I Had A Heart Then
Maka Albarn understood many things about love. Primarily, she understood that the love she knew when she was a child was a lie. She knew love was unconditional and unwavering with the kind of certainty reserved for the very young—still naïve and untouched by the harsh reality of life and truth.
It took her parents separating for her to shed that childish notion of love. She won't admit it, but watching her mother and her father fracture shattered something inside of her. Her mother had custody during the separation, and Maka clung to her strength and her will, iron clad determination as she threw herself into her work as a meister without the aid of the Deathscythe she had worked so hard to create. But there was something broken within her too, and Maka learned that love wasn't unconditional or forever.
The moment Maka entered into Shibusen, her mother was gone—she was needed elsewhere, to become the best meister she could, but Maka knew that it wasn't that, that it was her father—it was sharp, broken love for her pathetic father that pushed her mother away. Maka understood that love wasn't enough, that you didn't love equally—that a mother's love might not mean what she had thought because she had needed her, and she left anyway.
Her father tried, but all Maka could feel was the permeating sting of resentment and betrayal every time he showed up on her doorstep to take her to dinner with flowers and a grin and his insistence that he still loved "mama and Maka the most." She didn't believe him, she said, but the first couple of times, she went with him anyway. Maybe it was loneliness, maybe it was some kind of subconscious desire for a normalcy that didn't exist any longer.
In her cracked and broken heart, maybe she still hoped, still wanted to believe him, in him, in the love that he offered.
She stopped going when she realized that his eyes still followed their waitresses as they walked or bent down, and every dinner felt like stabbing her mother's memory, and that really there was nothing that had changed except that Maka understood that there was no alternate definition of love that she simply needed to discern, but that there really was just…no such thing.
This she accepted, understood, acknowledged. It was truth she had determined, and if something deep within her chest ached every time her father came by and she listened to Soul tell him flatly to "Go the fuck away, old man," it was because she was annoyed. It certainly wasn't because somewhere deep inside she still loved her father because he was her father and she couldn't help herself.
And if something in the vicinity of her chest clenched when Soul came back and flopped onto the couch next to her, it was merely gratitude for his friendship and assistance because Maka understood now that there was no such thing as love, permanent and unconditional. That was just the world, as she had learned the hard way, and nothing could change that—not the way her partner scared off her father or burned their toast in the mornings, or the way he always tried to get her out of the house, or anything.
This is a little odd, and a little eh, and makes me want to pat Maka on the head.
