AN.
And Then. There Were None.
The colors had been bleached away. The world had turned monochrome, like they'd turned back the clock and gone back to a time where color had yet to be invented.
"How are you today, Maka?"
She giggled at a joke made only for her.
"That's great, Maka."
She was never as well as Soul hoped.
He sighed, letting his head fall against the cold cell wall. The Black Room and its red demon had all but vanished from his dreams, but this room—the cool stones echoing, the candle lights flickering wicked shadows that lurked on the walls like so many stringed puppets—was much, much worse.
Soul wore his exhaustion in the form of the deep bags under his eyes, like bruises to match his battle scars. Maka, bound by fetters deemed fit by Shinigami-sama to keep her in the cell, hiccupped a laugh.
The scythe growled his frustration.
"Dog," giggled his meister, huddled in the opposite corner. Her pigtails had long since come loose, and her hair was a disheveled, muted yellow mess. Her face was smudged with dirt and flecked with blood and marred by a grin that never moved.
The blood was not red.
Soul cracked a raw smile. "Very good, Maka. I guess dogs do growl."
"Wolf," she went on, seemingly encouraged. "What big eyes you have. What big teeth you have. What big—"
She paused, and the static smile slid from her face. There was a moment of silence in which Soul searched his meister's face for any sign of sanity.
"I hear butterflies."
Her green eyes burned in the candlelight like acid neon—a sickly, toxic thing. The madness clung to her like smoke, fogging her once-clear eyes and reducing her pupils into pinpricks.
The door to the cell creaked open, and rays of yellow light flooded in like the tide.
"I know you're in there somewhere, Maka," Soul told her, and he might have had better luck speaking to the cell wall. "I won't let you live like this."
"There's no difference, is there, Soul?" Kid. Grim-faced and ever-so-serious.
Soul shook his head, letting the iron-barred door fall shut behind him. "No," he said. "Nothing."
He felt Tsubaki's hand on his shoulder, and when she spoke, her voice was thick with sympathy. "You did what you had to, Soul. If the black blood hadn't been activated when it did, you'd both have died. At least this way there's still a chance that—"
That everything will be back to normal.
"It's better that we keep her in there, where she can't do any harm." Kid, again. Maybe he understands it better than Soul does.
"What do you think about in here, Maka?" He'd ask her, as they sat across from each other in the dim cell.
The spaces separating them spanned larger than the ten feet of stone between them.
Maka cocked her head, as if the question intrigued her. But the black blood running through her veins tainted any coherent answer she could have given. So, instead, she said, "You look awfully familiar."
"Oh yeah?" Soul chuckled. "That's a start."
"It's dark in here."
"It is a little, isn't it? I'll try and see if I can grab some extra candles next time."
"Not here," she clarified, huddling into herself so that her head rested on her knees. "Here."
Soul set his face in a grim scowl.
"I'll try and do something about that."
The apartment that Maka and Soul once shared fell into dusty, messy disorder. The laundry was done only when there was no other choice. Plates piled up.
Soul no longer slept in his bed. He dozed fitfully at the kitchen table while dust collected around him, or on the couch as the silence multiplied. He ate whatever was readily available in the fridge. The emptiness smoldered all around him.
Blair would stay out of his way most of the time, sneaking to Tsubaki to tell her, "He's like the walking dead, nya. His heart's not in anything. I think he's close to giving up."
The walls closed in around him when he lay to sleep, and he felt himself spiraling into some one-dimensional plane in which his thoughts became of more substance than he did.
He felt like he was the crazy one.
"Watch out, Maka," he said to no one, draping a forearm over his face. "Or I just might come in there after you."
He dreamt of chasing her, but the door to the Black Room was always locked.
He swore he'd be patient. Swore he wouldn't lose his temper. Swore he'd wait as long as it took.
But the tray fell from his hands like two magnets repelling each other and the plates hit the floor with such a clatter and his hands flew to her shirt collar and clenched the fabric so tightly that his knuckles turned white and he had to do the same with his teeth so he didn't beat the sanity back into her.
Soul stood there for a breath or two, holding onto the last vestiges of his sanity, feeling hope slip further down the rabbit hole.
Maka, with her striped tie askew, asked uncertainly, "Why are you so mad at me?"
The weapon couldn't meet his meister's wide eyes, but gradually loosened his grip.
There was a pile of books sitting untouched in the corner that had been pulled from Maka's bookshelf back home, in the hopes that she'd emerge from her half-coherent shell for the things that she loved. It hadn't worked, as was evident from the fine layer of dust that coated them.
"I'm mad because—" he swallowed because his heart was in his throat and he needed to force it down to his chest to beat properly—"because there's only one of you."
She giggled a little at this.
Soul caught himself in the act of forming a fist, stepped back from his friend, and instead fixed her tie.
"Sorry about dinner. I'll get you another one. Just give me a minute."
On his way out, Soul stooped to scoop the pile of books into his arms.
And he'd sit on the steps to Shibusen, dismembering flowers as he imagined each and every one of them to be the little demon.
"You're a Death Scythe now, you know."
He knew.
"Why don't you get a new partner? You could go out and try and find some clues that way. Hunt down Medusa. Or the Demon Sword. You can't do that all alone," they'd say (friends or teachers or strangers, they tended to blur together).
To which he would respond, "I do it with Maka, or not at all."
And when time passed and he got tired of saying that, he took to saying nothing at all.
Maka lay on the ground, her hair pooling about her head like ribbons of pale blood. She didn't move much, and seemed to be listening to the very thrum of the earth. Soul took up his usual spot, slumped up against the opposite wall, his fingers intertwined and elbows resting on his knees.
Shibusen shuddered and bucked as if assailed by some unholy tornado.
Soul's red eyes travelled upwards, dull and uninterested.
"That'd be Medusa," he voiced aloud, and then, after a moment, he made a face. "Or is it Asura now?" He looked darkly pensive before he simply shrugged and forget he ever thought about it.
There was another thunderous rattling- a cyclopean army travelling overhead, perhaps—and dust trickled down from the ceiling. Cries and shouts and screams.
"Do you know where hell is?"
Soul started vaguely, like he had been jostled from a dream, and looked towards Maka, who had without a sound stood to her feet. He blinked upwards at her, and, without missing a beat, replied, "Chrona's told me."
"It's in my head."
"So I've heard."
"Soul," she said, and suddenly, the bonds were gone. "Let's go."
He looked up sharply, allowing himself a jolt of optimism that he had thought was long gone—but her eyes were still like poison, and her smile spoke nothing of reason
He got up anyway.
The door was unlocked and Maka's dirty gloved hands found its way into his own. Her familiar wavelength rushed into her and he realized he had been a desert living a millennia of drought without her, all of her crashing into him at once—trepidation, calm, warmth, pigheadedness, curiosity, gentleness. All of her.
Soul knew this was far from the ending he wanted—Maka whole, their partnership forged anew, miracles worked—but he smirked and responded to her gentle squeeze.
Flesh turned to metal, bone turned to blade.
And the world turned to black.
When Soul opened his eyes again, he was in the Black Room.
His tie was too tight, his suit was too small, and the music skipped. Just like he remembered it.
"A rendezvous," the demon was sniggering, clapping his over-sized hands together. "A reunion! A get-together!"
Soul bared his teeth in irritation, his fingered picking at the leather chair he found himself sitting in.
"I was kind of looking forward to never seeing you again."
Was it just the lighting, or did the room seem more drab that he remembered? The wallpaper bled splotches, the curtains were frayed, the piano scuffed.
"Ah, now, now, Soul. You should know that I'm not the only one here for this soiree," the little demon chuckled, unfazed. His jagged teeth glinted in the candlelight like something deadly. He gestured with a gnarled thumb behind him.
Soul gripped the arm tightly as his meister emerged from behind the ragged-looking drapes.
"Maka."
She peaked at him through pale bangs, looking unsure and rather embarrassed. She looked at home in the room, balanced delicately on the high heels that it gave her. But Maka did not resemble the absent wreck in the cell; her eyes possessed the sharp lucidity that he had missed.
"Soul—"
He had enveloped her in a hug before anything else could be said.
"I've been looking for you."
"Touching," the demon drawled. His eyes shone with pleasure and he seemed to have all the time in the world. "Quite the scene."
"Soul, listen," Maka said, but could not suppress the relief in her smile. "If you can't pull yourself out of the black blood soon, you're going to be stuck here."
"I don't care," he returned, and he could not let her go for the fear that she might vanish. "I don't care."
"The madness'll just take you over and keep you here and you'll—" she looked frantic to explain, and her brow furrowed in anxiety— "you'll end up like me. The door'll lock. There's no getting out."
"I can't do it," Soul hissed, and now he pressed his forehead to hers. "I just can't do it anymore. I won't go back hoping that you'll break free."
"I don't want you to have to stay here, too."
"I want to stay here. I'm tired of dreaming."
"We can't—"
The Black Room rippled, like a spider's web agitated from a long ways off. The roof was beginning to buckle, and the madness was seeping in.
The demon spun the key lazily around his finger. "All too late, dear Soul. No more waiting, isn't that great? Time's up."
There was darkness, except for the red.
"What a good weapon you are, Soul," she said to no one, face pressed against the cool blade. "So good to me."
The scythe said nothing, but the blood dripped off his blade like water.