So this sort of happened a few days ago. I decided to upload it to maybe get your opinions? It might turn out to be big. That's what it feels like. It started out as a prompt from Puru (darkpurply), but I deviated completely.
Please tell me what you think!
I do not own Soul Eater, nor any of the characters. Despite of what my brain may think.
{Rated M for possible future content}
It has been raining all day. The hotel room is unfamiliar and suffocating. The view out the window is dull. Soul is sprawled on top of one bed, staring at the ceiling as if he's watching a thrilling movie with an intricate plotline. And she's driving herself crazy.
She could occupy her mind with some light reading, but she's too stubborn. She needs to torture herself and stand there and glare at the rain. Count the hours and the minutes and the seconds it will take until Shinigami-sama or Stein-hakase or someone contacts them about the reason they're in cold, wet northern Scotland, of all places, blind-guessing at their objective.
Well, Soul couldn't care less. He seems content enough to her, whiling away the hours in a day-off-at-long-last mood. He's satisfied with the motorcycle rental, even though he doesn't think that they'll have a chance to use it, and he doesn't mind the humidity and the rain. He suggests they "take the train and go explore a forest or somethin'", but she can't force a single affirmative word out of her mouth.
She smells a rat. This is not how missions work. You're supposed to locate where in the world the outlaw soul-eater presently is, get there, track it down, beat it to a helpless pulp and head back home. All this waiting is not what usually happens at all and she can't get it out of her head that Shibusen is hiding something from them again and they want to keep her and Soul away from Death City. Images of "BLACK BLOOD" written in cheap blinking neon lights swirl and boom in her head and she's worried that they'll go back to find the whole city in shambles or just plainly gone.
"Hey," he calls from somewhere behind her. "Stop it."
She peels her eyes off the glass, because she wasn't even looking at the rain anymore, and lets her head drop. She looks at her finger rapidly and loudly tapping on the windowsill and orders it to stop misbehaving. Sends him an apologetic look through the still, dusty air of the old hotel room.
"No, I meant- I meant, stop worrying, Maka," he sighs and sits up.
"Oh." He looks tired and not quite as content as she thought him to be. "Um. Okay."
He pats the mattress so she shuffles over and flops on the bed. "I'm just worried that, you know. I mean. What are we doing here?"
"We're waiting? They'll have us hurrying all over the place soon, count your blessings," he says and runs fingers through his too long hair, pushing it out of his face.
She just looks at the ceiling, trying to find the same fascination in the activity as he does. It mostly frowns at her and maybe orders her out of the room. She's not welcomed by Scottish Ceiling. She doesn't feel welcome by Scottish Anything, really. Soul seems to.
She thinks she wants a shower. She hopes the water's warm. But that would make her sleepy and they need to stay up until it's actually night-time, because they'll need to take on a full day's work tomorrow. She hopes they will, at least.
He has his back to her and he's taken her place in looking out the window. She wants to nudge him from behind and maybe rewind a bit to when he asked if she wanted to go hunt imaginary Scottish fairies. She wants to snake a hand in his shirt and see if she can warm her hand up. He looks warm.
"Hey?" she calls.
"Hm?"
"Let's go on that walk?"
Soul decides walking won't take them anywhere he wants to be, especially in this rain. They run to the train station and Maka hopes they have the right tickets for the train they're boarding.
The ride is long and the train is pretty much empty. He's semi-excited about all the green outside and he prods her for equal parts of excitement from her every time he spots an animal near the tracks. She grins at the white-haired child sitting next to her and pushes him back in his seat so that she can see out the window as well.
He doesn't even complain about it.
The lightning flashes like sunlight in this shade-drenched place, and the rumble of thunder is sounding closer by the minute. She's just grateful that her pigtails will get wet and not fly loose in the wind, obscuring her vision and testing the sensitivity of her rage-switches.
Their umbrellas are already useless, bent and twisted inside out from the violence of the wind. She questions her brain about the reasons that let her voluntarily follow him here, but the only thing she has to say for herself is, hey, it's not the middle of winter, they'll survive.
He's laughing at the weather (or with the weather, she really does wonder whether he has any supernatural powers other than shape-shifting, sometimes) and she wants to keep her seriousness and grave mood going strong, but the unusually large drops of water hitting her feels purifying and relaxing. She thinks she should be scolding him for being out in the rain. She's glad that this is cancelled out by the fact that she'd also have to scold herself.
She's keeping her gloves on though, for better or for worse. They may not have an official objective yet, but this is still in the wider territory where their mission is supposed to be carried out.
He seems to be prepared and aware of his surroundings too. He's walking ahead, scouting, looking intently at the shadows tall trees cast and sniffing the air.
"Soul?" She hates how surprised her voice sounds. "Are you looking for elves?"
He ignores her and strides ahead. She sighs and follows. Calls his name again. He ignores her.
They reach a meadow. There's a small shallow not-really-lake that looks especially ominous under this periodic, naturally electric light. He turns to her and smiles his familiar shark-teeth grin and it turns demonic in the rapid changes of light she is not used to.
"What?" she asks, hugging herself to keep her coat from obeying every single command howled by the wind. The multitude of trees and narrow openings to slip through make its whistling eerie and she may or may not have started believing in half-broken memories of stories about wood elves and sprites read to her while she was still a child and typically half-asleep.
"This!" He excitedly points to the lake. "This is a 'loch'!"
She wants to mock his childishness and she wants to tell him that a 'loch' must, by default, be bigger than this. This here, amazed little boy, is mostly a deep, wide puddle, strictly speaking; a sign that the earth adjusts to the stratosphere's directions 'round here, you know?
She smiles instead. He scoffs and she joins him in the meadow, because it's not very wise to stand under a bunch of trees while lightning makes evening closely resemble a sunny day.
He says something but the wind is blowing away from her and she can't hear him. She moves closer and motions 'what?' to him.
"Do you have a hair-band?" he shouts in her ear and the rain starts letting up.
She laughs and pulls one off her wrist. "You need a haircut," she tells him and he makes a point of taking his time picking up each of his white strands of hair and tucking it into a weird samurai-looking do.
His implied attentions are lost on her, though, because she's spotted something that doesn't belong in this scenery. In this world.
She's not entirely sure whether the light caught onto something and transfigured it completely (but there is no sun), or if her eyesight has finally abandoned her, after lots and lots of squinting at printed letters in the dark (but she has obligatory monthly physical examinations- nine days ago her eyes worked perfectly fine).
"Did you see that?" she asks him and takes a few steps toward the thicker end of the woods.
"What?" His voice takes a plunge for the usual low and bored, now that shouting over extreme weather phenomena is no longer necessary. "Maka?"
It's her turn, now, to ignore him. She runs to where she thought she saw it.
This tree is old, the bark is sturdy and compact. She looks up and sees its leaves dancing to a wind different from the one destroying her hair. She places a palm on the trunk and as Soul's hands grab her shoulders, she mentally chops herself. What did she think this was? Is she the one going insane now?
"Think we should head back," Soul asks but doesn't bother making it sound like a question.
She decisively nods and decides the shower she thought she wanted might be what she needs. A cold shower. Cold water on her head. Not rain. Not this rain.
"You cold?" he asks, kicking a twig on the ground.
"No," she says and feels a chill down her spine.
"But you're shivering," he says, noncommittal and always more intrigued by the twig.
"I'm fine."
A/N: Gimme all your precious thoughts. Please. I'm being polite and all.
As always, and on a more serious note, thank you for reading!