Week One Long hot showers didn't work. Not enough heat, Maka grumbled. Not long enough.
Neither did her favoirte music. The song started, then faded beneath the quicksand of repetition, all sound fading from her. Boooooreing!
A carefully selected book, selected to appeal to her tastes, flumped.
She couldn't concentrate, and every sentence was boring, sapping a minute of her life.
Another minute. Restlessness.
Maka set the book on the carpet permanently.
Maka felt an unfulfilled wish in her gut. But she didn't know what it was. She would keep searching tomorrow. Today, she surrendered. To sleep. She dumped her hands on
the mattress, opening the blankets. She curled up under them, trying to gather trapped heat, pulling her pillow under her chin. Unlike most nights, sleep stole her quickly in its
waiting arms. She dreamed. She dreamed of Soul.
Dream Soul stood really close to Dream Maka. Dream Maka was slumped against Soul, all droopy and creased eyes. Soul was muttering fast. Once in a while an electric shock
would shoot up from his toes to his head, altering the physical colors of him. Shifting them. Soul's white hair became sun yellow, electric blue, etcetra. Though she didn't
understand it, it offended Maka. She felt her lips frown.
"No, Soul." She whined with her entire being.
"Stay still." He grabbed her wrist, touching his finger to her upturned palm.
A bright transparent symbol, all golden, popped out and gently atomized. He poked her lower ribs, and a pink symbol committed suicide. Soul kept searching her skin very fast,
a light frown on his face. Symbols glided around and past his head like bubbles. Popping all over the place. Maka laughed: it tickled. All of it tickled. Soul stared resentfully at
her.
"What Sir-pokes-a-lot?" Maka shot back.
"You're fading from me, Maka. You're disappearing." Soul looked like he was in shock.
His words came out slow, low, and dead-like. Maka looked at herself, realizing her flesh was fading into a transparent outline.
Soul interrupted her gawking. "Something in you is breaking you. I can't find it. Maybe if you could help, I could find it?"
Maka listened and understood. In life, what Soul was asking would have been impossible. Maka wouldn't have known where to start. But Maka harbored an undercurrent faith
in Soul. And Maka was sleeping. She let her guard down.
"Concentrate Maka." Soul lectured. "What are you missing? What do you lack? Mmph!"
She didn't realize letting her guard down would make her grab Soul's shirt collar and kiss his lips. She didn't expect Soul to pull her in his arms and hold on. A vivid purple
symbol burst from her right eye. Soul smiled, catching it in his fist.
"This is it Maka!"
Huddled together, hanging on each other comfortingly, they watched in awe as the beautiful thing making Maka disappear separated in a million tiny glittering pieces and
faded.
Maka glanced at Soul's relieved happy face.
"I'm so happy Maka. You're not going to die."
"Uh-huh." Maka droned.
Soul said some other stuff. Maka paid no mind to his blabbing about her life just barely clutched back from death. Who cared, when Soul was here and hers? She
interrupted, kissing Soul Eater Evan's weirdly shaped lips, tracing his fanged teeth with her tongue and memorizing their shape.
"Wow, yay! I didn't die. That hasn't not happened a billion times before. But you, Soul. You're a first. And a second and a third and a fourth..."
Maka's lips met Soul's weirdly shaped lips.
At that precise moment Maka awoke from her dream, realized what that meant. Her eyes widened to dinner plates.
"No." She whispered.