A/N: Welp. This was another tumblr prompt, but I had just read through a series of very sad stories so here, I'm sharing. Warnings for suicide, drug use, needles, and general angst.
Her bed is always cold when he wakes. Little wrinkles in the sheets beside him hint at soft flesh and fiery eyes, calm nights falling asleep to the dual beating of their hearts and the melody of her soul. But he's alone in the room, and he can't remember where she went. She never leaves him for long.
Drifting into the living room, he expects to find her sitting on the couch or bustling around the kitchen, but again he's met with an eerie quiet and the feeling he's walked into a room someone had just left. To distract himself from the vague discomfort building in his chest, he picks up the leftover takeout on the coffee table (vegetable lo mein, her favorite) to bring into the kitchen. Her door catches his eye then, closed but not locked, just a handle twist away, and he loses sensation in his hands while he stares at it, frozen. Leftover lo mein slides to the ground with a sick plop, forgotten. He leaves it.
Now he's in the kitchen, and the sink is full but he doesn't stop to do dishes, turning instead to the trash to scrape the plates clean. When he turns back, the sink is clear, allowing him to place their dishes at the bottom while yawning profusely. Maka always brushes the sleep from his eyes.
As if his thought summons her (and maybe it does; the line between them has long been blurred, frequent resonance leaving his soul pockmarked with fragments of hers), she glides into the room, golden hair catching the light like a broken halo. He looks at her, greedily taking in the green of her eyes, so alive, and the pink dusting her cheeks. What he would do to brush a finger along the side of her face, tucking those stubborn bangs behind her ear, or feel the wholeness of her lips between his. Images flash before him, flickers of black vials and the demon with fingers down his throat, and it hits him again, for the thousandth time, that none of this is real. But she's looking at him like she always does, eyes a virgin forest on the brink of combustion, and his lips are dry when he croaks, "Maka?"
She holds his gaze as she drops a hand to the counter, granite top disintegrating at her touch in a swirl of black ash that rises to float around her. "Soul," she murmurs, stepping towards him while the ash coalesces into a tattered likeness of the dress she used to wear when they'd dance inside his soul, back when he had a soul to share. "I miss you." Reaching forward, her fingertips ghost over his jawbone to cup his cheek, and, like always, he wishes he would disintegrate, too.
He usually responds in kind, crushing her to his chest with a breathless litany of apologies. But something has finally snapped inside him, the thin tether holding him so tenuously to this world fading quietly like mist on the wind, and now he can't get the words out. They're battering at his tongue, his heart swelling with the need to let her know he's sorry, so damn sorry, and he'll always love her. Her eyes devour him while he silently implodes, a broken star existing for too many years without fuel, and he welcomes the coming supernova.
Her dress twists and writhes along her skin as she takes another step, body inches from his chest, while the kitchen begins to melt around her in gobs of irrelevance. The universe could burn as long as she exists, here, now.
"Are you wearing my shirt?" she whispers, voice already fading, and he looks down to realize that he is. It's her favorite shirt, originally one of his, an old band tee that she "borrowed" soon after they started dating. She'd always find an excuse to wear it whenever she could, and he had come back from many a month-long Death Scythe trip to find her sprawled on his bed in nothing more than the shirt and a pair of his boxers. The last thing she told him before she left on her solo mission was that he'd better not take the shirt back - it's hers for as long as she lives.
It's on him now, though, and he swallows the familiar tightness in his throat while he contemplates scenarios where he went with her, protected her, at least held her for her final moments. She could have as many shirts as she wants if she'd just come back.
The world is starting to crumble around him, and everything he looks at turns to dust. He hates this part the most, where he's close enough to waking that he's aware of the dream but unable to stop any part of it. She calls to him, "Soul!" and like always, he's drawn to her voice. She's nothing but a silhouette now, backlit by a weeping sun while thick, black tears roll from its surface to coat her. He meets her eyes, the only part of her that shines through the darkness, and he brands the tears shimmering down her cheeks onto his heart one last time before she's dust, too, disintegrating from the tip of her outstretched hand to fly as ashes on the breeze. He never gets to say goodbye.
But now he's falling, falling, gasping and choking as he struggles to wake up in a reality he wants no part of. He can't breathe, so he pounds his chest a few times until a wave of nausea takes him and he's vomiting into the bathtub he's sprawled in, head pounding as he dry heaves between his knees.
Rolling to the side when the world stops spinning, he sees black-crusted syringes littering the floor and everything comes crashing back, waterfalls over anthills. She won't hate him if he does it just once more, right? He grabs a syringe and flicks it with a practiced, shaking finger, tapping the tar-like substance down to the bottom and grabbing a worn rubber tourniquet. It's tight around his arm and his vision swims, briefly, before a flash of light draws his attention to what's left of the bathroom mirror, lying broken on the floor across from the bathtub. He hears the demon cackle in the back of his mind, Soulie is such an angry boy without his meister. He doesn't remember how it broke.
His reflection shimmers briefly in one of the larger glass shards. He's wearing her shirt, just like in the dream he chases every day, and he remembers that he's never once taken it off since she left. The black and blue splotches on his face remind him of stormy skies they used to fly through together, and feathered wings flit through his mind before the tremor in his arm breaks the spell and he plunges the needle home, sighing heavily as a different kind of black blood oozes through his veins.
Now that he's got his (temporary, always temporary) fix, he can stand again, stumbling through the apartment to look for rusting motorcycle keys under mountains of molding pizza boxes. Neatness was always her strength. When he can't find them in the hallway, he slumps into the living room and trips on chunks of black, glossy wood, cutting his hand on the wire protruding from a sepulcher of ivory keys. The piano was the first to succumb to one of his drug-induced rages, seven years to the day he got the phone call from Kid. Music lost its meaning when he could no longer hear hers.
He gets up and moves into the kitchen, noticing the warped spot on the floor where Maka spilled boiling water all over the linoleum trying to cook him a fifth year anniversary dinner. She had always tried so hard for him, held him when the nightmares clawed at his sanity and tugged him out of bed when the thought of opening his eyes was too much. He had never deserved her in the first place, but losing her just after he had begun to believe her soft I love you's was incomprehensibly cruel.
The aching in his chest is numbed by the tar in his veins, allowing him to continue his search for the motorcycle keys. They turn up on the counter next to a stack of fading photographs he had printed in his second year of mourning. Her bright eyes haunt him as he rummages through cluttered drawers looking for a pen, belatedly remembering to leave a few notes, and he stops to flip the top picture over in something like shame. He'll never be high enough to think he deserves to look at her anymore.
Paper is not hard to come by with the large pile of unopened mail strewn about the apartment. He scribbles his final letter to her and reaches for his lighter, a habit he got into after she'd been gone three years. Words were always her favorite and he liked to think that when he'd burn them, the smoke curling towards heaven would reach her.
As an afterthought, he writes a note to Wes and Spirit too, because even though he'd shut them out early along with everyone else, a small voice that sounds like her tells him they ought to know.
Tasks completed, Soul walks out the door with the demon grinning in his head. You're finally gonna do it, eh Soulie boy? Took you long enough, he cackles, gnawing on the tips of clawed fingers. Soul revs his motorcycle.
He's blazing down the highway they used to take to go to her favorite restaurant, trying and failing to remember how her arms felt clutching his waist. He can't remember much anymore, only where the needles go and different shades of green, but he has a strange feeling this is something to be thankful for.
He's on the road that leads to the best stargazing spot in the state, a secluded area on top of a small, rocky mountain. Soul used to take her there after particularly rough missions so they could lie together in peace, tasting each other's lips beneath the light of dead stars. Now he's hoping it will grant him a different kind of peace, one he's fought so hard to deny for her. But he's tired, so fucking tired, and he did everything he could to keep his promise. He's gone ten years without her, ten years longer than he thought possible, but he's had enough of living in a world without Maka.
Her funeral had been small, tasteful, intimate. Only family and close friends were allowed, but Soul still had to speak to them civilly and pretend his world hadn't already ended. It was only when Black*Star, face somber, came over with an unopened bottle of whiskey that Soul had let himself dissolve into fits of hiccuping sobs, wanting so desperately to follow her to the other side. But her will had come with a letter addressed to him, written in that tiny, precise hand, and her voice echoes in his head as he recalls her gentle command, "Don't forget our vows."
How could he? How could he forget the words, "And to carry on when the other is gone, not just 'til death do us part but forever and always," when he chants them each day like a prayer, a mantra, a spell, anything to keep from breaking them? The needles were his last attempt to obey her final wish, desperately seeking something to make him crawl into the next day, and the day after that. But like everything else he's tried, it wasn't enough. Nothing will ever be enough anymore, and he's done fighting it. She'll understand. She always does.
Opening the throttle, he revs the engine and bursts through the wooden guardrail at the top of the mountain. There's a moment of weightlessness before he's soaring again, just like they used to when he was snug between her thighs and surging forward on tufted wings. As the rocks below rise to greet him like a long lost friend, Soul closes his eyes and grips his (her) shirt, smile twisting his lips for the first time since he wished her luck on her mission. See you in Heaven, Angel. The ground has never felt so soft.