Cuddle material-that was the type of movie Maka had requested. After forcing her to indulge in his curiosity and sit through "The Human Centipede" a couple weeks back, Soul owed his girlfriend and meister something light-hearted and romantic. Most of their DVDs were piled around their television, but Soul kept a secret stash of date movies underneath his bed. They were mostly romcoms and animated films he saved for occasions such as this. How excited was that bookworm going to be when he popped "50 First Dates" into the DVR? Excited enough to forgive him for watching horrific foreign films, that was for sure.
The scythe reached under his bed and pulled out a slew of DVDs before finding the correct one. He got to his feet and blew on the dustjacket, but before Soul could turn to leave and show off his prize, a flash of light in the bedroom window caught his eye.
A tower of green lightning surged upward somewhere beyond the horizon. The deluge of light illuminated the indigo sky, pulsating as it jumped back and forth, up and down. Soul watched the silent spectacle, transfixed, as the lightning picked up pace, traveling from dirt to space and back again with increasing velocity, a resonance between earth and sky.
The scythe didn't know very much about physics, but he did know light always traveled faster than sound. His ears were suddenly rocked with the crash of deafening thunder, sending the scythe to his knees. He dropped the DVD to the ground and clutched his ears, and only the sharp timbre of Maka's frightened voice cut through the explosion of sound.
"Soul?!" Maka was standing in the threshold with eyes like huge olive saucers
Looking away from his meister and back through the window, Soul's jaw went slack. The lightning tower continued to undulate, expanding with every pulse. With one sudden burst, the green light spread across the sky, rampaging across the desert and straight towards Death City.
Soul threw himself at Maka, providing her one last shield-one last promise-before the sickly light burst into the apartment and enveloped them both. He felt his arms encircle her petite frame, blonde pigtails brushing against his collarbone, before they hit the floor and his mind went blank.
Soul shot up out of bed, panting and sweating as unexplainable feelings of horror and fear swelled like the shriek of a passing siren. Even after calming down, the sensation of displacement and nauseating wrongness caused the scythe to stagger out of the hospital bed and towards a nearby mirror.
Long, choppy white hair. Unfocused red eyes. Sharp teeth. Yep, Soul woke up the same girl she went to bed as.
She ignored the slight headache pounding in the back of her skull as her eyes drifted towards her exposed collarbone and the rough stitches creeping across her chest. Well, maybe not exactly the same. After the fiasco in Italy with the demon sword, Soul was actually feeling less and less like her usual, cynical self with every passing day. It wasn't just the barbed scar peeking out of her shirt; it was the scratching of a broken jazz record that echoed when she dreamed, the face of a cackling demon that appeared when she closed her eyes, the look of abject horror on her meister's face when she burst out of his abdomen like a child of the black blood.
Her dreams were getting more and more messed up every night, assuming she could even fall asleep. With a yawn, Soul ambled back to her bed and sprawled across the mattress. The one benefit of staying overnight in the Shibusen infirmary was that Soul had the opportunity to sleep in without Mako lecturing her to death. A little smile formed unbidden on her face. While it was true that her meister had a perpetual yardstick shoved up his ass, she missed that bookworm. Or, at least, she missed the way things used to be. Everytime Mako visited her in the clinic, he treated Soul like she was a girl made of glass. Didn't get too close, didn't smack her too hard, and didn't look too long at her scar. Maybe after she returned home…
With a jolt, Soul realized that she was actually slated to be released from bedrest today. How could she have forgotten? She immediately sat up to start packing up her clothes she forgot to fold, the homework she never did, and the bras she left strewn about the floor.
As she went through the mostly-mindless motions of collecting her things, an eerie tingling crept up her spine like the pricks of a thousand needles. The sensation was like a word lost on the tip of her tongue, a ghostly repetition of something she couldn't recall, a nagging sense of something that was both glaringly obvious and a shrouded enigma. The stark hairs on her arm stood erect, and the girl shivered.
Soul always joked that Mako was the one gifted with feminine intuition, but even someone as imperceptive as her couldn't shake the feeling that something was amiss.
On the other side of Shibusen, Soul's meister looked on as his reckless childhood friend writhed on the floor, hand enveloped inside a jar of soul-sapping water. Black Star whipped her hand out of said jar, only to thrust it back inside. The girl's muscles shrank until her limbs became limp and her enormous breasts shriveled up like raisins. It was fun to watch at first, but it peeved him that Black Star, who had only recently collected her first ever soul, got a special training regimen from Stein while Mako, Stein's top student who had already collected 100 souls, got no help or guidance from anyone.
Ugh, girls, Mako thought bitterly. His professor, Dr. Frances Stein, was standing beside him, staring blankly at Black Star with her hands in her lab coat pockets. They only ever look out for each other.
The thought felt odd in Mako's head, but he paid it no heed. He actually had been fighting a headache all day, not to mention a thousand other discomforts, one of them being that, in that moment, his legs felt too hot in his plaid pants. Since when did that happen?
Tired of watching Black Star splash around with a jar of water, Mako turned to his teacher.
"Professor Stein, can I have one of those special jars too?" he asked.
Stein's eyes were obscured by the lens flare of her glasses. "I can't do that," she said in monotone. "The water in the jar is only intended to help Black Star in using Tsubasa's enchanted sword mode."
The ninja gasped for air before yanking her arm out of the ominous liquid. "I'm not going to let myself get beaten by a jar. I don't care how special it is!" Black Star was only supposed to stick one finger into the soul-sapping water at a time, but she kept submerging her arm all the way up to her elbow. Once again, the girl was reduced to a squirming skeleton as the substance drained her of all of her strength.
"I would be surprised if Black Star even realized what she was doing by saying things like that," Stein mused. "By talking constantly about what a star she is, Black Star is driving herself without even meaning to."
Mako frowned. "Driving herself?"
He listened as Stein began to explain how Black Star coped with fear and inferiority by bragging about her own greatness, but the professor's words sounded stale and half-hearted. Neither of them, Mako realized, was fully present in this conversation, or even in that room. Stein spoke with the distant detachment of a bad actor reading from a script, and Mako bobbed his head along as if he were listening, though his mind was reeling from something else. The whole exchange was recognizable, familiar even, and though Mako could easily quote Stein's dissection of Black Star before it reached his ears, he could not figure out why pins and needles spread across his back like a rash and the wisps of hair on the back of his neck stood on end.
"Right now you're definitely lacking something Mako," Stein said in a bored, hollow tone. "A certain level of stress and anxiety is understandable, but you don't want to take it too far."
Whatever creepy sensations Mako felt before immediately evaporated. "Wait," he blurted. "What do you mean lacking something?"
The corners of Stein's mouth twitched. "Once you figure out what it is, come see me and we'll decide what to do about it."
Stein informed Black Star that their special training was over and walked out of the room with a curious expression on her face. The ninja neither noticed Stein's absence nor took her advice to give the soul-sapping water a rest. Mako left her to squirm and heave on the floor while he sought out Soul.
After a few weeks confined to the Shibusen clinic, his weapon could finally come home. Waiting for her was a party attended by all of their closest friends and catered by Mako himself. The thought of it spurred him to quicken his pace down the empty hall.
He always joked that Soul was a good-for-nothing slacker, and while the latter half was definitely true, Mako had come to realize that she was good for something. Soul was his best friend, his confidante, his equal. During battle, her weapon form felt like an extension of himself, a piece of his own soul, and having her temporarily severed from his daily routine felt akin losing a limb.
Mako learned three things from the encounter with the demon sword. First, unlike Black Star, Mako couldn't beat the odds by simply saying he could. The victories he earned and the disasters he avoided-the image of Soul's blood-stained jacket flashed through his mind-were lucky flukes. Second, Stein was right when she said Mako lacked something, and it was due that lack that Italy had gone so wrong. Third, the bleak emptiness of cooking for one and falling asleep while the bedroom beside his remained empty was as deep and maddening as the black blood itself.
He knocked on the infirmary door twice, but opened it before he heard any affirmation from the other side. So soon after Italy, the meister should have learned better than to recklessly open doors. After giving a perfunctory nod to Dr. Medusa, Mako sharply inhaled at the sight of his weapon.
Soul was sitting there, staring with her blue shirt rumpled in her hands as Dr. Medusa used his stethoscope to listen to her heartbeat. Though it covered the parts of Soul's body he couldn't visualize without suffering a nosebleed, her sports bra did little to obscure the scar slicing across her chest. Mako didn't need to imagine the rest of her to connect the knitted flesh emerging from her right hip bone to the tarnished skin on her left shoulder.
For the first time, it hit Mako that this scar was never going away. Soul would carry it across her chest like a brand for the rest of her life, and for what? To save Mako's useless hide? The uncanny familiarity that overtook him earlier rushed back, coursing down his arms and heating up his face. Mako may have walked away from the demon sword without a scratch, but for Soul, the meister's ultimate screwup was permanent. He could never fix this, fix her. The mixture of guilt and recognition, shock and sorrow, made Mako feel like icicles were dripping down his back and coals were burning up his feet.
"Hey," Soul said, studying her meister. While Mako's eyes shifted from Soul's scar to her face, he couldn't shake off the dark memory of staining his white gloves, desperately holding his best friend's broken body together as she bled out on the stone cold floor.
"I'm going home to get ready for the party," Mako said quietly. "See you there." He retreated back into the hall and shut the clinic door behind him.
Soul watched her meister leave, frustrated that she'd once again upset Mako without meaning to. She put her shirt back on with a heavy sigh.
The doctor removed his stethoscope from his ears and began making notes in Soul's medical file. "You're right, something does seems bothering him," he said. "Is it the scar?"
Soul clutched the center of her shirt with a white hot fist. "Yeah. It happens everytime he sees it. He gets this pained look."
Medusa scribbled something in his notes. "Well, beside a slight arrhythmia you seem to be making a nice recovery so far. Let's just take your blood pressure." Soul obeyed and held out her left arm, consumed with thoughts of her meister. In the past couple weeks, she had become completely at ease around Dr. Medusa. He wasn't creepy like Stein or annoying like Deathscythe; she found that she could quite easily zone out and trust Medusa to do his thing.
"Is there something else you're concerned about?" Medusa asked with his honeyed voice as he guided Soul's arm into the pressure bandage. Thinking suddenly of the demons plaguing her dreams, Soul stopped staring at the floor to look at the doctor.
Medusa's amber eyes were warm and inviting. His smile was sincere, but every nerve in Soul's body started screaming. Don't trust him. She didn't understand the origin of this impulse-she always thought Medusa was a straight up guy-but all she could see was his unblinking gaze and pronged goatee. Enemy. Behind the false smile, Medusa stared at the scythe like a viper slithering through grass towards its feeble prey. Any admission about the terrors that haunted her sleep dried up in Soul's throat, and all security she felt in the room was instantly gone.
Still smiling, Medusa steadily inflated the blood pressure cuff until it squeezed Soul's upper arm, which began to tremble. There are two impulses humans feel when they are in danger-fight or flight. Soul Eater wasn't a defenceless mouse, and she sure as hell never fled from something as small as a snake. In that moment, Soul wanted to transform her left arm into a blade, rip apart the medical cuff straining her bicep, and sink her scythe deep into Medusa's chest until his blood ran dark and thick down her sleeve. She wanted to silence this uncanny dread, to avenge a friend she couldn't name, to quench this nagging feeling that the world was a broken record and she was trapped in the dark while it played on forever.
"No," Soul said, overcome with horror. What the hell had gotten into her all of a sudden? To Medusa, she blurted, "Everything is good with me. Um, my blood pressure?"
Medusa's expression held no hint of disappointment or malevolence. "It's normal. Are you sure there isn't something else going on? Anything you tell me is confidential. I am a doctor, after all."
She quickly wriggled her arm free of the medical cuff. "Yeah I'm sure. Thanks for treating me and stuff." Soul headed out the door, and Medusa said that he expected her back next week for a check up. As she shuffled down the hall, refusing to look back at the doctor, Soul was already planning to skipping that appointment and every one after.
When she was several floors away from the clinic, the scythe leaned against the wall and slid down to the floor. Her left arm was still shaking, itching to transform. For the first time, Soul seriously wondered if the scar wasn't the only thing wrong with her.