Author's Note- This is a little snippet from my Underground AU, which is a massive project I'm working on behind the scenes, an adaptation of an original novel of mine that never quite got off the ground but which was perfect for a Liz-centric AU (loaded, naturally, with all the SoMa I can possibly manage because this is me we're talking about). This bit probably won't appear in the fic itself, but it's in that universe and on that timeline, so whatever. Enjoy this foretaste of things to come.


Intuition


They hadn't been able to get a hotel. It wasn't the first time that had happened, because they were getting into the southwest now, and distances between towns were farther than they had been back east, but it was the first time it had been cold like this. Soul supposed that was fairly normal for the desert, though. He'd heard somewhere it got cold at night out here.

They'd found a reasonably flat piece of land and walked the bikes a good distance off the highway. Not like Arachnophobia or the Reapers was likely to search for Liz out here, but if the last month or so had taught him anything, it was to always expect the unexpected.

Kilik had started a fire with a snap of his fingers, and not for the first time Soul was glad they had him along. He and Liz had stayed awake long enough to eat a couple of cans of lukewarm baked beans cooked haphazardly over the fire in the can, then curled up under their jackets and crashed. Soul was left alone to stare at the fire and hope he'd win his nightly battle with insomnia this time.

No. Not alone. Because they had a fourth member of their group now, and when he glanced at the pigtailed blonde across the fire, he saw that she at least was very much still awake.

When she caught him looking, she got up and walked around the fire to plop down next to him, moving with that weird clumsy grace of hers. She was still wearing that ridiculously huge sweatshirt of hers, and while he could understand wanting the protection from the cold (because it actually was fucking freezing, even with the fire), he'd never actually seen her take it off since she'd joined their company. He wondered if she was hiding something, like an extra limb or a dead conjoined twin.

Or maybe he was just loopy because he was exhausted and it was freezing, because there was no way a girl like Maka had anything quite that messed up going on.

"Hey," she said.

"Hey," he replied gruffly.

She poked at the fire with the stick she was carrying. "We probably should have moved another hundred yards off the road," she said.

He looked sharply at her. "Did you see somethin'?" he asked.

She snorted and shook her head. "No, I'm just being cautious. And I told you, I don't "see" things, like visions and stuff… I just get a sense of things that are going to happen, and about people. It's like super-charged intuition."

"Oh yeah? Well what does your super-intuition say about me?" he asked. He said it teasingly, but he really wanted to know, because it was his name that she'd called out when she'd found them days earlier, and he was the one she'd been giving strange looks, even though this was Liz's mission. Then again, he was used to strange looks, what with his rather unusual features. Still, the way Maka looked at him was… different. He couldn't explain it, and it made him nervous.

She kept staring into the fire, eyes distant, but she spoke normally. "You're really tricky to read, but I know you're very confused and very scared and very far from home, even though you act like you know exactly what you're doing. And I know… I know you're a good person."

Soul snorted. "You don't know shit. I think your radar's busted." He was a lot of things, but "good" wasn't one of them. He'd known that for a long time. Dangerous, but not good.

She shrugged. "Have it your own way, but I know what I feel."

They fell silent for awhile, and Soul thought Maka had begun to nod off, but when he shivered, she took notice. "You cold?" she asked.

He shrugged. "It's not exactly the Bahamas, but I'm fine."

"Come on, you're shaking," she said, and before he could protest she wrapped an arm around him.

Soul wanted to tell her to get off, but having her arm around his shoulders actually did make him feel a lot warmer, and despite himself he couldn't bring himself to push her away. She was a weird one, this Maka… not that he had any room to talk. He wasn't sure why he was letting her touch him like this, but it felt nice so whatever. Besides, she'd had her arms wrapped around him for the last five days on the motorcycle, so this wasn't much different, right?

Soul closed his eyes, leaning into the radiant heat that seemed to pour into him from the direction of her little body. Before he knew it, he had slipped into sleep, nodding off on Maka's shoulder.

The little blonde glanced down at the strange boy dozing on her shoulder and smiled. Soul Eater could say what he liked; she could tell what he was like beneath that icy front he put up.