Author's Note- I'm not sure what this is, but I apologize in advance because I don't know how to feel about it. I'm still getting a feel for these characters, I guess? Anyway, this is a three-parter, part two should be up tomorrow-ish, and part three by the end of the weekend (ideally).
His
It was probably avoidable. If he had just been paying attention, he might have caught this early, seen the signs, nipped it in the bud. He isn't sure if that would have made things better or worse, but not letting himself get to this place would probably have been smart. But then again, he's Soul Eater Evans, and no amount of cool can make up for the fact that he's a fucking idiot sometimes. Especially when it comes to one Maka Albarn, Scythemeister; she's the smart one, not him. And she makes him crazy.
That was the heart of the problem. Bad enough they're essentially tethered at the soul, but doid she have to be on his mind 24/7 as well? It's a little ridiculous, and he was becoming increasingly reliant on his ability to hold a poker face. He might be clinging to his composure by a thread, but at least he didn't have to let anybody know that. (Well, Tsubaki probably knew, but she was too perceptive for her own good or his mental health.)
If he spends an entire afternoon listening to her humming while she putters around the apartment and wondering if she realizes it's a tune she picked up from him, that's his business. When she drags him out to the training grounds for solo work, all he has to do is make sure he grumbles about it loudly enough and no one has to know he secretly loves those extra practice sessions, just the two of them with their souls chiming in perfect harmony. If the reason he flunked Stein's latest test is because five minutes into the exam he got caught up in staring at the way the eraser end of Maka's pencil would get tangled up in her hair and make her right pigtail sway every couple of minutes because she was bent so close to the paper... well, no one would really be that surprised that he flunked anyway. Maka cared more about his grades than he did most days, anyway.
Soul resonance has emotional side effects. It's a simple fact. Sharing soul-space with someone puts you into a uniquely vulnerable position, and it's not uncommon for occasional romantic inclinations to crop up, especially if a weapon/meister pair reach a deeper level of resonance than they had achieved before. Most of the time it's short-term, just chemicals in your brain going haywire from your soul wavelength adjusting. That had been the source of the brief, bizarre dalliance between Kid and Liz (seriously, no one could ever convince Soul that hadn't been weird, and he was pretty sure both parties involved agreed with him once it was over). Hell, even Ox and Harvar had a weird man-crush thing going on for a week or two a couple years back, before the effect had faded and left them both ridiculously embarrassed.
So, yeah, when this had started he hadn't caught it early. He'd noticed right away, of course. He had first caught himself doing that deeply uncool creepy stalker staring thing one particular morning when his meister- damn her- decided to parade around the kitchen in a long t-shirt (his!) and not a whole lot else. His reaction had been a little more visceral than what you'd expect from a typical guy who had an admittedly very pretty girl half-naked right in front of him. A hard-on could be expected, but the stupid fluttery feeling in his chest had not been.
He hadn't thought it was a big deal. It was normal. So what if he had a little bit of a crush on his meister? These things happened to the best of them, and with his and Maka's unusually high resonance rate, it wasn't surprising that it would happen to one of them sooner or later. He'd spend a couple weeks blushing around her and maybe taking a few more cold showers than usual, and eventually whatever neuron misfire was causing it would settle down and things would go back to normal.
Except it hadn't gone away. The staring he swore he absolutely could not help for the life of him, the constant struggle not to go pink if she smiled at him (and thank Death he's not prone to blushing much or this would have gotten embarrassing fast), the constant heart palpitations, for fuck's sake... it didn't clear up after a few awkward weeks. If anything, it got worse.
The realization that his newfound romantic inclinations toward his partner weren't going away had been horrifying. The realization that came about two months after that that his newfound romantic inclinations weren't even remotely newfound was even worse.
Maybe if Patty weren't such a little paparazzo-in-training who loved to document every single group outing with a photo or sixty, he wouldn't have had the occasion to see a photo of them from a few years back. It had been taken maybe a couple months after the battle with Asura, on some group outing he couldn't remember the details of any more. His arm had been thrown around Maka's shoulders, she had been laughing (for an amateur, Patty was strikingly good at capturing the moment), and he had been watching her with an expression that he could not describe any other way except 'besotted.'
And that had been the start of a slow slide into the inevitable realization that this stupid crush (which was actually something a whole lot bigger and more important than a crush, but one big admission at a time, okay?) had started actual years ago and lasted this long with no signs of fading even the slightest bit. He didn't know how to feel about it. On the one hand, several rather significant aspects of his life made marginally more sense. On the other hand, at least when he'd been ignorant about what his own stupid heart was doing behind his back, he'd been able to keep his cool at least a little bit.
Fat chance of that now. Strictly speaking, he knew he wasn't as obvious as he felt like he was (at least, he hoped not!), but that wasn't saying much, considering he felt like he was walking around with a damn neon sign painted on his forehead.
If it had been any other girl this had happened with, he'd have just manned up and done something about it. Kissed her or asked her out or whatever the hell. But this wasn't just a girl, this was Maka, and Maka (as usual) made everything a whole lot more complicated.
Just figured, right? He had to go and fall for the one girl he had about a snowball's chance in hell with. For one thing, she was his meister. And his roommate. And his best friend. They had a good thing going, and had for the better part of a decade. All of that was important, dammit, and he didn't wanna fuck it up.
Less important, but probably more painful to think about, was the fact that Maka had made it crystal clear that she didn't see him that way. She wasn't lining up the guys for dates, but she didn't need to to let him know the door wasn't just closed, it was dead-bolted shut. I mean, how many books to the cranium did a guy have to take before he got the message? He knew Maka loved him platonically- if he asked she'd probably say something nausea-inducing along the lines of "like a brother"- but last time he checked, girls with a violent streak tried to curb those tendencies around guys they liked romantically. Right? Shinigami knows Liz didn't beat up anybody if she wanted to get into their pants.
So yeah, he was screwed. Unless this miraculously went away (and with every day that went by with him still feeling like the butt of some enormous cosmic joke played by the most deranged Cupid of all time, that seemed less and less likely), he was gonna spend the rest of his increasingly uncool existence hung up on a girl who probably viewed him more like an oversized butter knife than an actual human man.
It wasn't hard to hide it during resonance. In battle they both had bigger things to worry about than his feelings, and he was focused on that. As long as she stayed out of the Black Room, everything would be fine and she'd never be any the wiser, and their partnership would stay intact. And that, right now, was Soul's ultimate goal. Maintain the status quo, preserve the partnership, because it might not be everything he wanted, but it was still pretty damn good and probably better than he deserved anyway.
He still got a lot of partnership requests, and ignored them. He still got a lot of requests of a more personal nature and... well, to be honest, sometimes he was tempted not to ignore those. There was part of him that was still self-deluded enough to think that maybe all he needed to cure this was a distraction. The greater part of him, though, couldn't go through with it. It wouldn't be fair to whatever poor girl whose time he took up, and leading people on wasn't classy. Wouldn't work, anyway.
He did, however, start spending less of his free time with her. Used to be that whenever they weren't on a mission or out with their friends, it was invariably just the two of them hanging out, occasionally with totally innocent invasion of personal space involved. Well, innocent when it was her throwing her legs over his lap. When he threw a "friendly" arm around her shoulders because he couldn't go one more second without touching her or he was going to go insane... maybe not quite so much. Now, though, he tried to avoid spending quite that much time alone with her. As much as he loved her company (as weird as that sounded considering how often he suffered encyclopaedia-induced concussions while in it), he knew he needed to give himself some space. He started spending more time hanging around with Black*Star and Kirikou. He started spending more time alone, combing the record stores of Death City for rare recordings or just plain bumming around the city.
Maybe it was a masochistic impulse, putting space between them, but he needed it. It was kinda ironic that Maka, who had always kept him sane when the black blood was singing in his veins and his mind was scattered and far away, was now the cause of him losing grip on reason in a rather different way. But that was how it was. He was stuck in limbo, unable to act on his feelings because that would alienate his partner but unable to get rid of them either, and to deal with that he had to distance himself a little. Not a lot, not so much that she would notice something was wrong, but enough that he could stop and breathe and think about video games and Kirikou's far more mundane lady troubles and creative ways to kill Blair if she didn't stop bugging him and just generally not feel like quite such a pathetic sap for awhile.
It was a good system. He couldn't help but wonder how long it would last.