaining? This's Vegas, isn't it?"

\\

Thankfully, somewhere around that liminal, two-in-the-morning hallucinatory hour, ShadowStag shuts up BlackStar by offering him a 'ride' (to where, Soul does not want to think about in detail if he can help it), and some of the raiding crew make plans to go to a bar and attempt to get Death the Hardass drunk.

The rest of the party filters out, crashing for the night, until only ReaperMan remains – well, her and the ninja waitress who keeps refilling Soul's coffee when he's not looking.

His ass is asleep and he doesn't think he can stand to get to the other side of the table, but he does scoot over to give Reaper more space in the booth. "Are you, uh, cool with being alone with a guy this late?" he asks, as if they haven't spent scores of hours chatting privately online.

She shrugs. "Yeah. You're a good healer."

He waits for some kind of punchline, but she doesn't say anything. "That's it? That's your basis on judging a person's character?" Soul narrows his eyes. "I'm not even specced for healing."

"I know. That's why I run five-mans with you." With the lack of people at the table, her voice has gone darker, deeper, playing inside his ears in a way only music usually can, not so much direct sun anymore as it is reflected moonlight, and he determines he has officially had too much coffee. "You're always the first name that goes by when heals are thrown at me after I do something reckless." She smiles. Moonshine, 120-proof. "I like that."

Fuck him. He is fucked. He doesn't know where the waitress is, so he puts his hand over his chipped mug and deigns to keep it there permanently. "Because you're insane," he insists. "I had to write a macro to save your ass whenever the real healer's AFK because you just throw yourself into danger."

"That only proves my point. And aw, you wrote one for me? I'm honored."

"You should feel guilty."

She tilts her head, brown-blonde fringe scorching to gold in the overhead lights. "You always write the smoothest macros though. I have like seven of yours on my hotbar for raids."

Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuc– "If you're trying to butter me up, it's only working a little." He needs to get out of here, away from her, but he's house-sitting for his mother and going back to an empty mansion is presently less desirable than possibly developing a crush on the guild's main tank. "Seriously though, you probably shouldn't be basing your trust on some heroic encounters. My actions stem from dodging an expensive repair bill, not because I'm trying to save you, personally."

Reaper yawns behind a hand before drowsily reaching down to his plate and swiping leftover syrup with her finger. Sticks this in her mouth in the least sexual way possible, though it doesn't particularly save him from any mental images. "So are you saying I should not trust you?"

"Bwuuuh." He scratches his head at that, caffeine-addled brain making sloppy connections. "Well, okay, I wouldn't hurt you. But if you're relying on me to save you if someone else tried anything… I'm pretty much the same as in-game – a hit or two and I'm down, not gonna lie."

That laugh of hers is more potent than the five or twelve cups of coffee he's had. "I'm the tank, fear not. I'll protect you."

His heart is thudding at an unhealthy speed, so he takes a sip of some guildie's untouched ice water. "Right. All hundred-ten pounds of you, I'm sure."

"One-seventeen, thank you," she sniffs. "Besides, I carry mace."

"What, like two-handed?"

"The pepperspray, stupid."

"It was a joke."

"Yeah, your jokes are awful." Reaper pulls her legs up on the booth cushion, crossing them. She's wearing a schoolgirl skirt, which doesn't help the thirteen-year-old look, though her really god-damn amazing thighs are another story. "That's kinda why I started talking to you online, really. That and I thought you were a girl until I heard you in voice chat one time."

Soul chokes on water. "What?" he croaks.

"'Cause I don't trust guys that much. That's why I never use my mic–"

"No, back up. Why did you think I was a chick."

She shrugs. "I dunno. The emotes? You wink a lot."

"What does that have to do with– forget it. Let's clear up any misunderstandings now: I'm a guy."

"Yeah I know, already, sheesh…" Reaper's head then tiredly lands on the backrest of the booth. "Uhg, I better go. I'm getting delirious and I have a cosplay to finish." She pulls out a cellphone too big for her hands out of her hoodie pocket. "Do you have one of these things? Stag's been trying to get me to talk about stuff that isn't, like, efficient threat generation."

They exchange numbers, and he tries to tamp down whatever seizure his guts are having right now. After she takes his photo for her contact list, he can't help but quietly blurt, "Why the username?"

(Why had he, the one person he'd like to think talks to Reaper the most online, never known this girl?)

She smiles brightly, though her green eyes are a dark, dark contrast that make his toes twitch in his shoes.

Very carefully, she says, "It's a Terry Pratchett novel," and leaves no room for further discussion on the subject.

\\

Driving to Mom's place, his brain blazes with thoughts and bad ideas.

Pushes this away with logic. Once he's done house-sitting, he'll go home, and Reaper will return to being a capslocking friend-slash-entity on the internet, because they live four hours apart.

There's no way for him to say 'let's hang out sometime'– he's not the type to casually drive that far to see a friend just for some overpriced coffee. That would insinuate a certain level of above-average interest; of pursuit.

He doesn't pursue.

Better to stay away from her. Whether or not she's even interested, he knows if he gets any closer, it is very likely he will end up miserable. He's afraid he could really like her, and Soul is not cool with long-distance shit; he need only look at his parents' marriage, his brother's multiple failed relationships to know that distance breeds distrust every time.

He will cull the fruitless ideas of something other than online friendship with her. He hadn't been attracted to ReaperMan yesterday, so it'll be easy to erase tonight and go back to that simple, straightforward camaraderie.

Decides this firmly after he pulls into Mom's driveway in his brother's car, trudging through the yawning garage door into a silent house.

\\

Wakes, needing to piss, just shy of six hours of sleep, in last night's clothes on the parlor's couch that no one is allowed to sit on. Shuffles in his dad's dinosaur slippers to the nearest bathroom. Does not stare too long in any particular direction, because his mom's place is 4,200 square feet of clowns.

He is thankful that he had not acquired the same propensity for collecting terrifying-as-fuck antiques, but it doesn't make the guest room any less impossible to sleep in, which is why he'd passed out in the parlor. Deftly avoids eye-contact with porcelain, red-nosed sadface on the back of the toilet while getting rid of possibly two gallons of coffee. Dinosaurs his way to the kitchen.

There's a pile of mail on the kitchen island with his name on it – he forgets sometimes that his place of residence is still, technically, here, though his room has long since been sacrificed to Mom's ever-expanding closet. Peruses through this, though it's mostly junk, as he debates on taking a dip in the pool to wake up or grabbing some food first and then taking a dip in the pool, but then his phone cackles in his wrinkled pants.

ReaperMan's ringtone: Emperor's New Groove's Yzma, evil cat version, laughing maniacally in a deranged squirrel voice, which had seemed the most fitting at two in the morning for some reason.

And he'd been doing so well, blood pressure nice and apathetic until just now. He pulls the phone out of his pocket. Answers while picturing Reaper's game character instead of the leggy girl-thing from last night.

"Mornin'?" he tries.

What he hears in reply sounds far away, but still loud enough to shatter glass, like she's been taking lessons from BlackStar in the past six hours.

"WHAT DO YOU MEAN MY RESERVATION'S CANCELLED? I BOOKED IT THREE MONTHS IN ADVANCE!"

Conclusion: butt-dial.

"MAKA. ALBARN. Check again!"

Oh. Her real-life name. "Reaperrrrr, pick up! Your ass is talking to you!"

She doesn't hear him. He hangs up, vaguely remembering the anime convention she'd mentioned going on in town. He calls her back, not really expecting her to answer. She doesn't.

Soul, alone with clown magnets and teacups in the kitchen, recalls his stance on pursuit, on his decision to not dwell on fruitless possibility. Shoots a text, despite knowing on a molecular level that it is probably a bad idea, to ShadowStag.

[[ hey. i think reaper buttdialed me and was yelling about hotel rooms? do u kno wat con she's going 2 ]]

Then, realizing it's not yet eight in the morning, adds, [[ if ur not bangin my friend rn ]]

Stag appears to be a real human being with real life goals and responsibilities, but she's also eerily integrated with technology to a level that makes even him somewhat uncomfortable, so he figures she'll respond soon enough. He opens up the gigantic, clowntowned refrigerator to grab some string cheese. Leans on the counter and struggles with the wrapper.

His phone vibrates across the kitchen island. Stag has texted him an address downtown. [[ Not answering her phone? ]]

[[ neg ]]

The ease of which he predicts her next message borders on the painful, if only because it means he's already had the same idea.

[[ You should go find her! I bet she would be glad to see you. =D ]]

Soul is extremely unhappy about ShadowStag's intuition. And if she's getting the smiley faces out this early in the game, he doesn't stand a chance at winning. Heaven help him if she starts with emoji.

He bides his time, finishing off the string cheese before typing what she probably wants to hear (which also happens to be what he'd like to know).

[[ y me? ]]

Immediately after sending, he nearly throws his phone to the ground. This is not highschool. He is supposed to be above doing the text gossip bullshit thing, damn it.

His phone buzzes, Stag's reply sent at a speed well beyond acceptable, casual conversation. He reads it eagerly.

[[ Well, you're the only contact on her phone with a photo. ]]

How the fuck does she know that already? And why does she says this like it means something? He got one of Reaper, too – it doesn't mean anything.

[[ ur speculating now ]] Yeah. Exactly.

[[ Observing! ]] she replies, followed by heart, sunglasses, and winking emoji.

He can't handle this insanity. [[ hallucinating ]], he insists, and then, trying to abort mission, [[ don't i need like a ticket or something to get in anyway? ]]

[[ Hold please. ]]

"Oh god," he says aloud, dread setting his nerves ablaze. Next to him, the ice machine in the fridge groans and crashes with another load, startling him. He realizes he's slouched over his phone, absorbed in this ridiculous conversation.

Stands up. Walks to the french doors leading to the sparkling pool and pretends he doesn't give a damn about specific nerds being less than 15 minutes away from him.

[[ You've just been registered. Go get your pass. ]]

"Are you fucking shitting me," he blurts, startling the birds in the sprawling backyard. He starts to furiously type 'i didn't ask to be registered for shit' but he is interrupted.

[[ Don't worry about paying me back. There's always some Shadow Clan eager to support a good cause. ]]

Soul holds his phone as far away from his person as he can, like one daintily grasping a very poisonous snake by the tail, fervently wishing he knew some exorcism chants or whatever to cleanse bad, badjuju.

Shadow Clan: the creepy instagram fan base Stag had somehow accumulated online. They shower her with gifts at all hours of the day; sing praises to her both in-game and IRL.

[[ do NOT get me involved with ur freaky cultists ]]

She is not phased. [[ I won't force you, though you know Blake would if I let him. ]]

How rude. She's had him in her clutches for less that a day and BlackStar is already one of her minions.

[[ Show up or don't. I'm just saying that Reaper is Black Rock Shooter today. ]] Devil face.

She used the devil face.

Soul sits on the edge of the pool, taking off the dinosaur slippers and dipping his feet in the water while he mourns his expectations of having a shenanigan-free remainder of the weekend. He waits a few minutes to see if ShadowStag has anything else to say, but gets only ear-grating silence. Scowling, he pulls up a search bar on his phone and types in 'black rock shooter'.

An image search returns multiple iterations of tiny pigtailed girl in tinier bikini. Big Fucking Gun. Blue fire.

"Whaaaaaat the fuck is this," he nearly wheezes, trying to parse this carefully-honed, sex-appeal-schoolgirl creature with the main tank in the booth at Denny's last night.

…Thinks more intently about this for an additional five seconds.

His phone vibrates, just when he thinks he's finally alone with his bewildering dilemmas:

[[ From one of my sources. ]] followed by an instagram link.

It's not Stag's usual filters, so some Shadow Cultist had evidently taken this artistically crooked snapshot of black-bikini-clad ReaperMan pointing a dangerous finger at a hotel receptionist, shapely legs parting her trench coat.

Completely unnecessary, Stag adds, [[ She's been doing yoga with me. =D ]]

Soul sighs very loudly at the pool.

[[ ur the absolute creepiest person i kno ]]