Soul Eater

Not Normal

Notes: I actually have a little soundtrack for this one. You can see it below. c:

Disclaimers: Duh. I wish I owned Soul Eater, but sadly I do not.

Dedications: To Stein/Spirit Bromance-lovers! Sorry, but I just can't see them... you know, paired. It does not rock my socks.

Were this a 'normal' story with characters whose madness was 'normal' by 'normal' terms of a 'normal' world, then perhaps it would start out with something like; Stein was odd. He'd always been odd. Insane, really, but who really kept track when so many other people were just as interesting? Spirit, perhaps. As the student's only friend, or at least the only person who could be around the little mad scientist, it was in Spirit's best interest and partnerly obligation to keep the other boy out of trouble. That usually meant obscure surgeries in basements and waking up with an alarm clock for vocal chords.

That's how it would start.

If it were a 'normal' story with 'normal', nutcase, nonsensical characters.

But it's not. After all, how normal can a world be when the sun is so happy to be rising that it laughs all day until it laughs itself to exhaustion and returns to sleep every evening?

Well, it can't.

Supposing you suffered through that foreword, enjoy the theatrical nonsense you are about to experience...

"Gah! Stein what the hell did you do to me this time?" Oh, god, it hurt to scream...

"Mm? Oh, I just replaced your spine with a slinky." The look on his companion's face was priceless. Fear, revulsion, disbelief, then annoyance followed by a lot of really loud whining.

"Liar! That's impossible!"

"Nothing is impossible with science..."

"Wh-... S-Stein, you're for real?"

"Why so shocked, Spirit? I had thought that surely you would be used to such things by now... Perhaps I was under the wrong impression." Puzzling, but Stein had learned to expect such things from his companion. He didn't think of Spirit as a friend. It wasn't that he disliked the boy. In fact, it was quite the opposite; Stein really liked Spirit, not leastly because he was fun to mess with. He needed no practice in the art of Mind Fucking. Oh, no, he had that down to a... dare he say, science?

Stein might have called Spirit 'friend', but he simply did not understand the principals of 'friendship' by normal terms. If there was anything that made his brain hurt, it was trying to understand the complexities of the human mind and spectrum of emotion.

In those regards, Spirit was a very complicated boy.

"You're lying!"

"Let's give it a test run, shall we?" Stein rolled across the floor in his rolly-spinny chair, sitting backwards in it with a cigarette between his teeth. He didn't smoke often. It was a new thing for Stein, really, but he seemed to enjoy it. A lot. And, honestly, Spirit had bets going that Stein would be a chain-smoker by fifteen.

"W-wait, Stein. What're you do- AH!"

As it turned out, the saying was right. People, Spirit especially, like slinkies, were fun to watch tumble down the stairs.

Stein giggled merrily, swinging his legs a bit and riding the chair down the stairs to join Spirit, who was now laying in a tangled mess of legs and arms as adolescent boys often did when pushed down a flight of stairs.

Blood leaked freely from Spirit's head as he whined and cried and complained that he thought he could see some of his brains on the last step. Stein clicked his tongue and said that Spirit didn't have any brains in the first place, thus it was impossible for them to be splattered on the step. Without standing, the chair (and Stein) rolled merrily away from the scene and toward home. Spirit lingered on the ground, just kind of hanging out with a dead moth and crumbling cement. The retreating scientist supposed he could always bother Spirit later, when he wasn't bleeding and crying like a little girl. For now he would let the boy steam over the concept of having a slinky for a spine.

Of course Spirit didn't seem to accept the fact that this was not only impossible, but rather detrimental to Stein's partnership with him. Spirit was the only weapon partner to stick around this long, despite all of the stitches and experimenting and horrible, horrible things the young doctor came up with to torment the redhead.

"W-wait! Stein, you jackass, wait up!" Spirit peeled his drooling, bleeding face from the ground and raced after the zombie-esque meister, "What'd I ever do to you, huh? You just pushed me down a flight of stairs! What on earth did I do to conjure your epic wrath?"

"Who said anything about wrath?" Stein smiled simply, kicking his chair along the side of the road while he hung lazily over its back. "I'm simply a curious young man, I cannot help that you are the subject of my experimentation."

"Ugh..." Spirit seemed to have recovered nicely from his greivous head wound, which hadn't been all that life-threatening in the first place. He was so much like a slinky anyway, not to mention he seemed to be made of some kind of weird rubber or something. Stein knew that was ludicrous, but it amused him to think of Spirit that way, so he did. Spirit was still pouting, though. "Ass."

Stein laughed, and for once it didn't sound half-mad.

The soundtrack, as promised. It's just what played while I was writing, but it seemed oddly fitting, so I thought I would mention these little diddies. I recommend giving them a listen if you haven't heard them!

Volbeat - "Still Counting"

Avenged Sevenfold - "Bat Country"

Sick Puppies "Odd One"