Soul Eater Shorts: Kisa Stein

Swimming Lessons

Prompt: Stein signs Kisa up for the swim team

"Kisa, I have some news for you that I think you'll be interested in."

Kisa looked up from the book she held in her hands, brunette brow raised curiously at her father's statement. Today had been a fairly quiet day for the younger Stein since her father had been out and about for most of it, leaving her in the lab alone with nothing but the book in her hand to occupy her. She would have been angry with him for interrupting just when the plot had begun to get interesting if she weren't curious about what news he was planning to share with her.

"Is it about that endangered fox you dissected last week?" She couldn't help but ask about it, knowing damn well that said fox was something that was probably incredibly rare and her father had sliced it open like it were nothing. "Is PETA trying to sue you or something? I wouldn't be surprised."

"No, this has nothing to do with the fox, Kisa." Stein frowned at this, rolling his eyes at the thought. "Don't even get me started about PETA since they kill more pets yearly than I've ever managed to lay a finger on within the span of my life."

"Ah, I didn't know PETA was such a shitty and hypocritical organization." Kisa looked genuinely surprised by this, her hand moving over to the little table at her bedside as she grabbed a glass of water and took a sip from it.

"Anyway, as I was saying," Stein moved a hand to reach into the pocket of his lab coat to retrieve something, soon pulling out a colorful piece of paper that he looked over once before glancing back up to his daughter. "I wasn't sure whether or not you would be interested, but Spirit said that I should surprise you with it. They're some kind of swimming team or something of the sort—"

Kisa choked on the water in her mouth at the mention of swimming, the water rocketing out of her mouth and spraying Stein in the stomach thanks to the considerable height difference between the two. He couldn't help but stare down at the wet spot on his shirt with a frown, slowly glancing back to Kisa with his expression conveying how unamused he was. "Don't get too overexcited."

"What the hell did you do that for?!" Kisa was hacking and coughing at this point, trying to regain her breath from her near-death experience. "Swim team?! Of all things?!"

"Oh dear, am I not fathering right?"

Kisa looked up at her father in abject horror at the thought of joining the swim team and judging from the sound of it he had already signed her up before coming home. Her heart raced at the thought of being made to swim with a team, much less being made to swim in general. It wouldn't be so bad if she had talked things through with her dad before he had decided to sign her up for some kind of extracurricular activity. She didn't mind having something other than school for her to do, she just needed literally anything else.

Kisa doesn't know how to swim.

Every time that Kisa had been made to try and swim in the past, she would always end up sinking beneath the surface after a solid minute or so of wild flailing to try and keep her body afloat. To be fair, a lot of this took place in a time when Kisa was a mere child who didn't really know any better, though remembering the feeling of suffocation as water filled her lungs and her eyes burning as she tried to see through the endless pools of water that surrounded her on all sides was enough to make her, for the most part, hydrophobic.

"I-I mean, no, it's fine, I just... Is this the only thing that was available? Wasn't there something like, I don't know, softball? Hockey? Literally anything else other than the swim team?"

"This was the only thing that was left on the bulletin board; Spirit saw that I was looking and helped talk me through it saying that extracurricular activities are good for kids your age." Stein's expression remained as stoic as usual, the light catching the frames of his glasses and hiding his eyes from his daughter who was very displeased with the news. "I'm sure it's not as bad as you're making it out to be, you know; at least give it a chance and try it out and if you still don't like it, I won't make you go back again."