~inspired by reading horror manga and a recent re-reading of 'The Yellow Wallpaper.' A bit weird, I know, but it's a silly little drabble. Anyway, enjoy!

My mother has her faults, but she did get me reading at a young age, which has done me so much good you wouldn't believe. She read the newspaper to me even when I didn't understand it, she read me Dr. Seuss, but what she read most to me before bedtime were fairy tales, except she could never quite get all the way through them. I don't think my mama ever quite understood the concept of 'pretend', you know, or maybe she thought I was too young to really understand what she was saying, but I remember.

She'd come, stroke my hair in the way I loved, and say, "So Cinderella's wicked stepsister, determined to fit into the glass slippers when the prince came to call, cut off her toes and part of her heel— oh, honestly! That's ridiculous. She cut off her own toes? She'd pass out from blood loss. At the very least the stupid girl wouldn't be in a state to be receiving any royalty."

Or:

"So the sister told the little mermaid that if she did not kill her sleeping prince and bathe her feet in his blood, the sea witch's curse would take hold and she would dissolve into sea foam at dawn— you know what, this is really silly. You know never to make deals with a witch, don't you, sugar? Especially not for a boy, of all things, a boy you've just met! The women in these stories, I swear!"

Or, and this one haunted me until I screamed myself hoarse at ballet class and tried to strangle another little girl with the ribbons of my shoes:

"The executioner did as she asked, and raised his giant axe to lop off her aching, dancing feet, and— again with the impractical blood loss, my god! Hmm? Oh, all right, I'll keep going. So he lops off her feet, um, and she finally fell to the ground at rest— but the little scarlet slippers and the tiny white feet she had been so proud of danced away at once, into the night, leaving a trail of red footprints! The executioner made her a fine set of crutches, but every night the little shoes and her beautiful feet would come to dance outside her window."

That one stuck with me for a long time. Once my papa made her let me quit ballet I either went barefoot or I wore the ugliest, clompiest shoes I could convince her to buy for me. Those are the kinds of fairy tales my mother read to me at night, and although I never could quite remember the dreams I had afterwards, when the thing finally happened it was so very familiar… Well, maybe after those stories, everything that happened isn't so surprising after all.

I'll start at the beginning, or at least, the most important part.

Soul is a very monstery boy, but he's my best friend and a lot more, and when I eventually told him about the fairy tales, he laughed and laughed and then said, "I guess that explains why you put up with me, then, eh?"

Which is ridiculous. I don't put up with him because I can ignore his eyes and his teeth; I fell for him because of the eyes and the teeth. I love his wild-wolf bite and his bump-in-the-night eyes. I never told him that, of course, not in so many words, but it's true. Regular people have never held all that much interest for me, which I think is why I enjoy the Academy and Death City so much— there are very few people there that are anything approaching normal.

That includes me, I suppose. But we'll get to that.

Anyway, Soul eats souls, hilariously enough, and though of course I've never done that myself, it's a thing that's always stuck in the deeper bits of my brain, the parts that like rare meat and rough sex and sleeping till two.

"What do they taste like?" I asked him.

"Hm. Soft. Kind of… like Jello? I mean, they're not salty or sweet or anything, but they're really good."

"You like them?"

"Yeah."

He really did. He always got this heavy, sated look on his face after eating one; it curled my toes, to be totally honest. "It doesn't bug you? That they'resouls you're eating?" I asked him once, when we were seventeen and had just started sleeping together in a way that… wasn't platonic. It was a funny sort of in-between time for me, when I was trying to figure out how to navigate the murky waters between 'friends who stare into each other's eyes way too much' and 'people who mash their naughty bits together at every opportunity'.

I got that one from Black Star. He's just so skilled with words, that one.

Anyway, we were lying in bed and I remember I was panicking slightly and wondering if I was being boring and not talking enough, and what exactly proper adult pillow talk consisted of, and that popped out of my mouth.

He sort of looked at me for a long time, then he shook his head and got up to get us some water, and that was that, or so I thought.

It was another question that stuck in my head, though, the same as those dancing bloody shoes. I've always been like that, I get ahold of an idea and I can't let it go for the life of me. It's why I'm so good at reading, because I just have absolutely got to find out what's next in the story or I'm useless for anything else. My papa used to call me a conceptual pitbull.

So later, when we were nineteen and eighteen respectively, when we had moved past the awkward and knew pretty much everything about each other that anyone could possibly know, I asked him again. I tried to be a little more roundabout, though. "So was that witch's soul different than a regular one?"

He considered it carefully. That's one thing I love about Soul. Even when I'm being an idiot, or pushy or bossy, he at least tries to take me seriously once he knows it matters to me. "Maybe a little," he said at last. "Not so much as you'd think, though."

"So it felt the same as eating a pre-kishin's soul?" I pushed, and the word 'felt' made him squint.

"Tasted about the same, yeah," he said firmly, very cleverly not answering what I'd actually asked in that infuriating way of his, because what I wanted to know was how it made him feel, to know he was one of a very small percentage of the human species that could survive ingesting the soul of something pretty darn evil without also being corrupted. (I told him once, jokingly, that maybe he was a higher form of evolution, a different sub-species, and of course it didn't go over well at all). I suppose I was jealous, honestly. He's so special, he's literally made to take care of the lingering remnants of madness, and doing something like that, taking a piece of what was once another human being inside of you (that's not a dirty joke, get your mind out of the gutter) has just got to make a person feel… different. I don't know, it didn't make much sense at the time, but it didn't have to. I just wanted to know, and when I want to learn something I always, always do.

But for that moment I let it go, because he started kissing me, and that's always very distracting, especially if he's all bloody and beaten up, which he was at the time, but also because, just for a moment, I fancied I could taste a hint of soul in his mouth.

I started reading about it, doing heavier research. Of course I'd graduated with full honors from the Academy, which is the world's leading expert on souls, but I wanted to know more, was ravenous for it, so I went to Stein and then Kid, and they hemmed and hawed a little and then gave me books after I shouted at them a little. Gentle persuasion, really. I read about how the spiraling shape many souls together will naturally take, first photographed during the 1951 influenza pandemic in England, helped guide Watson and Crick to their discovery of DNA's double helix. The photo in their paper is really spooky, and I highly recommend reading it, it's just this big beautiful rope of blurry white souls above Liverpool. I read that, and I read about the high concentrations of noble gases within souls. There were some Russian scientists in the late fifties, the same lab that made those hideous two-headed dogs, who ran mad experiments on souls. They compressed them, they exposed them to extremes of heat and cold and all sorts of chemicals, they force-fed them to various animals, and— the thing that really sealed my fate— they exposed each soul to things that had belonged to the person in life.

What I mean is this: for example, there was one old woman who died and donated her soul, and in the two days before it dissipated naturally, they brought it into contact with photographs of her husband, and her quilting basket, and the chair she'd died in. There was a clear and measurable increase in phosphorescence levels of her soul around the photo and the chair, and a shift in wavelength from around 450 nanometers, which is blue, to 550 nanometers, which is yellow-green.

That paper, I read over and over until the pages were frayed. It meant something, it did, and I knew it. After a while Soul got a bit worried, but he's always been a mother hen so I tried to explain that there was nothing to worry about, I'd just gotten an idea in my head and was running with it, but he kept coming to my room to hover.

It came to a head when we were at Deathbucks, sitting with the whole gang as we rarely did those days, what with Kid being the new Shinigami, and Tsubaki and Black Star busy planning the wedding, but that day we were all together. It was nice, it really was, at least I thought so, until Soul smacked the table so hard my coffee slurped over the edge of the cup and started yelling at me.

Things like, "Maka, you haven't come out of your room in a fucking week and you barely eat anymore!" and, "I don't know what the hell you want me to do! You ask me every fucking day what it's like and I can't explain it, I don't feel anything!"

"I ask you every day?" I said in confusion, pulling out my notebook, the one chock-full of the references I'd been compiling about souls, with some vague idea of getting together with Stein to write a paper.

"Yes!" he shouted, and the look in his eyes—

It was very fairy-tale, and it scared me to death.

"I'm sorry," I told him, and believe you me I meant it, because the last thing I ever wanted to do was worry Soul, the person I loved more than anything.

But everyone was staring at us, and finally Kid forced us both into taking a few week's vacation. We decided to go to Italy, to the same place we met Crona, because Soul goes nuts for the architecture and I go nuts for pasta and museums.

It was so much fun, I can't even tell you. I felt lighter than I had in weeks, and I left the notebook in out hotel room every day, and I didn't worry about souls at all because I had my Soul and his wonderful mou—

Ah, anyway, it was a lot of fun.

But then—

Soul was sleeping in on our fifth morning there, but I was wide awake, so I decided I'd go out and fetch us some breakfast and bring it back to him, only I got a bit lost and my Italian, despite all Soul's tutoring attempts, is pretty much limited to asking where the bathroom is. I tried stopping people and asking them the name of our hotel with lots of confused hand gestures, but then they couldn't really explain very well how to get back. One nice gentleman drew me a rough map. Looking back I think I reversed it, or something, because by noon I'd been lost for four hours and I learned later that I'd ended up very far from the hotel.

The streets were sort of shady, and I don't mean cool and dark, I mean criminal. Liz's territory, you know? I tried to swagger like she does. It must have worked, because I only got almost-pickpocketed twice.

And then I turned a corner, and there it was. Il Museo delle anime erranti. The Museum of Wandering Souls. I could piece together that much, even if I couldn't pronounce it without butchering it, and before I even realized what I was doing I was going through the doors.

It was quiet, and small, and the man at the front counter had milky eyes and a shaking voice. I bought a ticket and started looking, and it was all so beautiful I wanted to cry.

There are ways to suspend souls in a sort of stasis, but they're very uncommon and can be rather unreliable, not to mention most major religionsseriously frown upon it, along with most governments. Anyway, the majority of uncorrupted human souls dissipate within the first four hours after death, though they can last naturally up to a week or so; you've got to get it done fast if you want to keep one. Stein has a few that he brings out to impress the freshmen, though he's never told me who they belong to.

This museum had a collection like I'd never even imagined. There were shelves lining every room, and each shelf was crammed with the special, delicate red glass jars that are needed for the procedure. Red glass is spendy, because it has to be made by adding gold, but for whatever reason it's the best at preventing soul decay due to light. I remember that the souls were shining from the jars, so very bright, bobbing gently up and down and throwing scarlet light everywhere until I felt like I was swimming in blood.

I took one. They were unlabeled, and I was mad. I see that now, although at this point it's stupid to admit my guilt. It's useless.

But anyway. I've got to finish the story. It's now or never.

As I said, they had no names, no indication at all of the people whom the souls belonged to, and when I slunk back to the front desk to ask the old man employee how and why this place existed, he was snoozing with his feet up. That's when the idea hit me, to take one, and I reasoned that I'd never get another chance like this, to examine one, and I thought that perhaps I could bring it back in a day or two before we boarded the plane home.

I have no idea what I thought I'd do to keep Soul from finding out. I am very ashamed to say that I forgot about him, or rather chose to ignore him, but like I said, I was insane like I hadn't been since the little oni. I swam through the bloody light in the museum for hours and thought about all the people I knew who'd died in the line of battle, of all the souls I'd seen flicker and go out like squashed lightning bugs as their bodies lay slack-jawed nearby, and I thought, very vain and proud, "Maybe I could have saved them," and, "Knowledge like this shouldn't be feared," and then I was running away with one of the beautiful red jars in my purse.

I was found wandering the streets by a policeman. Soul had gotten worried. I told them, and him, a version of the truth, that I'd gone out for food and gotten lost.

They believed me. He, of course, didn't, but I kept my purse closed and shoved in the closet of the hotel room that night when we went out for dinner.

I got up late that night, when the moon was shining in through the window, turning Soul into peaceful marble, and crept into the bathroom and took out the red jar.

The soul was still there, another moon, and I took out the notebook, intending to illustrate it and make observations on how it had endured the rare preservation procedure, when its light changed slightly, from deep red to something even darker, a muddy sort of brown.

And then I thought, very startled— souls are usually very light blue, almost white, but if it had changed to yellow-green, and green plus red makes brown—

I bit my lip till it bled as I flipped through my notebook, trying to be quiet though I was panting, and sure enough, I'd been right, that old Russian woman's soul had reacted, and so was this one, but I couldn't figure out what it was reacting to.

It wasn't until I picked up the jar and held it very close to me, examining it, that the light grew even muddier. I ran through every variable I could think of in the bathroom that the soul could be reacting to. Maybe the person had stayed once in this hotel room, I thought wildly, and I didn't care that it was a ridiculous long shot. It wasn't until I held it close to me that I thought; I am a Grigori soul, and how rare is that? One in five million? It would certainly be an unusual stimulus.

Grigori, the fallen angels of the Bible— those who are awake, the watchers, witnesses to the sacrificial pyres of Babylon— And if souls retained some level of awareness of their lives, then what was this one trying to tell me?

I smashed the red glass on the edge of the sink, and I cupped the soul in my hands close to my chest, and I watched and begged and pleaded. Soul was pounding on the bathroom door, he'd heard me break the bottle, and he was screaming, but I couldn't hear him over the rushing in my ears and the bright. blinding acid-green of that pulsing soul.

I watched it as his kicks shook the door, and the soul said— no, I don't knowhow but it did— it said, I'm so old, and, it hurts so much, and I'm so lonelybefore it turned to mist in my sweating palms. There were words, but by Death, it was the sheer impression of pain that got through the most.

When I unlocked the door, Soul about toppled through in an attempt to break it down. "I need your help," I said wretchedly to my beloved monster boy, and he shook me and shouted at me from worry, but, always the faithful weapon, he listened and he tried to understand.

"Maka, that's crazy. Souls are dead things. They're just… what did Kid call them, like, imprints? Residual spiritual energy? You've heard him talk. They're not bits of the people! They're not ghosts or anything!" He was trying to reason with me as I sat weeping among the scarlet shards of glass, but my lizard brain had gotten its teeth in and I couldn't let go. It felt fated that I should be here, that I should stumble upon that museum, and since my mother read me fairy tales I've never dared believe in fate, but at that moment I did, and I'd have worn the red slippers with a smile.

"Of course he'd say that," I whispered, and I believed it, I did, terrible as it was. "What would his weapons do if they knew the things they ate could feel pain still, could remember their lives?"

He staggered and went white beneath his freckles. "Fuck," he said, several times, and then he sat down and put his head in his hands. I showed him my notebook, I explained the Russian experiments to him, and I told him about the museum, about all those tortured souls, hundreds of them sitting there in agony, and he understood.

"We should get Kid," he pleaded. "He'll know what to do. What if it's like, a religious thing? We could get in so much trouble. This could be one of those international incidents like Black Star's always starting!"

But that soul's pain was still hot and itchy in my palms, and my feet were restless until I pulled him out the door and through the streets.

I don't know how I found it again, but I did, and the door was unlocked despite the late hour. We crept in, past the slumbering old employee— I thought, terrified, that he might have died for a moment, but I think he only slept through closing time— and into the first of the halls full of red.

Soul lost his nerve then, or maybe he thought I'd be better once I returned to the scene of the crime or something, but when I made to topple the entire shelving unit and smash them all at once he grabbed me.

"Maka, you can't do this, look, I don't know what's gotten into you but you can't do this!"

I'm smaller but I'm more practiced, and I managed to trip him out the door of the hall and lock it behind him. It was terrible deja vu, hearing him scream as he pounded on the door, but I pushed the shelves over and the room turned from red to yellow-green all around me as the bottles shattered.

There are so many of them. It took me longer than I thought to set them all free, even in this one room, and a few of them fizzled away at once, but now they're everywhere, and they're drifting into one long spiral, like a dragon, pulled together by electrostatic forces that are lifting my hair all around me. If I touch one of them, sparks leap from my fingers. It's the most beautiful thing I've ever seen, but they're still in pain, and I know from my research that it could take days for them to reach freedom.

There's no way to free a soul unless you're a Shinigami or a weapon, but I can't let Soul in here— it's the one thing he won't understand—

So time is running out, but I'll do what I have to do to to stop their pain. I only wish my mouth wasn't watering. It makes me feel uncomfortably like the big bad wolf.