(tempest)
she's a hurricane, tearing the world to pieces
Swing. Cut. Slash. Down. Swing. Cut. Slash. Down.
She's watching herself-her current self-do these things through the spyglass-consciousness of her soul, where it feels as if she's drowning, but not in water. The liquid she sinks in is red and thick, clotting and meaty and tasting of copper.
Blood. She's drowning in blood. Black blood.
Not-Maka laughs hysterically as she perches on Soul in his scythe form, her coattails fiendishly elongated and twisted like a pair of dead branches on an oak tree. Crona, her opponent, watches her in the fits of her mirth with something like apprehension, true, fearful apprehension, dawning on his face as he backs away, Ragnarok in his hand. The sword has a mouth, and it's singing to her, and the blood in her veins is humming to a tuneless song.
Soul is screaming, yelling for her to stop this right now, Maka snap out of it, fucking snap out of it dammit, this isn't you, but Not-Maka is willfully ignorant to her partner's cries of warning and lashes out wildly with imprecise yet deadly movements. She teeters like a puppet operated by a drunkard, her smile toothy and wide like an alligator's. If snakes could smile, Not-Maka would smile just like a serpent. Like Medusa, who she presumes is currently fighting Stein and/or her dad.
Medusa, the snake-woman with the vectors. Arrows. Lances drawn in black and stained with the inkblots of fallen meisters.
Crona yells something about not being able to handle weird, giggly girls and Not-Maka giggles even more and brings Soul across in a sweeping arc, catching Crona across the front and giving him a brutal gash on his torso. Ragnarok immediately intervenes and the black blood stems the flow, clotting and knitting everything back together again until Not-Maka swings again like a batter at a baseball game and Crona goes flying into a pillar and there's dust and Not-Maka is grabbing him by the hair, gnawing on his skull, smashing his face into the wall and grinding it there like his face is a piece of cheese and she feels in the mood for pizza, pizza with red tomato sauce that looks like regular blood which she doesn't have anymore because the whole world is turning-turning-turning like a top or a whirring dervish and pizza sounds good right now Soul would love it wouldn't you Soul wouldn't you wouldn't you wouldn'tyou-
Real-Maka gasps in the blood ocean and regrets it, tasting the bitter tang of iron on her tongue. Everything is so dark down here, but outside, it is too bright and she can see all the atrocities her other self is committing. The madness is everywhere, pervading the tiniest cracks and crevices, latching onto even the smallest particles of dust, into the atoms and quarks and the entire school is filled with it. Black, red, and rainbow colors are merging into something impossibly radiant and fathomlessly dark at the same time. The Kishin is stirring.
A hideous blackness looms in front of her, so vast and empty that she scans it for even one dot of light and finds nothing. This is unlike space, unlike hell, unlike anything she's ever encountered. Her blood sings.
The Kishin.
The Kishin is here.
Without warning, a voice is in her head, her own head, not the head of this Not-Maka who has suddenly taken over. It is the voice of a dragon, serpentine and slithering and sinuous, and it creeps into the nooks of her brain and lays there, watching her.
Give in to it, the dragon says. Give in to the desire, to the desperation. You will feel better if you let it go.
Never, Real-Maka replies, but the dragon whips its tail and shows her Soul, and Soul is drowning as well, but he is dying while she isn't. The black blood is dragging him down, sucking him into the floor of a checkerboard room in alternating black-red tiles, and sitting on the piano is a little red imp in a suit, and the imp is dragon and the dragon is the imp, and they are both saying, Give in to it, Maka. Save him.
Don't do it! Soul shouts, his face wracked with pain, his eyes squeezed shut. Don't mind me, just go! Save yourself while there's still time! You can't let the madness take you, Maka!
But I can't let it take you, either, she thinks, her fingers growing numb and her face feeling as though it's on fire. She can't let Soul die.
Save him, then, the imp whispers into her ear. Save Soul, and free yourself from these mortal shackles.
You are powerful.
But you deny yourself that power.
When you deny your own power, you become weak. And when you are weak, you cannot protect the ones you love.
Papa, Soul, Black Star, Death the Kid, Tsubaki, Blair, all of them.
They will die for you.
Because of you.
Do you want that, Real-Maka?
Or are you not as real as you think you are?
But she is real. Isn't she? Suddenly, she is quite terrified. Not-Maka is with the imp, and she is grinning her stupid lunatic grin and she has Crona's head in her red-stained gloves.
I'm more real than you, Not-Maka, Not-Maka singsongs, skipping around. I'm real and you're not, I'm real and you're not, fuck you, you dumb bitch, dumb bitch, dumbdumbbitchbitchdumbBITCH
Shut up! she shrieks, but Not-Maka is still singsonging and twirling around her like a carousel and she's starting to forget who she is. Her friends are fading to pinpricks of illumination on the vast tides of the blackness, before dimming and dying out like stars. And then the black-hole gravitation of her tainted soul is sucking them away to oblivion.
Come back, she calls, but her words are meaningless, because this is infinity and nothing and no two things can exist in one location at the same time, much less several people she loves. There is no room for love here.
Save them, Maka.
The dragon beckons. The imp drags her forward. She glides across invisible stairs with an effortless grace, and it feels like she's tethered to balloons and is floating off the ground, off the earth, out of the atmosphere and to the sun, it is so warm and not-dark-
Save them, Maka.
Make yourself real again.
She feels like Alice in Wonderland, watching her Not-Self beating up Crona, and she realizes that there is something very right about it all, that it makes sense, that there is no logic besides the rules we create, and that Stein is an idiot and Medusa is a whore and Crona is a mealy-mouthed weakling not worthy of her attention.
She doesn't want power. She is power.
Soul is safe.
Real-Maka howls in wolfish delight, her pigtails coming loose, her hair cascading behind her as her scythe turns a brilliant, stained-glass crimson replete with kaleidoscopic whorls, and she is wielding Death itself in her fragile, bird-like arms, and when she swings it down Crona screams but his screams are cut short as the blade cleaves through his body, bisecting him, and the black blood is not responding. It has abandoned him. It is in her now.
Ragnarok wails a funeral dirge.
Crona is bleeding.
She is smiling.
She is finally complete.