#on obi & shirayuki as meister and weapon 🤣

[sabraeal]

Remedial Lessons, Chapter 2

[Read on AO3]

Written for @kaedix's birthday!! Last year Kimber requested what become the first chapter of this fic, back when there were only a handful of people in the fandom who had even watched Soul Eater. But last summer the discord ended up watching Soul Eater as its summer shonen, so I was all too happy to continue it when she asked for a continuation this year!

This is hardly the first sepulcher that Shirayuki has been lead into since she started her time at Shibusen, but she’ll grant the professor this: it is the nicest.

“So what?” Obi huffs, parka hunched up around his ears as he takes in the bank of computers stretched along the walls. His breath mists in the air as he speaks, like swallowing souls in reverse. “You get like, four? Five G in here? Or did you just like…roll some fiber out here? You know a guy? There’s some people who could really use this kind of set up—”

“Etiquette demands that a host graciously welcome his guests into his residence, whether that be a professional office or personal home,” Lata informs then with all the enthusiasm of a wet blanket. “However, since it seems that you are determined to wear it out as fast as humanly as possible, I think we’ll skip over all that.”

Obi presses a hand to his chest; his parka lets out a soft pffft under the pressure. “I’m just showing interest, sir. Showering you with compliments. Really—”

“Asking for proprietary information.” The professor glances over his shoulder, glowering at where she lingers in the doorway. “Come here already. We don’t have all day.”

‘Here’ happens to be a marble slab; one large and smooth enough to accommodate Mitsuhide from head to ankle, the way most beds do. There’s quite a few of them in the room, most serving as flat surfaces for Lata’s equipment, but this one has clearly been left free, sterile as an exam table, though with the way it fits into that carved bier beneath it, Shirayuki suspects—

“Is that a coffin?” Obi coughs, circling it like a cat around a bath. “Just what are you gonna do with her on that, doc? Hoist it up to the ceiling? Let lightning hit her? Hate to break it to you, but she’s already alive.”

“Obi.” If there’s one thing Shirayuki has learned about Shibusen faculty, it’s that you don’t go around giving them ideas.

“What? I just want to get the scope of the work or whatever.” His hands slide into his pockets, slowing his stride to a casual creep. “If we’re going to have to run, I’d like to start now rather than after he’s got your all hooked up to his Doom Canon.”

“Oh, really. I’m not about to perform surgery on her. Or mad science,” The professor grouses, rummaging around in a drawer. “This place is hardly sterile. But you can’t possibly think I’m so naive as to take your word about her bloodline, do you?”

Shirayuki wrinkles her brow. “Why would I lie about that?”

“Why does anyone lie, girl? To get what you want.” Lata straightens, the honed edge of his body angling toward the stone. “Now take off your coat. This won’t take long.”

She glances down at the cold marble and suppresses a shiver. “But you haven’t taken your coat off.”

“Of course not. It’s freezing in here.” Clouds steam from his sigh as he turns to her, strung tight with impatience. “And I hardly need to take blood samples from myself.”

The tag of her zipper digs bloodless gouges across the fleshier bits of her knuckles. Two year ago this would have all come as a shock, but after a few semesters at Shibusen, she’s only thankful it isn’t a weirder bodily fluid. “Blood? Couldn’t you just—?”

Obi steps right between them, shoulders not squared to shield but hunched, potential energy all coined in his spine like a spring. “Uh uh, no way, doc. We said we’d let you poke around, not actually put a needle through her. Just because she’s a weapon doesn’t mean you get to treat her like an ob—”

“I wasn’t asking you,” Lata informs him, bored. “Now are you going to take off your coat, Miss…?”

“Shirayuki.” Obi angles a look over his shoulder, half are you kidding and half don’t feed the animals. As if she were some child sticking her hand through bars at the zoo, daring a tiger to chomp them off at the wrist.

To be fair, it’s earned. But this particular tiger is their best best for surmounting this resonating problem, and Shirayuki’s willing to risk far more than a nibble to keep from collecting another ninety-nine souls. Twice is more than enough. “And yes, I will.”

The professor doesn’t quite smile, but there’s a shift in his eyes as she bares the skin at her elbow; a deepening of the crinkles at their corners, a widening of his pupils. There’s a part of him that likes this, that looks at her twining path of veins and sees something beyond flesh. That devours this stretch of skin the same way she might a grimoire’s pages, reading fell knowledge in every drop of her blood.

“Good.” She’s barely set herself on top of the sarcophagus, wincing at the chill that seeps through her jeans, when Lata strides right around Obi and grips her wrist. Klaxons ring between her ears, telling her to dig in her heels and twist, but there’s only air beneath them now, an awkward angle between her and the nearest flat surface, and—

Just a pinch, a squeeze, and he’s stepped away, glass slide gripped between his fingers.

“Wha….huh?” she murmurs, watching as blood wells up from the prick. It lasts hardly more than a blink— Obi hands her a tissue, and by the time she’s wiped the bead away, it’s like her skin was never broken at all. A perk of the lineage, Lord Death had always told her. “You just needed a drop?”

“As much as I would love to sequence the entirety of your genome, I would prefer not to wait for the results— or waste the resources.” He hums, much more chipper now that he’s placed that slide into one of his machines. “Not when a specimen sample is much quicker and negligibly less accurate.”

The reasoning is solid, but still— “Then why did you have me take off my coat?”

"To see if at least one of you could obey an order.” The professor jerks his chin toward Obi. “Or if you were as much of a lost cause as that one.”

“Hey! I can sit and roll over as good as anyone,” Obi sniffs, dropping his coat over her shoulders. “If I wanna.”

They’ve hardly known each other a quarter of an hour, but already Lata is sending her long-suffering looks. “That’s the entire—”

His machine beeps, once, twice, like it’s impatient, eager to have eyes on the data flying across its screen. Attention Lata’s quick to give, scrolling through faster than even she could possibly parse, turning familiar words into flipped-bit gibberish. The professor, however, hums.

“Well, you are from Carnwennan’s lineage, it seems.” Shirayuki can’t help but notice that he doesn’t say daughter. Like somehow a hidden bloodline was probable, but direct progeny a stretch. “You’ll forgive me for doubting you. I’ve met Excalibur” —he grimaces— “and there’s not much resemblance. In either of your forms.”

Obi cocks a hip against the sarcophagus, making himself one long, lean line. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

Lata fixes him with the same sort of look a stern kindergarten teacher might give their most difficult charge. “Carnwennan was a dagger. And from what I’ve seen of Miss Shirayuki’s shape, she is most certainly not.”

One of these thing, his look says, is not like the other. “I suppose your father had his own lineage? Or should I assume he was a meister rather than a weapon?”

Her mouth opens, then shuts. Opens again, only to say, “I don’t know.”

There’s the vaguest twitch of that stern brow, the softest hum of intrigue. “Interesting. It was always said that Carnwennan was particular with her meisters, one must assume she would be even more so with a romantic partner. So who is he?”

“A deadbeat.” Obi says it like punctuation, the period at the end of a sentence gone on too long. He shifts too, crossing his arms and angling his shoulders, breaking line of sight between her and the professor. It’s effort she appreciates, even if it’s unnecessary.

“My mother is the legendary weapon,” she asks, each word weighed and measured, the perfect split between firm and fair. “Is my father really pertinent to your research?”

“Look around, Miss Shirayuki. Do you see a water cooler anywhere? A break room, perhaps? Coworkers?” The look he levels at her is downright withering. “Do I really look like the sort of man who would make small talk?”

Obi's smirk glints the way her blade does before it cuts. “He’s got us there, kid.”

There’s an inertia to overcome when it comes to her father; it’d been so much easier to not talk about it, to let everyone believe she thought he was dead. But now that he’s dredged himself up out of her memories and into reality, becoming more than just a character from the childhood she can’t remember, it’s…hard. Separating what she knows from what she feels is a job Shirayuki’s pretty sure she’s under qualified to handle.

“I don’t know much about him,” she admits, because that’s true. Maybe he raised her for four years, but she’s lived another thirteen without him, and that doesn’t make him any better than a stranger in her book. “He left me with my grandparents when I was little. I barely even remember his face.”

Also not a lie, even if it earns her some side-eye from Obi’s direction. She’d seen him for a day nearly a year ago; not enough to commit more than broad strokes to her memory. It’d be a miracle if she could even pick him out on the street.

Not that she’d tell the professor that. She’s already in danger of clucking tongues and piteous looks; something about parental abandonment bloodies even the hardest of hearts. There’s quite a bit Shirayuki’s ready to weather for this training, but if she has to endure yet another ethically dubious mentor trying to empathize with her, well—

“Hm.” Lata’s fingers clack across the keys, not even sparing her a cursory glance. “Interesting.”

“So.” Obi wraps his mouth around the sound, stretching it as long as the look he sends her. “That’s it, right, doc? You’re gonna help us?”

“I didn’t say that.” Lata steps back from his screen, one rigid line from the heels of boots to the whorl of his cowlick. “I study legendary weapons. As intriguing as it might be to study one of their progeny— however direct— Miss Shirayuki is not her mother. There’s no guarantee that her biometric data will provide any meaningful contribution toward my—”

“So you have other half-mythical weapons lining up to be a part of your experiment?” Obi perches on the sarcophagus like a particularly mischievous gargoyle. “Is Caliburn’s great-grandson going to walk through here? Excalibur’s ex-roommate? Maybe you’ll be lucky enough to find a guy who knows a guy who saw Kusanagi-no-tsurugi buying cabbages once.”

Lata’s mouth pulls thin. “Caliburn is—”

“—the same sword as Excalibur,” Shirayuki finishes, hurriedly.

“What?” Obi squawks, nearly toppling from his perch. “But wasn’t that the one in the stone, and then that lady in the lake or whatever gave that guy another one…?”

“That was a translation error,” she murmurs, flushing as Lata lifts his brows. “From when the troubadours in France began singing Arthur’s lays. Exacalibur was the sword in the stone. He just, er…broke. And the Nimue” — ah, she’s starting to sound like her uncle— “never mind. It’s a common mistake. He was still sleeping when it happened.”

“A better time.” Lata glares as if they were the ones who woke him.

“Huh.” Obi shakes a hand, like that might clear the air. “The point is, does how many legendary weapons is doc gonna meeting hanging around in some dusty ass old ruins? You’ve gotta need us as much as we need you. Maybe even more.”

If the professor was glaring before, he’s glowering now.

“You make a compelling point,” he admits, begrudging them every word. “Fine. I supposed it would be beneficial for my work if I helped you both with your resonance issue. But you’ll have to help me with my research,” he warns, as if that soured rather than sweetened the deal. “And not just your own contributions to my data— I need legendary weapons if I’m going to get anywhere, not just their…relations.”

“Well,” Shirayuki hums, struggling to keep her voice so even, so innocent. “I could always ask my uncle, if you really needed—”

“We can start with your training first,” Lata grits through his grimace. “I’m hardly that desperate.”

“Sounds like you’ve got yourself a deal, doc.” Obi sprawls himself across the top of the coffin, tapping at the marble slab. “Now which one of these are ours? You got a couple lined with Egyptian cotton or something? Maybe some memory foam? I don’t need a lot but I’ve got to be able to snooze in full Nosferatu.”

His eyes close, arms cutting up to cross over his chest— full Nosferatu, indeed— but Lata only grunts, “None of them.”

One eye peels open, skeptical. “What, the Cryptkeeper’s got guest rooms down here? A Best Western? It takes three hours to get here one way, there’s no way we can hike out and back every day.”

“Of course you can’t,” Lata scoffs. “I’m coming back with you.”

*

“Just like that, huh?” Obi’s no longer playing vampire, but he’s still sitting on the sarcophagus,  shoulders stacked beside hers. “You’re not even going to ask us what the problem is first? What if it’s just a five-minute fix, and—?”

“If it were really some ‘five-minute fix’ then that idiot Shidan would have been able to handle it,” Lata grouses, already sifting through books to take with him. “And there’s certainly no point in asking your opinions on the problem. If you neither of you have managed to devise a solution by now, then I doubt that you have any meaningful insight to provide me.”

Shirayuki would have protested— if the professor didn’t have a point. Locating a reclusive academic was hardly the sort of option a reasonable person took as their first step. But after two years of reaching for resonance and having it slip through their fingers, Shirayuki was willing to try anything. Short of braving one of her uncle’s lectures, of course.  “That’s not very nice.”

Obi tucks his chin, keeping his grimace between the two of them. “He’s not wrong.”

“Still,” she sighs, “he doesn’t need to say it.”

“Hey, what did he mean anyway?” She cocks her head, questioning, and Obi clarifies, “About how you don’t look like your family.”

“My uncle…” It’s her turn to grimace now. “Well, my mother doesn’t take after him, that’s all.”

“That gives me at least one answer about your father,” Lata grunts, heaving a trunk up onto his back.

"Really?" Obi drawls, rubbing at his shoulder. "I feel like I didn't get anything from that at all."

"I'm sure," the professors hums dryly, "that you're used to it. Now, are you two ready to go? We have quite a ways back, and thought I am experienced at traveling in the snow, I'd prefer not to do it in the dark.”

Obi heaves sigh, shoving his hands in his pockets. "Get a load of this guy, kid. Spends all this time packing up everything that isn't nailed down, then ask us to hurry up and--"

"Today, if you would." The words echo down the hallway, ghostly in the empty room.

"Yeah, yeah. We're coming." He rolls his shoulders, shifting his weight like a fighter right before a match. "Welp, you heard him, kid. One-way trip to Lilias, leaving now. You ready?"

Shirayuki doesn't spare a glance for the sepulcher behind her-- but she does pause for a shiver. Really, she'd thought she'd left these sorts of trips behind at Shibusen. "More than."

"Love to hear it." He holds out a hand as she starts up the rise. "Let's get out of here. Ladies first."

There's no hesitation as she takes it, hand fitting in to his like her haft snugs into his palm. "Let's."

#obiyuki #akagami no shirayukihime #snow white with the red hair #my fic #soul eater au #ans #let me tell you coming back to this after doing a full rewatch #and then also do my first full read of the manga #extremely different experience from when I was writing the first chapter after rewatching 12 eps #also now everyone knew what i was talking about when i was doing my outline #and had OPINIONS #on obi & shirayuki as meister and weapon 🤣 #i keep being like 'one day we will get to the parts of this fic where the romance come in' #but this time lata fully took over #no regrets