346 days before the riots.
"You're new."
The white haired man looks up, startled. "Excuse me?"
Maka nods to the piano at the back of the club, the one the man had been stationed at not ten minutes before. Curiosity has made her approach him, the slouch of his spine and the intensity with which he stares into the amber liquid of his glass a mystery. "You're new. I've never heard you play before."
"Ah. I lived in the other end of the city until just recently."
Fingers trace the polished wood of the bar. "You're quite good."
His lips twitch and he studies her. Finally he shuffles over, motioning to the stool next to him. "Would you care to join me?"
Maka smiles. "How long have you played for?" she asks, slipping in beside him. A nod at the bartender and her regular drink is set down on a napkin before her.
"Since forever. I can't remember not playing." He rubs his arm. "...Did you really like it?"
"Of course! It was beautiful."
His smile is shy, but pleased. "Thanks. Uh, my name is Soul by the way."
Maka grins and sticks out her hand. Soul eyes it with some mixture of confused amusement before gripping it back gently. "I'm Maka."
They talk for hours, their drinks forgotten amidst the warmth of pleasant company. When finally they say their goodbyes, after the bartender has pointedly checked his watch for the fifth time in so many minutes, Maka meanders from the bustle and lights of the club to her high end apartment.
She is in the elevator about to press the the button for the fourth floor when her strange white haired companion steps inside and nearly gives her a heart attack.
Soul quickly holds up his hands. "Don't hit me!"
Maka doesn't lower her fist. "Are you following me?"
"No! I live here!"
After some much needed assurance that, no, she wasn't being stalked, Maka finds out that Soul is her new neighbour - the one who listens to jazz music till one in the morning and had carried the majority of his belongings into the high end apartment in only two trips.
Maka berates him until he promises to turn off the music by 10:00 pm and to meet her the next day for lunch.
...
"Soul?"
He blinked up at her, red eyes darker without the usual luminescence behind them. In the absence of gold, the muted teal only cast a shadow across his tired face. Baggy eyes, streaked with a few renegade tears that had escaped his attention; white hair matted with dirt and sweat; lips rubbed raw. Soul stared, almost unseeingly. "Where to?" His voice was hoarse, so different from the confidence it normally wore. In that moment, Maka didn't want to fathom just how long that facade had been - how weak for it to have crumbled this way.
"This way," she murmured. With only the dim, pathetic glow of a 'streetlight' as their guidance, Maka used her other hand to pat his palm as she began to pull them into the shadows. It was truly ominous; whereas the bright luminescence once helped her forget, without it, Maka could only think about how they were truly underwater. The bottom of the ocean, with expanses and expanses of nothing awaiting beyond the glass walls that kept the world out - and them in. It was cold. Surrounded by water, the grub of the back alleyways, dim shades of turquoise and flickering white their only solace, Maka was cold.
The silence between them was almost uncomfortable. It'd never been that way before. Conversation. Not that Soul was necessarily good at it, but she wasn't a shining example. The urge to speak stayed with her, as the only noise to accompany their fleeing was the sound of their own echoing footsteps, so foreign against the backdrop of the echoing sounds of hollow jazz. By now, the streets, too, were silent.
.
The next step Maka took was met by resistance. As she turned to question it, she was instead met with an eyeful of flickering flame. Her eyes trailed from the lick of fire that seemed to dance from curved fingers, to the solemn face just barely illuminated behind it.
"It's cold," Soul said simply. He swallowed. "And I'm better now. They were already gone."
It sounded more like he was trying to convince himself.
"Why don't we take a break?" Maka murmured. Soul shrugged, but didn't complain as she sat, dragging him with her. It was quiet at first, the same echoing silence that pounded loudly in her ears. And now that they sat, the adrenaline had faded away, leaving nothing but numbness. Every breath was slow, calculated.
"Your dress," Soul said suddenly. Maka's hand, already up against the frilly crinoline, suddenly felt red hot. She glanced down to the big tear along the side. Maka grimaced; it had been truly one of her favourites. She grabbed a fistful of material, yanking it along the tear to the sound of more ripping fabric. Soul gaped.
"What?"
Something like a laugh, a gasp, and a cough escaped him. "Your dress," he said again.
"I left the mask back at Kashmir anyways," she amended. At least that earned a chuckle - the scrunched material in her fists still felt hot. It didn't matter, she told herself, survival. Survival.
The least she could do was wait for his grin to fall naturally from his face.
"We haven't run into another splicer yet," she said. Soul's head bobbed once. "I think we should arm ourselves."
"I'm fine," Soul said reflexively. And then he coughed into the back of his hand. "I mean, I think I'm okay." But she could see him, he was only just a few feet away after all. She could see the rigidity in his fisted hands, the taut skin that threatened to crease across his forehead.
"I have a-"
"Maka." His voice had changed - it had steadied. For the first time in a long time he sounded serious. His hand snaked around her wrist, brushing along the fistfuls of fabric and wrecked crinoline scrunched in her palms. Her head jerked reflexively, a small breath sipped between her parted lips. "I'm fine."
She breathed.
When he was that close, it really was difficult to escape that gaze of crimson.
...
The second time they put down a splicer, at least Soul didn't throw up.
But his hand was still stiff afterward, his face all too lax. It was better than the agony, the shock after he'd first killed someone. Better, but the unnatural stillness was too much for Maka. Too much like the body they'd left on the floor. She clamped a hand around his wrist. Soul seemed to snap awake, and they'd returned to their brisk pace.
The third time, she'd watched the splicer fall to the ground. Only because Soul couldn't; he'd turned away, unable to watch. Maka was careful not to inhale - the last thing she wanted to taste was the charred air, the odd medicinal sweetness that was leaked ADAM. She hatedthat smell. In theory, it should've calmed her. After all, the odd substance that fueled and granted the Plasmid power was abundant in her normal work environment. But her work environment also had Suchong. And the last thing she wanted to think about during this time was her asshole, money-wrangling, flip-flopping employer.
After the fourth, it only took ten minutes before he spoke. "We're walking home," Soul murmured.
"Where else would we go?"
Maka didn't mean it as a rhetorical question, truly - but the silence that followed was answer all the same. It was a harsh reality that they both faced, the knowledge that when they both had come to Rapture, they both knew it was a one way trip. But it was all worth it, so worth it, even with the murmurs of civil war. Now, things were different. There shouldn't have been a way out of the city - and there wasn't, as far as she knew. Sometimes she wondered - how did Suchong get fresh supplies all the time? - but it didn't make sense. Rapture was a one way trip. Everyone here knew that.
In the end, there was only one option, really.
Maka didn't want to think about it. Not when her heels had all but snapped off, her eyes rubbed raw from weariness and her legs aching. At least they weren't injured. Soul's Plasmid had attested to that. Healing was one thing, she knew - that fascination at watching your own limbs patch together before your very eyes. Killing, though, that was different. Terrible. The thought lingered as she veered a right, Soul's footsteps just a few feet away.
They stumbled back onto the mainstreet, surprisingly quiet. But not empty - two splicers, or the remains anyway, laid off to the side, thick and viscous blood oozing from the mess of limbs that were left of them. A vague haze of green, residue of Plasmid and ADAM abuse, seemed to blanket the street. She didn't want to say it, but there was something in the irony of splicers being attacked by Plasmid users, only for the Plasmid user to become a splicer themselves. A vicious cycle she was all too familiar with, and one she chose not to associate with the man who was barely a step behind her.
"It looks like there might've been a standoff," Maka supplied, stepping aside.
"Bullets," Soul pointed out, nodding his chin towards an inactive sign board. It once displayed the name of their apartment, one of many electronic billboards that dotted Rapture. Now, it was merely black, their turned heads and tiny, tiny bodies reflected against splintered glass.
"And human victims." She didn't need to look to know Soul avoided staring at the decidedly human attacks. The blood was less like the sludgy consistency that belonged to the splicers and more like that of humans. It was hard to judge who the contenders were, whether it was human against splicers, humans against humans, or all out chaos. All she knew was that their apartment laid a few blocks ahead, where the carnage already seemed lighter.
It was fine.
The cleaners would come in the morning. The news would be on. Maka would have her coffee, see what she witnessed reflected in the miniature screen of her tele. And then she'd whisk out the door, into the pristine streets of Rapture. The streetlights would be back on, casting the dark blues back into it's usual gold. Downtown core would be its usual dizzying array of lights, and the Kashmir would stand tall, lit in its usual teal and red signs.
She'd wake up, and it would all be fine.
...
"And the riots are still ongoing, the Kashmir -"
"Turn it off," Soul said quietly.
"-still broken, the death count is higher than we could've expected -"
"Turn it off."
"I can't. It's coming from the management," Maka said patiently. And then, as if in response, a loud ding signified the arrival of their elevator. She punched their floor button without hesitation. As they began ascending, she felt as if her limbs were heavy, that she were sagging. She could finally think about everything that happened, sift through the turmoil of conflicting feelings. The more she thought about it, the more overwhelmingit felt.
Even as she stepped into the shower, after dismissing Soul for what she promised would be fifteen minutes, as she twisted the left faucet and stood under the stream of steaming water. Maka tilted her head back and washed the grime from her face, coarse soaps burning at the shallow cuts and scrapes that she hadn't initially noticed.
This was real.
This was real.
The water stopped draining murky, and instead tainted with red. Maka rubbed her body until it was raw - as if shedding a layer of her skin would rid her of the burdens from their night. And yet, as she wrapped her wet tresses in a towel and slipped into a bathrobe, her radio continued to crackle and fizz, as if it were trying to find signal.
In and out, the sharpness came and gone. The only thing audible were snatches of words - chaos, stay in- can't find - been missing since the start - Ryan's been looking -thousand and fift -gedy.
Maka shut off her radio with a snap.
And then, with a surprisingly steady hand, she lifted the plywood planks from the ground. The metal knob underneath was cold to her touch - never once had it actually been turned, until today. In hindsight, she was surprised she still remembered the combination. The knob whirred back into place, clicking open with a snap.
With an equally steady grip, Maka pulled the pistol free from the safe.
The door flung open.
"You have one too?"
Maka whipped her gaze upwards, locking onto his red eyes. They weren't looking at her, rather they were trained on the cool steel in her grasp. He, too, at least looked a little less haphazard - gone away was his business suit, replaced instead by a set of pressed trousers and a white button-up shirt. In his hand was a similar pistol, somehow less foreign in his grasp than she would've expected. Maka suddenly felt self conscious, clad in nothing but her white bathrobe. Maybe, in a different circumstance,and without the guns, this would've been a very different kind of encounter. Funny - awkward, maybe charming.
She ignored the discomfort that stabbed her in the sides. "For safety purposes."
Soul scoffed. "A researcher with a firearm?"
"Says the club pianist."
Soul's arms fell helplessly to his sides.
It took several moments before Maka finally willed herself to move. Soul didn't question when she brought the gun with her, into her room, as she shed off her bathrobe and instead chose a garment that was in between a night robe and one of her usual crinolined-skirts. When she finally reemerged, gun in hand, he was by her window, staring back into the still-too-dim lights of the downtown core of Rapture. The usual vibrant hues of gold, amber, and teal were gone, muted, as if someone had painted over the picturesque scenery with broad strokes of grey watercolour. He was motionless, solemn.
"I didn't know."
Maka sighed. "I suspected. I work for Suchong afterall."
"He's such a bastard," Soul said spitefully. If it were another circumstance, Maka might've laughed. This was their typical conversation over a glass of brandy, usually the very line she'd say. Hearing it from Soul, with as much aggression as he could muster, was supposed to be funny - but all she could do was sit. He wasn't wrong. Suchong was a dick. And after what felt like an eternity, Soul finally sat down with her.
The silence between them stretched - yet in the beats between, they could still hear the fading sounds of what must've been gunfire. Muted screams beyond the double-paned windows, steady plumes of smoke unfurling into the artificial sky.
"Yeah, well, the real bastard here is ATLAS," Maka murmured. "All Ryan wanted was progress."
"You don't care about the little people?" Soul murmured. The little people. Whom ATLAS always said he was about - who he was fighting for. Where he'd host his Rallies, where Soul would disappear to so many nights.
Suddenly annoyed, Maka got up. "Did the little people set the bombs? Because in that case, no. I don't care about the little people." With that, she left him on the couch, dragging a blanket from cabinet. Wordlessly, she draped it back over her vacant seat. Her fingers skimmed briefly along the corner of his shoulder, and he twitched in response - for a brief moment, she wondered if he, too, had rubbed himself raw in his own shower.
And just as wordlessly, she fell onto her own bed, and lost herself in a dreamless sleep.