"You'll stop waiting after a year, right? Like you promised?"
Tsubaki had her arms wrapped around herself, probably in an attempt to keep from strangling Maka to death or simply straight-up kidnapping her, but she nodded faithfully. A dry summer wind kicked up, carrying the pungent scent of corroded metal and pollution that was constant in this part of town. "Yeah. I promise. I still think-"
"I know, I know," Maka interrupted, letting Tsubaki hug her again anyway. It was grounding, to stand in her best friend's strong warm arms, and she had a panicky sort of feeling in her stomach that was proving hard to smush down, now that it was really time to leave. The few people walking by this early in the morning were giving them rather suspicious glances, and she'd just had to threaten the guards twice to get them to even agree to let her out. It was useless without a hunting permit, at least until they recognized her relation to Asura and hastily gave in. "Don't cry."
"I'm not crying," said Tsubaki, crying just a little. It only made her prettier. She went into her usual Mom mode and started patting Maka all over. "You've got your water purifier? And your fishing lures? And flint? And- here, take another knife. Just in case. You never know when you'll need another one."
"I am currently in possession of exactly seven knives, six of which are from you," Maka snorted, taking the offering by the hilt anyway and sticking it in her left boot.
"Well, now you have eight," Tsubaki said stoutly, dark hair blowing wildly in the sour wind. "I love you."
Maka closed her eyes in near-desperation. Something rabid in her chest pricked its ears as the guards began to wind the gates open, gears older than time screaming horribly in protest. "I love you too."
"Come back home, okay?"
"I will when I figure out what happened to my dad." And why she was hearing voices, but Tsubaki didn't need to know that. It would only make her worry more if she thought Maka was going nuts while also trekking alone through the shattered remnants of what had once been. Not that she hadn't noticed the change in her best friend, of course; she had, with her typical keen-eyed and merciless empathy, but she'd assumed it was due to Spirit's mysterious disappearance.
"That's not what I said."
"I'll try."
"That's a lame way to leave," Tsubaki muttered, brushing her glossy bangs off her face.
"Yeah, I know. I'm sorry." She was sorry to leave Tsubaki, deeply and ferociously, but she was also deeply worried about her missing father, who had skipped through these very gates three months ago to, "Go do some scavenging and some trading, and oh, maybe I'll bring you back a new book, sugarplum, and your mother too if I run into her!" and vanished into the ether like a damn ghost.
Tsubaki only sniffled and began to look suspiciously damp-eyed again, little stars blooming in the corners of her beautiful eyes. Maka took Tsu's face in both palms, held tight, and said with as much conviction as she could muster, "Don't worry. The rumors are all exaggerated, anyway, how many times have you and I gone hunting and been just fine? I'm too tough for the old cities to get hurt, and I know that's where he went, it's the only direction we haven't looked. He's just such an idiot. He probably got his foot stuck in something, or fell in a hole, and we'll be back in a week, but- I've got to. But I will come back, I- I promise."
Tsubaki looked appropriately grave, even though she'd heard all Maka's rationalizations before. "Good," she said fiercely, gripping Maka's wrists tight for a moment. "Now go on."
Maka went, with leaden feet and buzzing ears, fingers gripping the straps of her backpack so tight it hurt. It was exactly eighteen steps from where she had stood with Tsubaki, to the outside of the walls; she counted as she went, watching her feet scuffing up dust clouds, because she was terribly frightened she'd give up entirely if she turned back to watch Tsubaki's face. It was very different, walking away from the city alone. She stood there with her back to the walls, listening as the guards grunted and cursed and finally tortured the rusty gates closed. The thump of the giant iron lock-bar on the inside was quite final, and then she was all alone, standing on the bridge of the long brick moat and staring out at an infinite ocean of gently swaying, golden grass. The wind had subsided a little, but the rush of the water beneath her was still overloud to her taut nerves. The din of the city was still audible too, but dramatically lessened, as if simply closing those gates had pushed her into another universe, an even emptier one.
"Okay," she said firmly to herself, squaring her shoulders. "Let's do this."
"...faster…" answered the voice in her head, the deep impatient one like stones rubbing together.
"And it's about…. time... you need to… go to the warmer places," said the other voice, which was still masculine but much higher in pitch, with a silky-smooth, polished cadence absent from the other.
"Don't boss me around," she said rebelliously, still unsure if her own insanity could take orders. Could a brain order itself to stop doing something?
Sadly, she didn't think so. If that were possible nobody would ever be stupid or afraid- two things Maka felt very much at the moment. Anyway, she didn't need voices in her head to tell her she needed to go south, to the cities and away from the protective, forested water systems cradling her hometown.
The things in the cities couldn't cross water.
Her father could, though, and he was both impulsive and curious enough to explore.
"Not the word I'd use, but…" said the silky voice rather wryly, in a rare almost-complete sentence.
She put her hands over her ears, then dropped them. It did no good. "I'm going, I'm going," she mumbled, but it took a long time for her to force her feet to move in their new, dangerous direction.
The two gigantic twin statues that flanked the other side of the bridge and marked the symbolic entrance into the vaster world, identical but for the tattered wings one bore, watched her approach. They witnessed her going past with equally patient indifference, though the delicate veils carved over their faces hid whatever they might have thought of it.
She really was losing it all over again, not yet ten minutes into her journey, but it was hard to care when there was stuttering almost-harp music echoing in her ears, the same amateurish music that had put her to sleep for weeks now. At least it was a pleasant enough sound despite the frequent mistakes, unlike the annoying arguments of the two voices.
The crackling yellow grass rose to her hips when she waded into it, and she plucked a sweet-tasting stalk to place between her teeth, the way Tsubaki always did. Now she was ready; she hefted her bulging backpack higher on her shoulders and went forward, overly aware of her own pounding heart and the morning sun warming her left shoulder. The nearest city, the one her father was most likely to have gotten into trouble at (and he was alive, he was, he was) no longer had a name that anyone remembered, but it was only four day's walk, three small streams and one actual river away. That was doable; Maka could walk for four days easily enough, and ford a river with equal success. Her father had seen to that, rather surprisingly, because he hadn't ever taught her anything else. It was too hard for him to focus on a daughter, as much as he loved her, when his true heart was out wandering the ruined world, having left him only a nearly identical scrap of child to remember her by.
"Maybe he found Kami and they're just camped out somewhere," Tsubaki had suggested. "You know last time she came into town they shacked up for, like, weeks and didn't come up for air once."
That was true, and Maka had considered it, but the likelihood of her mother tolerating Spirit for any reason other than sex or needing a place to stay during her yearly drop-in for supplies was ludicrous. Everybody knew that Spirit worshiped her, had bound himself to her with unbreakable chains, and everybody but him knew that the Albarn women were dangerous and could not love. The elder loved nothing but herself, and the younger had left no space in her life for anything but bared teeth and a house full of scavenged antique books, books that smelled warm and dusty and had nothing to do with anything any more.
"Can't bear to think…" said the deeper voice.
"Yeah," Maka answered, for no reason, and she kept trudging on, parting the grass like Moses but feeling much more like Cain, cast aside into the wilderness. A flock of white birds that had been scavenging for food took flight at her approach, bursting from cover in a wild, frantic flurry. She almost cowered, and she flung her hands up instinctively; the birds swarmed away, and she stood there panting, aghast at her own foolish reaction.
Finally, once she got her pulse back under control, she pulled the final blade Tsubaki had given her from her boot, unsheathed it, and held it tight in her hand. The hilt was elk horn, polished and varnished to glossy beauty and carved with two delicate flowers, and the blade itself was shined and oiled to perfection. Tsubaki had made it, in her shop with her own two hands, folding and tempering and putting love into the molten metal. It had been Maka with her when they bagged the elk, a day after Tsubaki's twentieth birthday, just like a gift.
The tears came now, in an unstoppable flood. She hadn't realized it was that knife, but trust Tsubaki to manage something sappy and sweet even without actually being present.
The ocean of grass swallowed her up again in moments, and the birds came cautiously back down to earth once she had passed, sending a few annoyed croons after her. When she finally looked back, hours later when the sun was bright overhead and her shadow nearly gone, the massive veiled statues were gone. She couldn't even see the walls; there was a tiny smudge of black on the horizon from all the smoke, but that was all. There was only rippling gold on every side of her, and the infinite blue of heaven's vault arching above.
The air was clean, though, and she took deep breaths as she kept going, scouring her lungs with it, Tsu's knife warm in her palm.
On the first night, the wolves came, circling her in an endless, snarling carousel of glinting eyes and clicking fangs. She built a fire bigger than she needed and huddled close to it, reciting fairy tales to herself with a voice that shook just a little. They sniffed and howled, but then they left her for easier prey.
"Smart move," she said softly, relieved for both parties and resolving to give her dad a real piece of her mind for causing all this worry when she got ahold of him.
"... reminds me of him," said the silky voice, and the rough one gave a hum of agreement that reverberated like distant thunder in her teeth. It was still early enough in summer for the nights to be a bit chilly, but the stars out here were her favorite part- in the city, the sky was nearly blocked out by the tall buildings, but out here, she could see it all, spread out above her. The star-strewn vastness was comforting, even with the wolves still howling off in the distance; she lay close to the embers of her fire looking upwards for a long time, wondering what Asura had gotten up to in her absence and how Tsubaki was faring. Tsu would keep him from doing anything nasty to Maka's little apartment, but if he decided it was time to make his move, without her dad there to keep him in check- well. Who knew what Maka would return to?
On the second day, she snared a pheasant for dinner, and while she was plucking it, she heard the harp again- this time clearly being destroyed. That was the only word for it. It was a cacophony of vicious off-kilter notes, snapping strings and clanging metal, punctuated by hideous cougar-shrieks that sent her to her knees, clutching her head. It lasted for maybe ten minutes, which was just long enough for her to recognize the screams as coming from Rough Voice- strange, because she would have sworn those sounds could come from nothing human.
"Are you okay?" she asked, rather involuntarily, once it was over and she was curled on the ground in a pile of gloriously bright, bloody feathers.
Silence, silence, and then, "Did you hear that?"
Maka held her breath. She would have stopped her own heartbeat too if she could, and the wind, and the rustling of the grass, but it was useless. "...nothing there, we…" said the silky voice, rather regretfully, she thought.
She took it out on the rest of the pheasant and left the bones for the wolves. The voices did not comment.
On the third day, she was walking with aching legs, rubbing her thumb across the carved flowers on Tsubaki's knife over and over and staring with bleary eyes into the unchanging yonder, when she literally tripped over the first sign of the approaching city.
It was a road, hemmed in with thick grass and brush that had hidden it upon first approach. It was black, smooth and very flat where still whole, impossibly and artificially perfect despite the many places where roots and weather had twisted it.
And- "It goes south," she whispered into the breeze, setting her boots tentatively on the strange surface and rocking back and forth a bit. It didn't have much give. Concrete or asphalt; she remembered the words from her mother, but she didn't know which she was looking at, or even what the difference was. It wasn't one of the lost technologies, but nobody in her hometown used it. The roads were packed dirt or gravel, because as Asura said, "There's no point wasting funds we might need one day to defend the town." Now that she was standing on it, she could see a few tiny flecks of white here and there, like the road had once been borne markings. She wished she could have been able to read them, to take this road at the height of the cities' success and into one of the libraries her mom had told her about, so many times, the beautiful sanctuaries for the written word where everything and anything ever dreamed of could be learned.
"... just remnants and that… iron left, we…eight." said Silky Voice.
"...water there…" added Rough Voice, not very helpfully.
"Can't you two tell me a story or something? And be useful?" said Maka, rather dismally. The voices did not reply. Probably she should be more excited about that, considering that 'hearing things' was a pretty good indicator of having gone completely off the deep end, but she wasn't. They were weird, and mostly just frustratingly hard to hear, but they'd been company of a sort over the past few days, and she was eager to keep pretending she wasn't alone. In the city, it was always crowded, always loud, and even the hunting parties she'd joined were never smaller than three people. Did her mother feel as Maka did? Did the silence and the roaring wind rattle her bones too, till she felt she might fly apart? She and Maka were similar in many ways, from their cautious green eyes to their hair-trigger tempers, but somehow Maka could never picture her mom cowering beside a fire at night. Kami needed no one but herself. She would be striding along right briskly, wherever she was, cutting through the terrain like a ship at full sail, perfectly at home in her own head.
Speaking of being trapped in one's skull, Maka did wish she'd had space to spare in her pack for at least one book. If she hadn't already been crazy, she'd be pretty close to it by now, with nothing to fill her mind but the voices, and her own circular worries and fears.
On the evening of that same day, after hours heading south on the black road, which smelled rich and strange as it heated in the sunshine and which frequently shot smaller copies of itself off into the grass, branching out like the veins on her wrist, she came to the big river.
That, of course, she'd expected, and anyway she'd caught the lush scent of it on the air long before she actually got within sight of it. The collapsed bridge was more of a surprise. The black road led up onto the beginning of it and a little past, straight between two towering iron pillars webbed with dangling cords of metal and rust. Only a few vines had tried to take over the thing, and they'd made a desultory effort at best, though moss had had a bit more success. It took a long time for her to figure out that the towers, which shed rough orange flakes of fragile corrosion when she touched them, must have been the supports for the part of the bridge that was long gone- the part she needed, that had presumably once led safely over the unexpectedly wide, churning river.
"I don't need it," she told herself grumpily, thumping her first on one of the towers again and watching bits of rust drift down. An orangish smear stayed on the side of her hand. "It would just be easier." Though the river had turned out to be quite a bit bigger than she'd anticipated, and it was moving uncomfortably fast near the center. She'd have to follow the banks for a while, and try to find a gentler spot to cross.
"... completely unacceptable," snarled Rough Voice.
"Fuck you," she said automatically.
"... fresh meat, except they already blooded it and…" he added, still sounding irritated.
Ominous words to welcome her here; how wonderful. She got down on her hands and knees and crawled as far forward onto the bridge's remains as she dared, then craned her neck over the broken edge of the black road and looked down.
Two bright red eyes met her own, along with a loud, "Oh crap!" She only just managed to stop herself on the edge of a shrill scream; after all, the guy was easily fifteen feet below her, standing up to his knees in the shallow but still rushing water close to the bank.
He said nothing else. He seemed frozen, actually, a lot like she was; they both stared at each other in stunned silence. He was young, around her age, or at least, not old; there was a curious sort of indistinctness about his angular face, despite a very stubborn chin and almost childishly large eyes. Finally she found her voice and said, a little sharply, "What are you doing down there?"
"What are you doing up there?" he fired back promptly, pale brows settling into a rather haughty glower beneath the really ugly green hat he wore.
"I asked first," she snapped.
He eyed her warily, squinting a little against the low angle of the setting sun. His shadow was very long across the water. "Go away," he said finally.
She didn't move, though she did draw Tsubaki's knife quietly, keeping her movement behind the edge of the road, out of his view. "Why don't you go away? I plan on camping here tonight and fording the river in the morning."
He shifted his weight a little, and now he was definitely scowling at her. "Nope. I told you once, go away. Now. Chop chop, weird girl."
"Who made you king?" Maka said, annoyed. "Fine, whatever. I'm warning you, though, if you think you can sneak up on me during the night and steal my gear, I'll catch you, and I have a lot of knives. Okay? And I have very good hearing."
"You can't threaten me," he said, sounding rather shocked.
She actually laughed, for the first time in quite a while; she laughed so hard that she ended up on her belly clinging to the edge of the road, drumming her feet hysterically and wiping her eyes on her shirt. "I just did," she chortled at last, gasping.
He looked horrified, and didn't answer, though his strange eyes narrowed even further. The ugly hat covered his hair, but his eyes and his very pale eyebrows made her think he might be a person with albinism; only his skin made her wonder. It looked almost gilded, rich and glimmering even in the shadows beneath the bridge, as if he'd rolled around in metallic dust, and she had thought it was simply the play of shadows and sunrays, but-
"You're one of them," she hissed, realizing with an almost painful shock.
"I- wait, one of what?"
"From the city, Jesus! You're not human!" The red eyes caught the bloody sunset light in a scintillating display as he tilted his head further back to look at her, and at this new angle, when he opened his mouth to say something, she saw innumerable glinting points. Terror and adrenaline turned her cold as she gripped the road's crumbling edge. "You have- you have three seconds to turn around and get out of my sight or I'll come down there and exterminate you myself!"
She was bluffing. On a hunt, if there were signs of anything from the city lurking around, the only options were to hide or to run home, and most chose the latter. She'd never 'exterminated' anything she hadn't been intending to eat later, except maybe a few squashed spiders on occasion.
He snarled in earnest now, baring those predatory teeth, his warped overlong shadow dancing like a demon on the rippling water. "I can't, and I'd like to see you try, pipsqueak!"
"What did you call me," Maka screamed, infuriated, and then she realized- "Wait, you're in the water!"
"Ye-eees," he said slowly, as if she were stupid. "And?"
"Augh! You can't- but you can't not be- this doesn't fit the criteria!"
"... something, I know, it had to be, I recognized…" yelped Silky Voice, at an ear-shattering volume; Maka grunted and toppled backwards into a kneeling position by the bridge's edge, clutching her head.
"-you out of your pixie-cursed mind?" said the red-eyed man from below, adding to the clamor. "I am not one of those- things! I just… I like it here, specifically right here in this exact spot, and I refuse to move, so there!"
She breathed slow and deep until the ringing in her ears stopped, and then poked her head cautiously back over the edge to study him better, sheathing Tsubaki's knife for the moment. He hadn't budged an inch, which both soothed her instinctual panic and made her wonder if he really was trapped there somehow.
Well, only one way to find out. She worked a loose chunk of the black road's edge loose, took careful aim, and dropped it on his upturned face quite neatly.
He doubled over, clutching his head, but didn't move his feet. "Merlin and Morgane! What the hell was that for? You can't throw things at me, you- tiny little girl!"
"You keep pointing out that I supposedly can't do things which I just did two seconds ago," she told him, giggling a little behind her hand despite the surreal situation. The teeth could conceivably be false, or his real ones filed down, she supposed, and his skin could be some kind of cosmetic. Maybe he really was just albino, in which case she would owe him a huge apology and also probably something tasty for dinner. "Okay. You're in the water, which means you can't be from the city, but you're… unusual looking for these parts." Her curiosity, always lurking and always hungry, poked its head up at that. "Wait, are you from really far away? Are you lost?"
He prodded gingerly at his face, which looked fine to her; obviously he was just a big baby. "Yes," he said finally, looking up at her again. The sun was a breath from disappearing entirely under the horizon now, so she took a moment to rummage in her pack and pull out a pre-made pitch torch and her prize possession: an ancient Zippo quite literally older than she was, with more dents than she had freckles and inscribed with the initials 'WS'. It was a gift from her mother, scavenged in some lost corner of the world many years ago. Buying rare, expensive butane on the rare occasions merchants actually had some was a pain in the ass, but the lighter was waterproof and powerful, and it lit the torch in half a second.
She lifted it up and crooked her neck over the edge to look down at him again. "Which one is it?"
"Er. Both, I guess," he admitted, sounding disgusted. Her torchlight reflected off the water and ringed him in a choppy circle of firefly glints, multiplying his sinister shadow into a hundred shattered clones. "I'm not from here, which I think you guessed, and I'm definitely lost."
"And also stuck. How exactly are you stuck?"
"I- are you going to help me or not?"
"Of course," she said in utter exasperation, pressing her bangs down irritably as they blew into her eyes; it was windy on the bridge, though it wasn't all that high up. Her apartment balcony was about a zillion times higher, and she'd long ago gotten used to the vertigo of looking down. "I mean, look at you. I'm not worried, of course I'll help. Are you even armed? Where's your stuff?"
"Around," he ground out, after a moment of fumbling. Clearly it was a lie.
She squinted down at him and considered. No way a person, however weirdly dressed- was that lace on the cuffs of his jacket?- could survive out in the open without at least some basic equipment, and the fact that he didn't seem to have any made her wonder if he had company lurking out there somewhere. "I don't believe you."
He took a deep breath, pinched the bridge of his nose, and muttered something that sounded suspiciously uncomplimentary under his breath. "So then you're not going to help me."
"Yes, I am! I help people!" Maka said heatedly, stretching to hold the torch further out so he could better see her angry glare, and if she 'accidentally' dropped an ember on him, so be it. "I am a helpful person, okay, but I'm not an idiot, just you need to explain a few things first before I-"
She was falling before she realized it, along with several large chunks of black road. There was no time to scream; water filled her mouth before she could finish taking a breath. The last thing she heard, just before the night swept in and her head began to crack apart, was the fizzle of her torch drowning in the river.
"... strange is going on, and I can't figure… unusual, and it's all sort of reversed, which… Titania disagrees, of course, the snake," said Silky Voice.
Rough Voice gave his signature brain-rattling irritated hum, which hurt enough to make Maka open one eye, though the multicolored velvet that filled her swimming vision didn't make any sense until she also felt lace brush her skin.
"Fuck," she gasped, lashing out instinctively; she got dropped again a second later, right on her ass into the dark water.
It woke her up the rest of the way, and she staggered to her feet, wondering if her skull was actually inside-out or if it just felt that way. The red-eyed man, holding her torch aloft and still up to his knees in the river, looked infuriated. She stared at him warily, then sloshed a few steps further back. At least her backpack and Zippo were presumably still safe atop the bridge; obviously she'd only been unconscious for a very short time.
He growled like the wolves. For a moment, she was so dizzy she swayed. "You're kind of a bitch, aren't you? First you toss a rock in my face, then you try and crush me, then you try and drown, and now you-"
"Ow," she managed, lifting a hand to pat at her soaked head. It hurt a lot, but there was no blood or swelling, though her hip was starting to ache like she'd landed on it. If the voices started up again, with her head in this state, she might just cry.
"Yeah, ow! I said ow too when you bashed my face in with the rock," snarled the guy.
She took another shaky step back, feeling water in her boots, and stared at his teeth. They were uniformly sharp, and his canine teeth were elongated, like her own but on a more exaggerated scale. Again, she was reminded of the wolves. What was it her mother always used to say? "Go on your way," she whispered, through the haze of white-hot agony clawing its way out from behind her eyeballs. "I am sending you out as lambs in the midst of wolves." And wasn't that just the funniest thing for Kami to say, when it was her own daughter she left among all the gnashing fangs.
"Again! Come here, I heard it again, listen!" roared Rough Voice.
Maka clenched her jaw, hard enough that a wave of burning anguish swept through her from pounding head to chilly toes, and forced herself to meet the red-eyed man's gaze. If this was some elaborate ambush, there would have been no point allowing her to wake up, and he was still in the exact same spot he'd been in. The broken bridge arched halfway above them, a dark mass blocking out the stars.
His green hat was disheveled, and wet, like it had fallen off and been hastily retrieved, and the white feather tucked into it was broken, hanging limply. His clothes were wet too, even his many-colored coat, which was sporting quite a few rips- he must have had to really stretch, to reach her where she'd landed. There was no sign of weaponry on him; actually, he looked sort of helpless and ill, now that she was paying attention. That strange shimmering skin was sunburned pretty badly, and dark circles showed under his eyes.
He was still now, watching her watch him, with a sort of contained emotion that she couldn't read, but which had him nearly vibrating. It might have been suspicion, or unwelcome memories; whatever it was, he was trying his damnedest to hang on to his poker face. "You," he said at last, "are having some problems, huh?"
Maka frowned. Something about his deep, gravelly voice seemed sort of familiar, in the vaguest of ways, a tickle at the back of her mind, but she didn't have time to think about it. Instead she began rubbing the back of her neck in the slow, firm way she'd learned sometimes helped with her headaches and said hoarsely, "Yes, but lucky for you it's none of your business. Now." She drew Tsubaki's knife from her boot. "Tell me how you lit my torch, because I know I put my Zippo back in my pack on the bridge, and you're too wet for matches to work."
He looked away from her. The torchlight shadowed his face into a ghoulish, jack-o-lantern caricature; she suddenly felt a little embarrassed, as if she were seeing through to his bones. "What are you talking about?"
"It went out," she said grimly, starting to circle him with careful steps. "I heard it." The rocks were slippery here, treacherous with clinging algae, and the current had a passionate grip on her ankles that would become much crueler just a short way further out.
She wasn't really expecting anything wild to happen. She was sort of hoping he'd pull out another Zippo or something similar, maybe, some interesting bit of lost technology; she was trying to buy time, to see in the darkness what was holding him in place, and why his teeth were so-
But he held out a hand calmly enough, opened his palm, and on his bare skin bloomed a breath of dancing sparks, then earnest, leaping, fairy-tale flames.
Her dizziness returned. "You'll burn yourself," she squeaked idiotically. The river pushed harder at her heels, driving her away from him; she went without resistance, backing towards the bank as he held out that spinning ball of joyous fire, unable to tear her eyes away from it, mesmerized and afraid.
"Chill out," he groaned, closing his hand around the fire and extinguishing it with a bitter twist to his lips. Smoke curled up from his fingers for a moment, soft and white in the torchlight, like an ascending spirit. "Look. How 'bout we make a deal?"
Maka was panting now, open-mouthed like a dog, from a weird cocktail of pain, adrenaline, and confusion. This didn't fit. Humans could not make fire from nothing with only their own flesh, not even in the old days, the ones in her books- nothing on earth could do that, nothing that wasn't a legend, anyway. What was she supposed to do in the face of something she'd never imagined?
"The horsemen and their messenger…" said Silky Voice, unhelpfully.
Maka looked up at the black mass of the broken bridge again, then across the river, where the black road went on into the night. "You tried to jump, didn't you?" she guessed, mouth dry. "And you didn't quite make it, and once you hit the water… You couldn't cross it. You were trapped where you landed."
He sneered, but it was halfhearted. "What exactly are you implying?"
She gritted her teeth, considered, then pulled another knife from its sheath on her hip and held it out to him gingerly by the blade, leaning far forward and stretching her arm to stay as far away as possible. He took it after a moment, with a dubious expression. "Show me your blood," she said grimly. What she was about to propose was, without a doubt, insane, but so was she, so what did it really matter?
Anyway, she was curious, which obviously took precedence, and she needed solid proof before she could form any proper conclusions.
"Huh?"
Idiot. "Show. Me. Your. Blood," she enunciated, rolling her eyes.
He wrinkled his nose, which was severely freckled under the sunburn and the shimmer. "Why? Listen, you know, I can ask rude questions and be suspicious too! Why are you out here all alone? Why do you need to cross the river so bad? What's- what's over there?"
"Didn't you come from that direction?" she said sharply.
"It's- yeah, but- you're not, uh, from there. Obviously."
The curiosity snowballed; Maka was a little afraid she might drool. "You live in the city?" Impossible- but so was the thing she'd just seen him do. It had to be a trick, of course, but it was a good one.
He pressed his lips together, clearly uneasy and just as clearly confused by her line of questioning. "No. Just that direction. Listen, why do you want to see my blood?"
If he had lived in the city, he'd know why. Obviously he'd told the truth at least about that. She decided to treat him like he'd been under a rock his whole life or something, like he didn't know anything at all. "The things that live in the old city kill people," she said finally, edgy again now that he was armed, despite having done it herself. "They're like animals, but they're not." To put it mildly. "They can't cross water. So that's why I thought you were one of them."
Crossing his arms and scowling, he radiated offended dignity, which was quite a feat considering he looked like a particularly morose wet mop at the moment. "Hey! Are you saying I look like an animal?"
"That is so not the point, but yes, actually, you've got big bad wolf teeth and a bird brain! Now stop interrupting me! Anyway, so that's why I've come from the other direction. There's quite a few more rivers up that way, so it's a lot safer. And the things in the city all have black blood." She shrugged, wincing as the movement made her aching head twinge again. Her hip was really starting to hurt, too; doubtless she'd have one hell of a bruise in the morning. "So if you bleed red, we're good, and I'll talk about whatever deal you wanna make. If you bleed black, I'm going to-" Leave him there, trapped, to die a slow death of starvation? Murder him in cold blood? She shivered, and it wasn't only because the night air had begun to chill her soaked clothing. "-know you're dangerous."
It was rather freeing, being insane. She thought she might grow to enjoy it.
But he was wide-eyed, and he actually glanced over his shoulder in the direction of the old city, where the black road led; stranger and stranger. "Fine." With little fanfare, he jabbed the tip of her knife into the tip of one finger, on the hand that was holding the torch, and then extended both the hilt of her knife and the finger in her direction.
It did look dark, in the poor light, but it was red enough for her to heave an embarrassingly huge sigh of relief. She stretched out on tippy-toe to take her knife back, then, on second thought, threw it onto the bank and out of reach, while putting Tsubaki's blade between her teeth. There was no point in letting him disarm her while she helped him, human though he apparently was.
He looked even more confused when she sloshed up to him and grabbed his wrist. He nearly dropped the torch and actually yanked away, hard enough to make him have to windmill his arms to stay upright, and said, "What the fuck?"
Maka blew out an irritated huff of breath and put her fists on her hips. Why did everybody always need things spelled out to them in excruciating detail? She pulled the knife from her mouth and said, "How long have you been stuck here?" She'd get the 'why' out of him soon enough; her curiosity about how someone who bled red could affected by water just like the things in the city had grown several sizes and was banging on the walls.
"Er-"
"Judging from the sunburn, at least a full day. So you can't move on your own. So, someone else is gonna have to do the moving for you." She put Tsu's blade in her mouth again, grabbed his cold wrist, pulled his arm over one shoulder, and crouched to try and heave him up out of the water. The first try failed pathetically, and on the second, her boots slipped and she half-fell. "Could you be any heavier?" she mumbled through clenched teeth, persevering and increasingly less gentle.
"Oh, okay, excuse me! Maybe it's your fault for being so short- oof. Ow!"
"'I'm helping you, don't be rude," she mouthed breathlessly around the knife, finally managing to heave his stomach onto her shoulder, gripping his knees tight before standing. Well, crouching slightly less; the guy was a good foot taller than her, and he wasn't scrawny. Her knees were already shaking. "And don't you dare burn me with that."
He only wheezed something unintelligible, though he did try and help hold himself steady; apparently her bony shoulder was digging into his stomach. How sad.
It was only perhaps twenty steps to the shore, but she had to set him down twice to catch her breath, and when they finally made it, she was gasping and dripping sweat. At least the exercise had warmed her up.
She wanted to collapse on the dry, grassy shore, but first she trotted over and began hunting for the knife she'd thrown. He was working the toe of one shoe into the soggy sand with a soft crunch, but he didn't otherwise move; he just held the torch up higher to give her better light.
"Thanks," she said stiffly, finally spotting her knife and grabbing it up. The sudden movement disoriented her. Everything was deepest, softest grey outside the orange circle of torchlight, like a quiet dream. "Um- so what deal were you talking about? You don't owe me for helping you, or anything. Well, maybe just a few answers." A fresh wave of adrenaline hit her suddenly, until her blood buzzed, and she rubbed her thumb over the carved flowers on Tsu's knife. He was free now, this unnatural, impossible man, and though she was armed, he had strange fire she didn't understand. Why was he holding the torch still, anyway, if he could make his own fire to see by? Was it hard for him?
He stuck the torch between two rocks, kicked off his shoes, then bent over to start squeezing water from his trousers. "Yeah, thanks… too. Thank you. And I don't know, really. I was going to offer to show you where the city was if you got me out of the water, but now that I know there's monsters and shit in there, no way. It was deader than Arthur when I went through."
"You were in the city?" she yelped, flapping a hand. "Wait- but you didn't- you didn't see anything? How long were you in there? What's it like? Are there plants and animals?" Her father had always refused to talk about what he saw on his scavenging missions, and her mother simply never made any sense.
"Yes, no, I'm not sure, I don't know, and yes." He raised an eyebrow at her, and for the first time, she glimpsed a lock of whitish hair poking out from under that offensive hat. "What's your name?"
"Why?"
"Well, in my head I've been calling you 'the really fucking loud girl' but I have a feeling you'll hit me again if I say it out loud."
"... if only, the woodpecker cried," said Silky Voice philosophically, sounding very tired and sad. "...be all right, in the… find him."
Maka began rubbing her neck again as exhaustion set in, doubled by the pain until she felt almost drunk. "Albarn." No one except her parents and Tsubaki called her by her first name, not even the voices in her own head, and thought it was fleetingly tempting to give it to this person, to someone, she resisted. She was one of the Albarn women, the cold and wild ones, and she would not let the label shame her, even with frostbite creeping in.
He inclined his head graciously; for a moment, she had the absurd impression he was going to dip into a bow. "You can call me Soul."
"Which insinuates it's not your real name," she said, snorting. "Ugh, paranoia." And thus she was a hypocrite, which made them quite the pair. "So tell me, what are you? Are you human or not? No bullshit." There was a question she'd never expected to ask. Three months ago, before the voices began, she'd have long ago run screaming from a man who could make fire.
He closed those eerie red eyes for a moment, swallowing audibly, then croaked, "Mostly. You're- human, then. You live in this land, you have your whole life?"
An icy finger traced her tense spine. "Yes."
He pulled the hat absently off his head, squeezing it dry and discarding the broken feather. Apparently his hair really was white, as white as bleached bone even at night, and he had an awful lot of it going unpredictably in every possible direction. "I haven't- listen, I don't know what you know, so what other things do you think exist?"
"What? What do you mean? Rephrase that."
He plopped the hat back on his head and held up a hand, ticking each point off as he made it. She watched his long fingers move, looking for smoke or fire, but there was nothing except that indistinct shine. "Humans. Animals. Beasts of the sea, and beasts of the air. Insects. Bacteria, viruses. The things from the city. What else do you think exists? Apart from, uh, space and shit."
Maka's heart was so loud that didn't think she wouldn't have been able to hear the voices, even if they'd chosen that point to chime in. She thought about it, hard, because she always took questions seriously, and because he seemed to think it very important. Finally she shrugged and said sulkily, "Nothing else. Not even in the old books. I suppose there could be- I've found stuff about legendary-type things. Like dragons, and unicorns. But those weren't real, even when there were lots of people." At home, she had at least one book on everything, and though many pages were missing or stained, she was confident in her answer.
Soul- what an odd nickname that was, and a little disconcerting, yet so appropriate at the same time- hummed thoughtfully, low in his throat. She appreciated that he was staying well away from her, but it still made her nervous when he found a boulder to sit down on, near the flickering torch. Framed in the boulder's black-velvet moss, and shrouded in perfect darkness on one side and too-bright flames on the other, he looked like someone who'd been feeling too many things for too long. "Have you heard of fairies?"
"Yes, but they're not real."
"Have you heard of parallel dimensions?"
"Yes, but that doesn't explain anything!"
"Have you heard the stories the humans used to tell? About a land underground, where time moved differently? Where the fairies live?"
Yes; of course she had. Maka read so much that Tsubaki used to say she had ink in her veins and paper for skin, and long-forgotten fairytales had kept her company in the long, dark nights alone. "What's that got to do with anything?"
"Maybe," chimed in Rough Voice.
He made an atrocious face. Then he sighed and pulled off his hat, swiping a few particularly wayward strands down flat, before angling his head to present her with the side of his face.
His ears were sticking out from under the ghostly dandelion-puff hair, long and pointed and just a little freckled. As her jaw dropped, one gave a surly twitch.
Author says: okay! So, first of all big thanks to ba-sing-saying for betaing this for me ;) this is a (vaguely) hamlet fantasy au. It's gonna be soma, and it's gonna be tsustar at some point, and all/most of our fave characters will show up at some point, that I can promise. I can't promise super duper regular updates (college, work, adult life and other lame shit, sorry!) or what direction this super-weird thing will go in, but i can promise i won't abandon it. And um, let me know what you guys think if you can, because this story got weird fast and I'm really wanting feedback. it's sort of experimental, i guess. Love you guys! thanks for reading, I hope you enjoyed! :) :) OH: and yes, the theme of Spirit being missing was in Dire Circus, I know, I realized, I guess I'm just predictable, haha. Sorry. I was too lazy to come up with something else.