Title: Olive Man.
Rating: T.

Summary: When Miss Maka Albarn moves to the western town of New Bly-commonly known as Death City-there is nothing and no one to hold her there. Not even a local weapons manufacturer. But change comes even to the least aware, and nothing is the same in New Bly. Gift!fic for ocha-no-deathscythe. Happy holidays, darling! Three parts. Based off of North and South, by Elizabeth Gaskell.

Disclaimer: I do not own Soul Eater. The anime belongs to Bones, the manga to Oukubo Atsushi.

Forgive any typos, but it's 1am where I am.

Olive Man, Pt. 1
by Shu of the Wind

-for ocha-no-deathscythe-

He almost said to himself that he did not like her, before their conversation ended;
he tried so hard to compensate himself for the mortified feeling, that while he looked
upon her with an admiration he could not repress, she looked upon him with proud
indifference, taking him, he thought, for what, in his irritation, he told himself, was a
great fellow, with not a grace or refinement about him.

—Elizabeth Gaskell, North and South

The train rattled and smoked and made a dreadful stench as Maka stepped down onto the platform, and let out a long sigh. There was only two platforms, one heading into New Bly, and one heading out, and from the look of the schedule up on the wall, only a few trains came through each day. A group of locals (or, at least, she assumed they were locals; they were dusty and wearing rough homespun and watching the south-bound train with curious eyes) was sitting on a nearby bench, and one of them whistled at her skirts. Maka resisted the urge to glare at him, and turned to grab her cases as her father stepped down out of the compartment, tilted back his hat, and said "Well, look at this, Maka; not so bad as you were thinking after all, was it?"

A lot of dust, she thought at him, uncharitably. Dust, and rocks, and manure, and not much else. She wasn't sure there could be much else, so far out beyond what people regarded to be civilized society; the bitterness welled up in her throat like poison, and she swallowed hard rather than let her father see it. They'd already had one tremendous fight over this trip; she didn't have the sort of energy she would need to start and win another one. Not that it was so terribly difficult to win a fight with Spirit Albarn; she just didn't want to end up in a shouting match (or, more accurately, her shouting, him being ridiculously pleading and thus making her look like the bad guy) on a train platform with locals looking on. She tightened her hands on the handle of her case as Blair stepped down, gave her father a kittenish smile, and then lifted a hand to call for a porter. Maka bit her tongue, and turned her back on the pair of them.

It had to be getting close to sunset, because the light had a dim, yellowish glow that somehow seemed unsettling. There was a single conductor, a few other passengers getting off, but for the most part people had remained on the train. No one comes to this city, she thought to herself, and for some reason that thought made her sad. No one wants to.

"Papa." She turned. Spirit blinked at her, and then that dopey smile that made her guilty and furious and happy all at once appeared and he beamed at her.

"Maka?"

"Where are we supposed to be going?" she asked, forcing herself to speak slowly, so she would not lose her temper. If Spirit noticed that she was being pedantic and rude, he said nothing about it; typical of her father. She was fairly certain he had and was just determinedly ignoring her.

"We're waiting for an acquaintance of mine to come and collect us. We've been in correspondence for the better part of the past six months, and he assures me that he will be quite on time." He checked his pocket watch. "We should head to the front of the station; he'll be here soon."

"You never mentioned this man to me, Papa," said Maka, as Blair alternately flirted with and ordered the nearest porter to load trunks onto a trolley. "Who is he?"

"He's a local manufacturer. Dr. Stein knows him, Maka, so don't worry about him; he's quite trustworthy."

"What does he manufacture?" Maka asked, but her father wasn't listening. He was staring at the train timetables, humming something under his breath that she thought she had heard her mother sing once. Maka huffed a bit, and then went to join Blair. Their new maid was alright, she supposed—kind, and certainly helpful when she cared to be, but put a male of any sort in front of her, and she completely lost her head.

It turned out that Papa's acquaintance—a gentleman by the name of Mr. Evans, so far as she could make out—hadn't been able to get away from the factory in time to collect them. Instead he had sent a colleague of his, an army man called Corporal Kidman, to come and find them. He was tallish, with neatly trimmed black hair, and, to her surprise, no mustachios. She had thought that every man out west as far as they had come (further beyond the Mississippi than she cared to recall) would have worn mustachios, but apparently she had been mistaken. Just as well; she thought, privately, that he would not have looked well in them. To her surprise, Blair kept her mouth shut and her eyes on her lap the whole way from the station to the house her father had engaged, so it was only Papa and Corporal Kidman chatting, surprisingly quietly, considering her father's capacity for volume control.

She wasn't entirely sure what they were doing here, in New Bly, on the west side of the Mississippi, so far away from all of her father's contacts and job opportunities and everything else (like her mother, her traitor brain thought, and she shoved that thought away as hard as she could—she would have sent it through the stratosphere if that wasn't physically impossible). They had gone from prosperous New Amsterdam, where the world was never silent, to a backwater mining town filled with factories and armed outposts and—and silence. She couldn't remember ever visiting a place so quiet, not even when she'd been very small and she and her mother and father had lived in a little town in Westchester.

Then, of course, Papa had landed the job with the company, and the world had never been quiet again.

She sank deeper into her seat, and kept her eyes on the world passing by.

The house her father's associate had found for them was right in the middle of town. She thought the place across the street might be a whorehouse, though she really couldn't be sure, not without further examination. She cursed Mr. Evans for the first time when she realized that, because her father's eyes lit up at the sight, and she wanted to kill him all over again. Blair went through the house with her, studying the torn curtains, the ugly wallpaper, and then glanced at Maka as if waiting for some instruction. Maka didn't give her any; she was ready to wash her hands of this house and this town and her father and just go back to New Amsterdam where she belonged, but she had promised that she would try to make it through a year. Besides, once she turned twenty-one, she would come into her grandfather's trust, and if she wanted to, she could live entirely separate from her father. She'd been planning it since she'd first walked in on him with one of his lady-friends at fourteen. Her mother had left three days before. Maka had never entered a room without knocking since.

Corporal Kidman and his man helped her father carry the trunks into the house. Maka directed from the threshold, sending hers up to the attic room, sending her father's to the master bedroom. Blair had only brought a few things, a carpetbag at most—"I'm a traveler," she'd said when they'd hired her, and winked at Maka, not her father, which had been Maka's decision-maker—and she settled in the closet-sized servant's room with more ease than Maka suspected. According to Blair, she liked enclosed spaces. So far as Maka was concerned, Blair was more than welcome to them.

It was once all the things had been carried in and her father had gone upstairs pleading a headache that Corporal Kidman caught her eye. The corners of his mouth lifted. "Welcome to New Bly, Miss Albarn. Pleased to make your acquaintance."

His voice was eastern, she realized. It was something she hadn't noticed in the carriage. She was too used to hearing eastern accents to give them much thought anymore, but out here, he was a singularity. She bobbed her head. "I'm sorry for not speaking much in the carriage, Corporal. I'm afraid the journey here was quite exhausting."

"That's perfectly fine. You'll find that people out here will understand if you don't speak when you don't want to." It was a funny thing to say. Maka blinked at him, and cocked her head. Corporal Kidman didn't elaborate; he took her left hand, and bowed over it, not kissing it as some of the swains in New Amsterdam might have. She liked him more for it. "I'm afraid that I have to excuse myself; my commander would be…unhappy with me if I stayed away from camp for much longer. I trust we will all meet again, Miss Albarn."

"You're welcome anytime, Corporal," she said, and ducked into a little curtsy. He snapped his feet together, military-style, and then tipped his hat to her and walked out the front door. She caught Blair watching him go, and Maka hurriedly shut the door behind him. She rolled up her sleeves.

"Well," she said. "let's get some of these rooms aired out while Papa's upstairs, shall we?"

Maka sat up straight, ignoring the crackle in her spine, and wiped her forehead with the back of her hand, dropping the sponge back into the bucket. The attic room was finally as clean as she could get it, she thought, though it would have done well with floor polish and better wallpaper. She'd finally managed to find some papers at the store down the street that weren't hideous, and over the past three weeks, she and Blair had repapered almost the entirety of the house. Not only that, but they'd scrubbed the floors, unpacked the trunks, restocked the kitchen, washed all the blankets and sheets, had a handyman come in to repair the holes in the stairs, and even managed to get a good start on cleaning out the basement. The last owners of the house, whoever they had been, had left more furniture in their cellar than the Queen of Sheba, and most of it was going to have to be put out for scrap. There were mice nesting in the couch cushions.

She stood, undoing the knot in her skirts, and then brushed the wrinkles out as best she could. Blair had complained through the whole process, all three weeks of it, but she had done her work willingly and, Maka had to admit, extraordinarily well; the complaints were more to keep herself talking than anything. And now the house was much improved, or, at least, much cleaner than it had been before. They'd even managed to take the boards off of all the windows and hide the holes in the windowframes with a fresh coat of paint. The whole place felt much…fresher, now. Even if her blue sprigged muslin skirt was never going to be the same.

She'd sent Blair out shopping ages ago, and Papa was out doing who knew what; she had the house to herself. Maka pushed open the porthole window and dropped down into one of the few salvageable chairs from the basement. The factory was letting out its workers for the day, six o'clock, as always, and the wave of people wandering through the streets almost made it feel like home. It made it seem like an actual place, rather than just an empty street in the shadow of a mountain.

Three weeks since they'd come here, and she still knew nothing about New Bly. Other than the general store, the main street, and the train station, she didn't even know where things were. Maka dried her hands on her apron, and went to collect her water bucket. She'd done as best she could with this attic room, and to be honest, she rather liked the look of these walls without papering. It made them seem realer, somehow; fresh and raw. She could almost imagine that this could be her room, this way.

Maka stared at the room for a moment—at the small boudoir, at the single bed, the bookshelf in the corner—and then started down the stairs. She had no intention of staying here. One more year, and she'd be free of this. It was only a matter of waiting it out, now.

The dirty water went in the dying garden in the backyard. Maka changed clothes, crammed an enormous hat onto her head—it might have been nearly twilight, but until the sun set her nose was in danger of peeling like a rotting fruit—and left a note for Blair or Papa, whoever came home first, before seizing the nearest book that came to hand and leaving through the front door.

If people didn't recognize her, they didn't say anything. She just felt their eyes on her as she followed the train of factory workers back to their source, holding her book in one hand and keeping her hat from flying off with the other. To the west, she knew, was the army encampment—Blair had told her that much—and to the east had to be the factories. There was more than one, she guessed, and people came in from all over the county to work for at least one of them. The soil was too dry here for most of the year to do much else with it. Then there were the miners, who lived in their own dormitories on the outskirts of town. Most of them, she thought, uneasily, came to the inn at the end of the day. Sometimes she couldn't sleep for their shouting, and other nights, guns had gone off. When she had finally dared to look out her window, there had been a dead man in the street. Maka skirted the edge of an old graveyard, turned left, and kept her eyes away from the factory workers as she retraced their steps. She was braver than this, she told herself firmly. She would do this.

She turned a corner, and then two, and then the factory loomed, and she had to stop and stare. It was like a castle, she thought, except it was made of drab gray stone and had drab gray letters on the front wall. Hale's Weapons Manufacturing. Well, that answered her question about Mr. Evans made, at least. He made guns. There was a bench near the gates, and Maka dropped down onto it, ignoring the crinkles it would put in her skirt. It stank of gunpowder and metal, here, of earth and blood, and as she sat and pretended to read, she watched the last few workers chatter their way out of the factory, and the foreman—a short, slender man with a top hat—closed the gate behind them.

Someone took her book.

"Hey!" Maka shot to her feet, lunging forward, but the woman—tall, leggy, blonde and smirking—jerked her book up out of Maka's reach. She was dressed in factory green, her split skirt billowing wide around her legs. In spite of herself, Maka felt the prick of jealousy. If she ever came home with a split skirt, Papa would have conniptions. "Give me back my book!"

"What'cha reading, new girl?" The taller girl—her nametag read Thompson—opened Maka's copy of The Rights of Man, paging through it over Maka's head. There was another girl, shorter, curvier, with hair cropped scandalously close to her throat and big doe eyes. She smiled, and patted Maka on the head.

"It's okay! Liz only wants to look at it."

"Give that back! It's mine."

"I'll give it back if you pay for it," said Liz, and pulled Maka's hat down over her eyes. Maka yelped, wrenched the wide-brimmed hat off her head, and threw it to the bench. The doe-eyed girl blinked at Liz in surprise.

"But Liz, I thought you said you were just gonna look at it."

"And when she pays us," said Liz, through her teeth, "she can get it back. She's rich enough to wear that hat, she can pay to get her silly book back."

"Give it back," Maka said again, and instead of lunging for the book, she lunged for Liz. Her clenched fist landed hard in Liz Thompson's stomach, enough that she felt the sudden burst of air driven up out of the girl's gut, and then the book had gone flying, and Liz was pulling her hair. Maka snarled—she'd promised her father she wasn't going to get into any more fights—but before she could do anything, someone had seized her by the back of her dress, and thrown her back onto the bench.

"Who dares fight in the presence of God?"

"Oh no," said the doe-eyed girl, and covered her face with her hands, peeking out between her fingers. "It's Black Star."

"It's what?" said Maka, wheezing. Across the street, Liz was staring at a man standing in the middle of the street, hands on his hips, laughing. Her expression was somewhere between frustrated and disgusted. Maka blinked, and craned her neck to see more, but then another face—pale, with vivid purple eyes—cut off her vision. "Are you all right?" the girl said, and dabbed at Maka's cheek. "You bit your lip."

Maka put her fingers to her mouth, and they came away bloody. She swore under her breath. "Papa's gonna kill me."

"—fight with a girl like that, the masters'll be all over you, and you'll lose your job. Do you wanna give up the fight with the mighty God before it even gets started?"

"Shut up, Black Star," said Liz Thompson, and she glared at Maka. Maka glared back. "It was just a stupid book, that's all."

Maka tried to stand up, but the girl with the purple eyes put her hands on Maka's shoulders, and pushed her back down to the bench again. "Wait for Black Star to handle it."

"But my—"

The girl with the purple eyes smiled. "My name is Tsubaki, by the way."

Maka blinked up at her. Then, slowly, she nodded. "Maka Albarn," she said, and then glanced over Tsubaki's shoulder again to Liz Thompson and whoever it was she was talking to. He had funny hair. "Is that…?"

"Black Star," said Tsubaki, and her voice was exasperated and affectionate and very, very tired, all at once. "He'll deal with it. Don't worry."

Black Star was still lecturing, and he seemed to be doing it at the very top of his lungs. "—would think that the chance to work with the great me—"

"Oh, for God's sake," said Liz Thompson, and she pushed herself to her feet, snagging the book in the process. "This stupid book isn't worth this. Here."

She offered it to Maka. Maka hesitated—Liz wasn't meeting her eyes—and then she took her book back, and clutched it to her chest.

"Not gonna say thank you?"

"Not when you took it in the first place."

"Aw, Liz didn't mean any harm," the doe-eyed girl said again, and tucked her arm around Liz's waist. "Didja, sis?"

"We're going home, Patti."

"But everybody's here!"

"Everybody we know who's stupid is here. We're going home."

And with that, Liz Thompson and Patti somebody stalked off down the street. Maka stared.

"…that was stupid."

"That was the Thompson sisters," said Tsubaki, and smiled, a bit tiredly. "They're really not so bad. Old habits die hard for Liz, anyway. Patti's sweet."

And dumb, Maka thought to herself, but she kept her mouth shut, and put her hat back on. Blood tasted coppery against her teeth. She glanced up at the taller girl—Tsubaki, she'd said her name was—and then offered her a little curtsy. "I'm sorry for the trouble. I don't…" she colored pink. "I haven't been in many fights. Lately. I swear."

Tsubaki laughed. "I don't mind. There are always fights with the sharpener-girls—the women who sharpen the bayonets and blades. I don't know why, considering all of the pointy objects in their immediate vicinity, but at the same time, they never seem to stop squabbling." Tsubaki squinted at her, concerned. "Would you like an escort home, Miss Albarn? Black Star and I—"

"Oh, no, that's fine!" Maka waved her hands. "No, I can make my way home on my own."

"Ah. All right." Tsubaki smiled again. "In that case, it was a pleasure to meet you, Miss Albarn."

"But she hasn't met the Great Me yet," said Black Star, who, now that the Thompson sisters were out of sight, had abruptly checked in to their conversation. He held out a hand, palm down, as though expecting her to kiss it. "I am the glorious Black Star, god of the assembly line and owner of all you see!"

"We work at Hale's," said Tsubaki, as Maka carefully took Black Star's hand, turned it, and shook it twice. "We live that way," she added, and gestured vaguely towards the mountain and the miner's dormitories. "So if there's nothing else, Miss…?"

"Oh." Maka flushed. "No. I don't—um." Tsubaki blinked at her, quizzically. "I'm sorry to ask this; I don't know anyone here, and if you…wouldn't mind, I would very much like to…to come and visit you. Would that be all right?"

Tsubaki cocked her head. A small smile touched her lips, sad, reminiscent. "You may come visit us if you like, Miss Albarn," she said, "but I hear you're to dine with the master in a few evenings, and if you remember us after that…well. It'll be a surprise."

"Hah. Like she could forget us. Or me," Black Star said, and swiped dust off his nose. Tsubaki tucked her arm firmly into his, and gave Maka a little half-curtsy.

"It was nice to meet you, Miss Albarn," she said, and steered Black Star firmly away. Maka stood and watched them go, wondering if the strange, clenching feeling in her stomach was indigestion, frustration, sadness, or a mixture of all three.

Her walk home was very long indeed.

A/N:

Soul will be here next chapter. Pt. 1, complete!