Omnipotent
(SOUL EATER.)
Author Note: I do not own. (I choose to use male pronouns for Crona. While Crona's gender doesn't particularly matter much in the context of this story, but I needed some sort of pronoun for the character.)
…
…
She is looking at the edges of Death City, shoulders straight and feet slightly apart.
Soul is positive he could fill this moment of silence with hundreds of words, perhaps a dozen questions and maybe, maybe… a complete piano movement.
He stays quiet, despite the mash-up of words that come so easily to the front of his mind. She is waiting, and while she has not explicitly said this aloud he still understands it. He has come to know everything about her, just as she implicitly understands him.
It is this mutual knowledge that brings him to stand exactly twenty inches from her back. He exhales and suppresses the urge to over-think this moment. He is their tactician and she is reckless in the middle of battle. This is not a battle though, he is aware that she is thinking everything through more carefully than he possibly could have. Faster too, if he were to bet on it.
It is not the first time he has marveled at her while her back is turned to him.
"Soul I need your help."
His eyes go a fraction wider as her hand crosses her body and her fingertips appear over her shoulder.
"I need to find…"
He is immediate movement, sliding his palm over the skin and bone of her hand.
Blood red eyes slide closed and the tendons in his neck shift as his head bows. She is right there in the middle of their resonance, her voice a low register that he could pinpoint on his piano blind. He is as familiar with resonance as he is with the simple act of breathing. Yet every time it is different, newer and older and complex.
She is pulling open her soul perception and he understands what she means to do with it. She wants to search the entire earth, blow open her awareness to encompass every soul currently living. She has never tried to do this before. He feels her inhale and exhale, her pulse slows down and her head bows. Her eyes flutter shut.
He has no doubt in her.
She is pushing and tugging and letting go and reaching for everything all at once inside their link. He is right there, standing absolutely still, arms wrapped around her shoulder and high across her waist in the place they share between souls. She is stock still as well. Fixated on the task at hand because they cannot fail, not when there is still so much left at hand.
They forget to brace for it. She was too occupied with reaching and pushing outward, covering every square foot, then blowing the edge of her awareness further to reach upwards, above the atmosphere. She had to be sure she did not miss any place.
He was focusing on giving her perfect resonance, feeding energy into the frame of the scythe technician in front of him as she expended it in rapid amounts.
The feedback came. The exact location and state of every soul on earth hit the pair of them with a force unimaginable. Images, emotions and a complete sense of overwhelming inability to hold the connection to all of them at once. Soul pressed back against it, throwing up a barrier that held them together and defined them in the face of a billion souls pressing against theirs.
She wasn't aware of herself enough to thank him, already halfway gone her hand relaxed under his. In their resonance he was aware of her knees starting to give way. His arm, formerly relaxed at his side, wraps around her middle. Soul steps forward and feels her spine too clearly against his ribs. His arm is around her stomach, digging up into the bottom of her ribs as her body stops supporting itself.
It is another moment that could be filled with hundreds of words.
Soul is flickering between two realities. Inside their resonance link his technician stands sure footed as he keeps his eyes pressed tightly closed and gives her all the energy he can while holding the crushing weight of so many souls back. Whenever his consciousness jumps into the more solid reality outside their resonance he adjusts his hold on her body by a fraction. She is sliding out of his grip by millimeters.
His face never breaks from carefully composed calm.
Maka shudders in his grasp and jolts forward once as if electrocuted. Feet shuffle on the stone of the balcony as Soul keeps the pair of them from spilling forward. He is aware of her grimacing from somewhere in their resonance.
"I cannot find him."
Her voice is in stereo, murmured by her slowly fading body and thrown out across their link deep inside his soul.
"Where is… need to find…"
He braces himself and pulls the barrier between themselves and the souls of the entire earth flush against his skin and hers.
She raises soul perception, pushing it out from the surface of the earth violently. It shockwaves upward. There is no additional soul added for a few micro-seconds and Maka severs awareness of the souls she has already sifted through to focus on the expanding edge of soul perception.
He is holding his breath, gently expanding the barrier he had hastily thrown around them. Within the confines of their resonance link the pressure of a billion life forces slamming into theirs has faded to nothing. Maka is still calling for energy, her body little more than a conductor for the force needed to keep expanding soul perception.
Soul was grimacing, familiar with the dark shadowy feeling that was filling the feedback from soul perception. It wasn't defined enough to identify. His grip on his technician's middle tightens and he allows himself to think that maybe they should stop this.
"No."
She is in stereo again, stubborn as she demands more distance from soul perception. It only needs to go a bit further before she can…
Abruptly it is dark inside their resonance.
The lack of light is so all-consuming that it feels nearly liquid. Soul will not let go of his technician's body, though it feels quite like she is no longer in his grasp. There is fear, murky and choking and heavy, leeching around them and soaking into him.
He cannot hear her, he wonders for a moment if she is even making any sound at all.
He is blinded, this time by light. Directly on the heels of the light is a screaming that sounds both female and distortedly male. He is holding onto her, trapped inside their resonance, as she pulls soul perception back to her. The effect is instant, she is tearing down their resonance and throwing up barriers and shields to keep out the dark. They are connected by a fraying thread of a link and he feels her sever that with a quick slashing tug.
The entire process, from darkness to where he is now … wide-eyed and holding Maka in a loose grip as she pitches forward on the stone balcony… lasts three seconds.
His technician pushes out of his arms and stumbles forward, dry heaving a few times and holding her stomach. Soul is shaken and pale but upright. More than can be said for Maka, who is wiping her mouth on the back of a glove and taking deep, even pulls of air.
She is looking at the moon.
Soul watches as his technician composes herself. He is marveling at her again, because he didn't get the time to while they were in resonance. He catches the shudder of her frame and begins moving for her.
He gets her inside his grasp again, she is murmuring the word no and a few other syllables he cannot make sense of. He does not need to see her eyes to know that she is afraid and confused, the moment he identifies those emotions from her he is mirroring them.
"He is on the moon."
Soul's mind fixates on the liquid thick darkness that had swallowed them so completely just moments earlier. He knows that darkness because it is in his blood. It is the Kishin, bringer of madness.
Maka is squirming in his grip, trying to glare at the brilliant glow of the moon while simultaneously hiding from it. Soul allows himself to be pulled under by three emotions… fear, defiance and awe. He is tempted to call the Kishin down, because his technician's soul perception has just reached the moon itself. He knows of no technician more powerful than his and no loyalty deeper than the resonance they share. He is furious, for a heated second of time.
"Soul."
At the sound of his name he goes still, his soul centers into perfect calm.
He looks down at his technician's face, she is still pale from exertion.
"…He…"
Soul has forgotten the last time he saw her face carry so many emotions, one after another.
"… He is watching."
Some part of him registers her blowing the edges of her soul outward to cover him, a shield for the madness she expects to rain down on them at any second.
"…He is watching everything."
Soul only just catches her whisper the words.
