So far, the things Maka has learned about adult life are as follows:
1: Do not apprehend criminals in front of witnesses.
Addendum the first: Do not apprehend criminals in front of witnesses while wearing a mascot suit that does not belong to you, or you will be charged for its dry cleaning fee.
Addendum the second: And you no longer get free dry cleaning like when you were a full time meister.
2: Do not roundhouse kick cash registers when they are being stupid. Normal People are expected to call the computer police.
Addendum: """Tech support.""" Sounds fake.
And so, she's back on the job hunt again. In fact, she's itching to go through the help wanted ads, but it's a rare day off for Soul and they see so little of each other lately that she doesn't want to waste it looking at her laptop.
That, and she has a feeling he hasn't been eating or sleeping well. He looks worn out all the time, and she hears him meander into the living room late at night when he should be dead asleep. She doesn't need to be a 'normal person' to know when her weapon is stressed out.
So she's cooking lunch for him. When he doesn't come sliding into the kitchen at the very smell of mac and cheese, it's only further confirmation. After a loud call of, "FOOD TIME," and he still doesn't show his face, Maka peeks into the living room sees Soul doing a fairly impressive imitation of a Dali-style melted watch, just oozing across his preferred chair and staring blankly at the ceiling.
He's dead. She makes her way behind the chair and pokes his head through his wilted mess of hair, and his eyes slowly pry open. "It's food time," she says.
"Oh." His chest heaves with a deep sigh, which is cut short by a small wince. "Urhg. Getting old sucks."
Maka crosses her arms. "Soul, you're twenty-one. Kid's gonna outlive us by like a thousand years, have some perspective."
He makes a raspy scoff of a noise. "Eff perspective, I can't get up."
"What?"
"Everything hurts," he whines. "Feed me."
She huffs, but she's starting to think he's a little serious. She sneaks a quick peek of his wavelength and finds it humming with a tightrope-strain, taut and monotonous. The thing that she's surprised to realize, however, is that it's not far off from how she's felt the past few months while trying to be useful and failing with straight F's. She'd been repressing it, taking a walk-it-off, tough-it-out stance on the matter, but it becomes unacceptable when it's Soul having to bear that crushing overwhelm.
She carefully settles her hand on his head. Hoping to ease that metallic note of his wavelength, she presses her fingertips gently against his scalp. He melts a little more into the chair, but maybe in a different way.
"I'm sorry," she murmurs.
When he scrunches his eyebrows, she feels it under her hand. "What for? You burn dinner?"
"No, I just... You're working really hard." And she isn't. She doesn't have a job to make her so sore and weary she can't get out of a chair, so isn't her stress meaningless compared to his? The way he tilts his head back a few inches to press more firmly into her hand makes her heart twist sideways. "Is there something I can do?"
Is there anything she can do?
Maka feels the cautious brush of his soul - something he does even though she suspects he doesn't do so with conscious purpose - because he must have noticed she's feeling off-center. He rolls his head to one side and looks up towards her to say, "Don't worry 'bout it. It's been months since our last mission, and like, years since I've had to really try. I'm rusty and sore, is all." He raises an arm, reaching up for her hand, though he winces the whole way. His hand lands on top of hers, and he presses his fingertips into the back of it, mimicking her. "S'not like I'm the only one. I know you're trying hard too."
She objectively appreciates the validation, but the fact that he has to put a voice to it makes it worse, for some reason. Maka takes a mental step away from his wavelength, ashamed that she's enough of a mess to warrant being noticed. His hand melts away, his arm ragdolling back down to the chair. Soul closes his eyes again. "That feels nice," he adds.
She places her hands on his shoulders instead, alarmed to find how close to steel he feels even though he's in his human body. Somewhat unthinkingly, she digs in her thumbs and draws a hiss out of him, but he doesn't tell her to stop.
All she can think is that he's doing the work of both a weapon and a meister, while she kicks cash registers and gets angry at missing socks; if she could just be normal and do her part, maybe he wouldn't have to push himself this much to pick up her slack.
Maka rubs her weapon's shoulders for a whole three minutes before he's sleeping so soundly he doesn't even hear Blair come home, mac and cheese be damned.
Another business trip. More social calls. Last-second class demos. And then there's the training.
Soul doesn't think he's that out of shape, and has been hoping his body would adapt to all the sparring with Spirit at some point, but just when he starts feeling like he can keep up with the old man's pace, the bastard turns it up to eleven.
His shoulder hadn't been dislocated today, at least. Since having eaten Arachne's soul, he knows he has the same capabilities as Spirit in terms of raw weapon power, but the difference in control between the two of them is as obvious as the desert is dry. He now understands why Maka's dad had been chosen as the late Shinigami's Death Scythe, and Soul's so worn out from trying to fill his shoes that he can't spare a moment to analyze the bizarre gap between Spirit's superior abilities and disappointing personality.
He catches himself mentally drifting off into space in the locker room with only his slacks back on. Considers the idea of taking the bus home and just leaving the motorcycle here, because that's like seven minutes of not having to think he could have on the ride home. He aches so much that it's been hard to sleep and his brain is utterly fried.
All he wants right now is to be instantly home so he can collapse on the sofa, the chair, the floor - anything would do as long as he could feel Maka somewhere nearby.
Though that reminds him of yet another thing that wears him out. She's obviously struggling with the whole job situation, and her worry over his job is such an apartment-filling ghost that it's just another note of stress on top of everything else. The only time he and Maka can spend together is the brief moment he's home and she's still awake, which more often than not isn't a stretch of time long enough to even exchange pleasantries.
That being said, Maka's been devoting some of her time to make things easier on him, which he appreciates - especially if it seems to help with her stir-craziness - but for all her help, he's halfway convinced there's a distance growing between them. He can't decide if it's a real thing or if he's just feeling homesick because he's pathetically needy and away so much, but he's tired and it royally blows either way.
He misses her. He misses the way it used to be, even though living had been considerably harder when witches were enemies across the board, when Asura broke loose, when the Blood sang tempting and awful in his heart.
But as much as he fondly remembers protecting one another from the many hundreds of things that could kill them, Soul Evans also wants to live with his meister without some constant threat hanging over them; to stay together as people. If he can just survive all this training, maybe being Kid's weapon will pan out. And after that, maybe he'll talk to Maka about things that are allowed to be talked about when one is an 'adult' and not a weapon for war.
Finally standing up from the bench, Soul cringes into the rest of his outfit, stuffing his training clothes into a battered duffel he's had what feels like forever. He supposes he should get rid of it and replace it with something mature, but this old-ass duffel bag was Maka's first gift to him as official partners. It's just one of many other facets of the past he keeps clinging to, and he wonders if this vague adulthood would feel more real if he could let go of them.
He doesn't like it. The thought makes him more lonely. He wants to go home, missing Maka so much he's imagining that crackling murmur of her soul already.
Or... he isn't imagining it at all. Soul walks out the locker room and it's the real deal, leaning against the wall opposite the door and looking at what he assumes are help wanted ads on her phone again. There's something so familiar in her posture that it takes the edge off the strain he feels in every inch of his body.
Maka looks up before he's said anything, her eyes darting across all of him in an instant. "What happened to you?"
He takes a glance down at himself: his slacks are more wrinkled than he'd like, but otherwise nothing unusual to report - shoulder's still in the socket, after all. "Huh?" he asks, though she's already three long-legged strides closer, closing the distance between them and taking his left forearm in her little hand. When she twists his wrist to get a better look at the smattering of yellows and greens there, he straight-up yelps - there's no way to cover that noise up.
Her hold eases, eyes wide, but it doesn't stop her from reaching towards other places, namely the side of his mouth, which hurts, and also his right jaw, which has scabbed over already but still sucks.
"Oh," he says. "Just training again."
Maka heaves a quick, frustrated sigh, clearly holding her tongue. It's unlike her, and he almost wishes she'd lecture him or something, just to feel a little bit normal. She says, "Kid texted and said you had a long day, but didn't elaborate, so I took the bus." Her expression becomes a few half-steps more sour. "He's getting as cryptic as his dad used to be," she mutters.
Kid? Death's been so focused on the budget lately, it's surprising to hear he'd been aware of Soul's training with Spirit today at all. Maka's trying to push his hair away from the cut on his jaw when he says, "Um, sorry, I dunno what he's talkin' about, nothing crazy happened. You didn't have to come get me."
Her hand pauses, and the way that murmur of her soul pulls out of earshot is like a frosty breeze moving through a silent house, leaving him chill as it disappears.
He's not imagining it after all. Soul makes a grab for her hand before he truly thinks about it, giving her fingers a faint squeeze even though it hurts his wrist like hell. "But I'm glad you came," he insists, allowing himself to demonstrate just a bit more of his exhaustion. If worrying about him gets her to stay, he'd rather have that over this near-terrifying silence. "Are you up for driving us home?"
This is the part where he expects her to say something with a skeptical tilt to her brow, for her to be surprised that he'd even let her drive the motorcycle at all. But Maka looks at their connected hands. She doesn't express any skepticism. She doesn't express anything. The space between them is vast when she nods and says, "I can."
Soul wishes more than anything that he could read her like she can read him.
If she stays another minute alone and directionless in the apartment, she thinks she may punch the sun herself before Black*Star can take the credit. She'd had the idea to drive out to Vegas and surprise Soul on his business trip, but she didn't want to take his bike without his permission, and tried to rent a car instead. That, however, had only ended in expletives and failure.
More things Maka has learned about adult life:
3: Persons under the age of 21 are not allowed to rent a vehicle in the state of Nevada, regardless of your meister rank.
Given the state of their budget right now, it's for the best that she didn't blow it on renting a car, but even trying to carry out a make-believe CSI investigation of the missing dress socks has lost its entertainment value. She'd found them all in Blair's stuffed-skull cave bed, back by the fake dangly uvula. Case closed. The magical cat herself is still holding a steady job at Chupa Cabra's, a fact which grates on Maka's nerves on new, improved levels, because a cat is bringing more income to the household than she is.
This creeping feeling of inadequacy is becoming harder to contain, spreading to every corner of her.
Blair is presently flat as a furry pancake on the kitchen floor, waiting for her next shift while exerting the least amount of heat-producing energy possible. A few paces away, her hat waves a wilting, pumpkin-shaped paper fan to help stir up a breeze. "When is Scythe-boy comin' home?" she asks.
All the letters in the help-wanted page of the Death City online community portal are blurring together, and Maka closes the laptop, pushing the overheating thing across the kitchen table and away. "Tomorrow, why?"
"'Coz he's not stubborn like you and turns the aircon down," the cat sighs.
"Don't be a baby. We're not dying."
"Are you sure? Blair's seen you paralyzed in the infirmary and you looked way more alive than this," she says, the tip of her tail giving not so much as a twitch. "Besides, I've got nine lives on you. I'm not the baby."
Maka would very much like to throw a tantrum, but she'd rather sweat to death than prove the cat right. Both those revelations make her feel exponentially worse. With a sigh, she slumps down in her chair, sweaty legs squeaking on the seat. "I just don't know what I should do. I'm really bad at being normal."
"Hmm," says Blair. "What does Maka wanna do?"
Fingers drumming impatiently atop the table, Maka mutters, "She wants to fight."
The cat gradually stretches into a long tube with pointy claws at either end, rolling to her back. "Well, is there a way to do that without hurtin' anybody?"
"Uh..." Maka's fingers pause as she tries to comprehend the very idea. "What? How? That's kind of the whole point, isn't it?"
Blair blinks, head resting upside-down on the floor. "You're smart, Maka," she says, tip of her tail coming to life with a confident back-and-forth. "If anyone can find a way, it's you."
While she appreciates the vote of confidence, Maka's not so sure.