Part II of the previous chapter. I think I need a Christmas party chapter next. That sounds like something I never wrote before, it could be fun. Really unsure where this wants to go ultimately, but I'm having fun. Hope all ya'll are as well. Thanks for the follows!
Maka considered pain to be an intimate thing. When she was young she learned quickly that expressing pain seemed to be more about bringing other people into her experience of it than providing any relief from it, so she made sure to hold back the tears and tough it out until she could seek treatment. Only later did she realize this meant those nights when she lay awake staring at the ceiling, unable to concentrate on her book, that she had lost words to express her pain to herself as well as others.
It made Soul's awareness of her pain, an unintended consequence of their resonance, all the more disturbing.
You're limping. I know that last swipe grazed the tendon. You can't pretend you're walking normally! The alarm in his voice—not that there were any vibrations in the air, it was her mind's way of reconciling the raw data he conveyed from their connection—shook her more than the actual pain. She wished he wouldn't put words to it.
"Shut up, we're handling it!" Running, or what she could manage at a fast limp, was not getting them to the car fast enough. Soul was swinging in wide arcs in front of her as her arm muscles screamed at her to stop and rest. The first few strong swipes had cleanly severed limbs and necks of the beastly creatures tracking them through the woods, but with limited visibility and an unknown number of enemies she had been too aggressive at the start and fatigue was setting in. Pulling Soul's blade out of the body of a beast had taken more effort than she had suspected it would, and only their creator knew how many more of them were following.
Duck! Soul's demand had Maka nearly hitting the dirt in overreaction, but the claw that arched over her head and past her peripheral vision wasn't a mirage. The glints of lights through the trees only illuminated enough to give her the general outline of what she had to strike at, and she rolled hard on her shoulder before popping up to face the creature. It's slightly to your right.
Maka swung wide, so sloppy she was happy Stein wasn't here to point out the deficiencies. Her arms jerked in their sockets as the blade connected but didn't quite clear the thick flesh of the beast. Again, the spray of ichor hit her body as she kicked her limping foot out and braced against the beast's cleaved chest to help her pull Soul out. The discolored blood was less a concern for her than the mat of sweat under her winter clothes chaffing her every motion.
You don't need to finish it off, it's dead. Soul reassured her as Maka took a shaky breath and then turned back to the direction she knew the car was hidden. Maybe if she stowed the dirty clothes in the trunk she wouldn't have to pay cleaning fees for the upholstery. Can you sense anything nearby?
"All I get from the monsters is fragments, anyway, but I'm too exhausted to concentrate that hard." It was evil magic that tore a soul into such small pieces that Maka could barely make out traces of it. This had no impact on most combat pairs, as they had to develop other ways to find their enemies to fight. Maka relied on her soul detection too much, she realized, and in situations like these it was a blind spot she couldn't afford.
I think I see the car! Soul's voice was excited in her mind, but she knew he loved the feeling of her passing his blade through flesh and bone so she assumed it was more about that undercurrent of concern he imperfectly stifling. She hated that he thought her so weak a few cuts and bruises would take her down. Maybe when she got home Black Star would train her a bit, since all he knew how to do was train until he collapsed.
They were mere feet from the car when suddenly the steel gripped in her gloves disappeared and Soul unfolded and immediately leaned into her to prop up her bad side.
"Never mind about me, get the car uncovered so we can get out of here!" Maka saw him hesitate, his red eyes dim points of light in the dark. He must have agreed with her, though, because he was busily throwing the branches off as well as pulling the bungees off the tarp that had disguised their car as a bit of forest. Maka dug in the backpack for the keys, glad the wide slashes that had wrecked it hadn't causes the contents to spill out. No sewing this back together later, but the supplies—and most importantly the spell book—were largely intact.
Maka popped the trunk with the key fob and Soul bunched up the tarp to throw it in the back, only to find it wouldn't fit like that. Swearing, he took more time to fold it properly while Maka smiled to herself and limped to join him by the trunk and strip off her blood clothes. Once her sweat soaked under layer was exposed to the night air she started shivering uncontrollably.
"What the hell are you doing!?" Soul demanded as he watched her standing around in half shredded yoga pants and a damp t-shirt.
"Did you budget for cleaning fees?! I didn't! Stop gawking and start driving." The adrenaline that had gotten her this far was wearing off. If walking was white hot agony she couldn't imagine trying to accelerate or break without wanting to throw up a little. "I'm suddenly really glad I had you learn…"
"Just get in and warm up, you're turning blue." Soul slammed the trunk closed and quickly made his way to the driver's side to start up the car. He sounded angry and she couldn't imagine why that might be.
His vision in low light was so much better than hers, and Maka wished she could point out some fault of his right now to make her feel less helpless, but all her thoughts ceased when the heat finally kicked in and her goosebumps smoothed out. She wanted to fall asleep so badly, but some weary part of her brain tried to remind her that was a bad idea. It was hard to make sense of it, since in the warm car with Soul intently reentering the road from the bumpy forest, this felt like safety. Dried blood from the creatures that had hit her cheek was beginning to itch, and she pulled down the visor above her with the lit mirror to take a look at the damage. There was dried blood on the back of her right leg as well, but she knew better than to touch it and reopen the wound until they could clean it at the hotel.
"I look like I just wrestled a bunch of pigs and lost." The dirt and mud that was smeared on her face seemed to highlight her hollowed out tired eyes.
"You're lucky I paid attention in that first aid class."
"I heard from Tsubaki that was the only class you went to because Nygus teaches it." Maka had also heard from Tsubaki that he went to it because he was afraid of the older demon, not because he was particularly interested in the supplementary lessons weapons had to attend. She decided to leave that part out while he was driving. There was a pause in conversation while Maka fought against the pull of sleep in the steadily heating sedan.
Soul picked up speed, but Maka didn't complain because the faster they got to the hotel the faster she could rest. "All those classes are seriously lame. They put me in with a bunch of kids and it's bad enough being stared at by adults… kids giggle."
"It's not my fault we missed out on nearly a decade of training together. They had to start you somewhere." Maka clenched and unclenched her hands in the cushion of the car seat and tried to visualize something that made her happy to avoid thinking about her right leg. Curled up on the sofa watching TV with Soul was figuring prominently and she decided to go back to making conversation as a distraction. "You can't let what other people think of you influence you so much. You're pretty cool in my book."
Soul barked a quick laugh. "Maka's Book of Cool, huh? Who else is in there?" They took a turn too sharply and Maka held onto the clothing hook above the window to keep from careening into Soul.
"Slow down, hey!" She was grateful it was dry today, snow would have made this more treacherous than the monsters the way Soul was driving.
"The young ones don't just stare because I'm older, Maka…" Soul was leaned forward practically into the window as if that would get them to the large first aid kit in the hotel room faster. "It's because I have an undeniable family resemblance and they're not as good at feigning disinterest the way older weapons are."
This was not the time she wanted personal revelations: covered in grime and blood, harboring a hopefully untraceable magic item, careening towards a hotel room down a deserted highway in the middle of nowhere. But then, maybe there would never be another moment and who knows what kind of mood even triggered this one?
"Family resemblance?"
"You had to learn all the demon classifications at some point, yes?" Soul sounded annoyed, but that might had been because the heat had reached near suffocation levels. Maka fiddled with temperature dials as she answered, cracking a window also for good measure.
"Of course! I even read the supplementary materials that were only recommended reading." At the time she had been so desperate to find a weapon that her mama would ok her to partner with, even though she knew it was futile. That was shortly before Maka's family fell apart and she gained half a father as she lost half a mother.
"What do you know about Muses?"
This was helping keep her awake, and she wondered briefly if that was his game here. She already had way too much to be grateful for regarding today, that to pile on one more thing was forcing that feeling in her chest for him to move from admiration into stronger and more emotional territory.
"A rare elite form of the Siren type, they can literally sing the soul out from your body. They're practically theoretical."
"I wish my parents were theoretical." Soul snorted. "Was it a right or left here? I wasn't paying attention on the way out."
Maka was too stunned to answer, so when he took the left and they had to spend another ten minutes backtracking later, she didn't even get mad.
If Soul had been born a muse and not a weapon then he wouldn't have been in the forest with Maka and she would have gotten killed. If Soul had been born a muse and not a weapon he never would have been summoned by that witch or met Maka in the first place, so maybe she never would have been in that forest in the first place having not taken a mission with possible combat elements. Then again, maybe she would have, only she would have been alone with a sword in her hand and that thought had him gripping the wheel so tightly he started to feel the plastic warp under his fingers.
Looking over at her slim frame covered in sweat and blood, he wondered why it was that she had to be the fighter while all he could do was observe. It was Maka's body that took the punishment, and Soul was no worse for wear than when he had been walking around that stupid cabin earlier today. It made him feel like less of a man because he couldn't share the burden. There had to be a way to get stronger, or protect her more effectively.
"…so incredible, I mean, the things you could tell us about how a muse functions since all the books I had read probably didn't have more than a single sentence about them with lots of questions marks and…" Maka's voice droned on next to him as she started doing exactly what he had hoped she wouldn't do—make a big deal out of his family. Everyone made a big deal out of his family.
What had felt like hours of driving in the darkness and now they were back in the relative civilization of the small town that contained the hotel. He knew they were close when he encountered a traffic light. It was tempting to ignore it, but he knew Maka's griping about that would have been far more annoying than the couple minutes pause before they could truly rest.
He checked the rearview mirror for just about the first time since he took the wheel, remembering belatedly Maka's driving lesson and all the stupid rules of hers that seemed to surge endlessly from her nervous mouth. It all came down to: go, stop, don't hit things. It wasn't like it was hard. He met his own eyes in the mirror and cringed. The hair and eyes were what gave him away. With hair and eyes like his he should have taken after his family and been using music to feed his hunger for corrupted human souls. Fate and his screwed up genetics had had other ideas. His tongue scraped over each point of his teeth, a nervous tic that had punctured his tongue more than once on accident.
Maka was still talking, though he suspected this was more about taking her mind off the pain than actually communicating anything important to him. "… ignoring me, but it's not just about me wanting to know, this is about expanding our knowledge! But not in that creepy way like Stein always talks about—and let's not tell him right away he might sneak in at night and operate on you…"
Soul wished he hadn't said anything. He would have had to before he died, as they had made an agreement during that sultry night in Florida, but the floodgates of Maka's intellectual curiosity were open and he just didn't want to deal. The terms of the agreement were fulfilled and he didn't need to say any more, but she'd probably pry something else out of him someday. Rivers won out against stones eventually.
"Are you going to make it up the stairs?" Soul watched Maka get out of the rapidly cooling car gingerly, protecting the leg he knew he was going to have to examine before she slept.
"Of course I can!" She was quick to answer, but by the time he had gotten the backpack disentangled from other things in the trunk and the car locked up he found her shivering and only about a third of the way up the flight of outdoor stairs that led to their second story room.
Asking her questions would only lead to more denial so he tapped her on the shoulder to let her know it was him and as she started to protest about being perfectly capable through chattering teeth he swept her up into his arms. Maka sputtered out some sentence fragments but thankfully didn't struggle as he carried her to the door and deposited her carefully back to the floor so he could dig out the key. She had hardly weighed anything at all, reminding him again that it was incredible she had survived to adulthood in this job.
"Go get a shower, you look like Death warmed over." Soul grumbled at her while she glared daggers at him for something he had thought was pretty fucking considerate, given the circumstances. As soon as he opened the door she darted into the room and limped towards the bathroom only to nearly slam the door behind. What was in her craw now? Human women made about as much sense to him as demon women, only with fewer hard and fast rules.
The noise of water starting up had him staring at the door for a while, imagining her peeling her wet clothes off her body until he realized what he was thinking and quickly turned on the television before wandering over to crank the thermostat up. The backpack he had hauled inside was abandoned in the small hotel closet next to their duffle, but until it warmed up a bit he wasn't about to get out of his comfortable coat. The fur lining on the hood tickled his cheek as he allowed himself a light doze until the burst of light from the bathroom had his eyes fluttering.
Maka, pink and white from her shower and clutching a towel around her middle only just large enough to cover her front and by no means large enough to cover those mile high legs of hers, purposefully limped out of the bathroom and stood next to the queen sized bed they were supposed to share.
"Can you look at my leg? Once I'm assessed and bandaged I just want to go to sleep." Her voice was a monotone and her eyes were droopy. He hated seeing her this run down. Whatever second wind she had found on the car ride had faded with a warm shower and the prospect of sleep. Turning off the TV he got up and wandered to her side of the bed.
As he had thought, there was a deep gouge so close to her tendon that she was lucky she was walking as normally as she was. It was the matter of moments to dig in the duffel to withdraw the dressings and a gel to numb the pain. He knew it would sting, but he didn't warn her because anticipating pain was worse than experiencing it in his estimation. Maka gave a hiss as his hand smoothed gel over the back of her right ankle and calf. Scratches only recently healed from the imps at Halloween had him scowling.
"You need to protect your back better." It seemed impossible that the feelings surging through him were normal, or well contained as his fingers smoothed and warmed the gel. He feared broadcasting so much he found he was talking to distract himself from feeling anything.
"You're heavier than a sword and the swings have more momentum. I'm still learning to compensate." The words were muffled in the pillow.
They needed to pack towels, Soul thought. These hotel towels were just a source of high blood pressure, and he had enough stress to deal with. "You calling me fat?"
"That doesn't even make sense." He hoped that hitched breath she gave was from the fading pain, because if she so much as hinted that she'd welcome his advances he wouldn't be able to stop himself. Good sense always seemed to be overruled by hot blood. Maybe the artistic sensibilities of his family had rubbed off on him more than he'd thought. Touching Maka like this made him think of crashing concertos and hammering out a visionary experimental piece dedicated to the curve of her ass in that towel…
This was madness. Maka, this moment, her skin—he needed to pull back before he was drawn into the darkness and tried to pull her with him. Desire was a hard row to hoe, and he had to win against it without compromising their partnership. More roughly than he meant to, Soul quickly dressed her wound and retreated from the bed.
"Done. I'm getting a shower," Soul shed his coat at last and tossed it towards the closet carelessly along with the extra bandaging, he knew his voice sounded ragged to his own ears but he hoped Maka was too tired to notice.
He was almost through the doorway when he heard Maka's still muffled voice. "Hey, thanks for everything today. I know I'm not the easiest partner to have, but as far as weapons go I couldn't have asked for better."
Soul carried those words with him that night up until he found unconsciousness.
