We're getting close to the end (next chapter might be the last?) and I added a time jump just for the sake of finishing this. I hope you're all OK with that.


Soul tried not to do this, to hold that stupid shirt in his hands but the twinge was decreasing like the dissipation in the ache of a stretched muscle and he only found himself sighing once in the entirety of his visit to the room. He only uttered a second one when he felt Maka's arms wrap around his waist, her fingers patting at his stomach. "How are you?"

"Alive," he murmured. There was no simple answer to that question and his was the most succinct he could come to with the present turmoil still broiling in his head. "You?"

Maka hummed thoughtfully into his back for a moment before sighing out. "Maybe a little better than that." She tapped her fingers against his shirt, weighing her next set of words carefully. "Soul, what are we going to do with this room?"

The air felt thin in his lungs and even though he found himself constantly recounting the conversation with Stein when he was in here his gut still lurched for the same thing. He wanted to deflect, to ask for her opinion first but that would be a no-no, a bad-boyfriend reaction as he now kept trying to remind himself. "Listen, Maka."

"I'm listening." She rested her cheek against his back, hearing the words reverberating through his chest along with his heart.

"I can't tear it down and I can't put any of it away. I need to be able to look at it, to feel it sometimes because I'm not sure I even get it yet, all of it." Soul ran a hand slowly through his hair, "At the same time, I want to fill it. I want to fill it right now even though I know it's not a good idea."

"It's not a good idea," Maka murmured back as her fingers dug into his shirt. "I can't, Soul… I can't do that right now."

"I didn't think so." He leaned forward, gently laying the onesie back on the crib mattress before easing open her fingers. Once she'd let go enough Soul turned, his hands cupping her face. "But you get that I can't let it go?"

"I understand that." Maka bit at her lip before taking a trembling breath. "I just can't… I don't want to feel it again, just yet. Sometimes I still forget that Jack's gone and I think I feel him and it hurts."

He freed a hand to smooth through her hair. "I get that, too. But can we… can we just shut the door for a while?"

"Literally or figuratively?" Maka moved her hands to his sides, her fingers burying into his shirt again.

"Both," Soul let out a long sigh. "Just keep it there, ready for when we're ready, when this seems possible again and when it doesn't hurt you."

"Or you," she added. "And what if that never happens? What if it always hurts, Soul?"

"Eventually it has to stop, right?" Soul had never imagined a more terrifying question, especially as the fear blossomed inside him that the answer had to be no. But his normal reasoning started sneaking in, tempering that sudden flare of panic with assurances that they were moving forward. Between date nights and loving, teaching and training, they were inching forward. "It has to, Maka."

She pressed the air between her lips, making an almost comical little squeak. "I guess slowly. So slowly, but OK, yes, Soul, let's just close the door for a while." Maka took a step, slipping out of his grasp and bringing her hands to her hair, running her fingers through it with another aching breath. "But Soul…" A little rasp of frustration broke from her throat. "Soul, I…"

He took a step back, giving her the room to tilt and pace for a second. "Maka, just say it."

"You don't hate me, right?" She blurted quickly, her hands coming to her mouth like she'd just uttered a curse so strong he should be hit into next week.

Soul's eyebrows furrowed, "Don't know why I should."

Her hand came back to her mouth, wiping in vain. "It's stupid because I was the sure one, I pushed you to get over the fear and now I'm standing here drowning in it."

"That's OK." He reached a tentative hand for her, letting his fingers graze her elbow in an effort to bring her back. "Be scared this time. I know you're usually the courageous one, but this time let me do it." There wasn't coaxing, just an eruption as she threw her arms around his neck, the sobs starting as soon as her face was pressed into his shoulder. "I don't hate you for being scared," he murmured in her ear as her shoulders shook with the uneven breaths. "Never hated you for anything, especially not Jack related. If you thought different, get it out of your head."

Maka squeezed him for another breath before releasing enough to clear the tears from her face. She took a few gulping breaths as he joined in to clean her cheeks. "We're OK." She said it more for herself than him, but Soul nodded anyway. "We're going to let the room stay as-is. We're going to wait."

Soul offered her a smile that was far from his smirk, the warm kind without playfulness. "And in the meantime, we're going to love each other."


"She's working me to death," Soul groaned as he threw himself back in the grass, legs splayed out as if that would cease the ache.

"She has to, you're still shit out there." Black Star slapped a hand to Soul's stomach, laughing as the short 'oof' erupted from Soul's mouth.

Soul rubbed at the spot before rolling on his side to face Black Star. Another long sigh eased from his lips. "I thought once you hit your mid-twenties you were supposed to slow down. She's treating me like I'm still nineteen."

"Yeah, a fucking geezer at twenty-six, that's what you are," Black Star rolled his eyes. "And almost twenty-seven. Did she tell you what she's doing for your birthday?"

"She never does," he sighed again with every effort to sound annoyed. Admitting out loud that he loved the way she always baked that stupid lopsided cake every year and then added some kind of very-Soul-themed surprise at the end of the day would absolutely diminish all of the cool he had left.

"Did you tell her about your lame-ass surprise?" Black Star was halfway to cackling as Soul grimaced at him.

"No, and it's not lame! You just don't have a romantic fucking bone in your body."

"Uh-oh, here comes trouble." Black Star's slap hit paydirt again because Soul was too interested in seeing Maka walk this way to deflect it.

Soul smacked back at him with a soft grunt before scrambling up to sitting just as Maka reached his feet. "I'm tapped out," Soul grumbled.

"Absolutely not." Her hands were on his arm in an instant, pulling him to his feet and back towards the dusty ring.

He heard a snort from Black Star and turned his head to see the cheesy smile, the half-assed wave of good riddance. "Tomorrow's my birthday, doesn't that count for anything?"

"Oh, I'm sorry, I thought, 'My birthday doesn't matter.' 'It's just like every day, Maka.' 'Birthdays are corny anyway.'" She put on a poor show of mimicking his voice that broke instantly as she started to laugh. "So don't try to use your birthday to get out of practice."

"OK, training is good and all, Maka, but this soul perception practice-"

"It's important!" This was a tone he couldn't decipher, and one she seemed to use every time soul perception came up lately like it was some panicked dire necessity.

"Yeah," he gave into the confusion again, his brow furrowing as he tried to play that voice again in his head. She was awful at keeping secrets and this was one of the few that actually irked him since she was definitely allowed to have them, but this one seemed heavy, strange.

Maka pulled him out to the center of the ring, some of their students meandering around in the corners. When resonating, it was more of an information transfer. Maka could see the souls, grab the important details, and transmit it to Soul, allowing him to formulate whatever attack was necessary. Maka had been toying with this, trying to get him to at the very least see the souls just as well as she could. In the first two years, Soul had managed to get to the hazy blob stage, seeing that they were there but any structure to them was lost. Now, almost seven years after their first date, Soul was just about to the point where he could actually see them take shape.

"OK, five souls on the field," Maka looked around at her students and then focused back on Soul. "Which one's the Grigori?"

"Easy, it's you," Soul prodded at her sternum, eliciting nothing but an eye roll from her.

"In the five souls other than us," she added exasperatedly.

"Fine…" The piano room always seemed so strange when Soul was looking for souls. For him, it wasn't a field like Maka saw, but a soul for each key, a note to be played that kind of started to feed him a little information about each. He started his hands across the keys, searching for the sound of angel wings and finding none. He felt her hands on his shoulders, but even with that, with her clarity, there weren't any of those divinely rare souls like Maka. "None."

"Right," she chirped.

"You tricked me," he grumbled. "And I should have known, Grigori are like one in a million."

"One in fifty million," Maka corrected with a grin. "Do you still see it like piano keys?"

"Yeah," he sighed. "Don't think it's a big deal."

A forlorn sigh broke from her lips. "I thought eventually you would, but I guess it's fine this way. As long as you can see something."

He didn't like it, the tone, that sigh, and he found his hands coming to her hips to pull her closer, regardless of the students' giggles or snickers. "What is it?"

"Nothing," she snapped back quickly before sighing again. "Or something. Give me a little time, OK? I promise, I just… I want you to keep practicing."

"Maka, I don't like this secret, whatever it is," his voice was gruff and his fingers dug slightly into her hips.

This was the strangest turn of all, the way her smile snuck through and her hand softly came to his chest. "Trust me, I think you will."


Soul would eat the whole cake if he could, not because Maka was some great cook but because of the way her eyes lit up while he was eating it. It was like each cake was her crowning achievement, not the fact that she'd made him into Death's Last Weapon. There was something in the way she could still love the mundane, find excitement in watching him be him, that was better than any birthday surprise she could ever conceive of. He could see her sitting on the excitement though, hands barely contained as she played with the fabric of the couch, scratching at the lines as he chewed slowly. He let the last of the crumbs clear from his mouth before he rested the plate on his knees. "What is it?"

"I think this year's surprise is kind of… well, it's for both of us, I guess." She pressed her cheek against the back of the couch, her eyes alternating between him and the plate when she couldn't take the amused smirk on his face anymore. "Is that OK? I hate to change tradition…"

"Maybe this year we kind of throw it out the window," he laughed, "since I kind of have a surprise for you, too."

"Soul," she groaned.

"Not sorry," he laughed back. "You or me first, then?"

"You," Maka grumbled before snatching the plate from his lap and discarding it on the table. That pouty lip was back as she wrapped her arms around his legs, resting her chin on his knees. "I'm not sure I like this."

"Why?" He resisted the urge to kiss her, leaning back as he curled an eyebrow.

"It's your birthday," she huffed.

"But you apparently did the same thing." His smirk ate up his face and it did nothing but elicit another sigh from her. "But if it makes you feel better the surprise is just you knowing. The thing was something I did for me, anyway."

This piqued her interest, the annoyance starting to trickle away as one hand moved to caress up and down his thigh. "What don't I know?"

He unsettled her slightly as he lifted his butt enough to get his wallet out of his pocket so he could open the well-worn leather folds. With the plastic gripped tightly in his fingers, those digits strategically placed to cover the awful state-mandated picture, he turned the ID towards her.

"You're covering your picture," Maka's complaint morphed into a giggle as the fight to pull the plastic from his grasp started.

"It's awful and that's not the point," he griped as he shook the plastic free of her clutching fingers. "Look at it."

"I am," she spat back. "I'm looking at Soul E-" Maka blinked, eyes finally no longer focused on the annoyance on his face but the fine print next to his fingers. "Soul Albarn."

"Yeah," Soul snatched air into his lungs, prepping for the rehearsed words he'd practiced in his head all week. "I asked you years ago, and then I kind of just went by it at work, with our friends, but I thought maybe it was time to just kind of make it permanent. Official. Like there's no Soul Evans anymore, just the better one, the one that's with you." Her green eyes were just glowing, but she was torturing him, hiding away her smile because she always knew when he wasn't done, but he was taking time to spit it out. "And I know you've been pretty vocal about not needing the marriage part, but I guess I'm doing my yearly check to see if that's still what you want."

"You're legally Soul Albarn?" She let a tiny corner of her smile curl, still holding out on him.

"Yeah, and it was a bitch. Waiting in line, all the useless paperwork, and you don't know how many things you actually have to change." He was holding up fingers, counting them off as her smile continued to grow. As soon as it was blossoming right over his knees, Soul couldn't stop himself from leaning forward, taking a taste of it with his lips. "You still feeling the same way or not?"

"We already are," she lingered in the kiss before sighing sweetly. "Maybe that's not on some legal document somewhere, but we feel like enough of a forever thing, Soul Albarn."

He snorted a laugh as his hand drifted into her hair, "How many times do you think you're going to say that tonight?"

"Enough to drive you crazy, Soul Albarn."

Soul stole one last kiss before leaning back, delighting in the feeling of her golden tresses slipping through his fingers before going through the process of getting his ID back to his wallet. "So?"

"So?" Maka echoed, still beaming at him.

"It's your turn." Soul stayed with his back pressed against the couch, his arms crossing against his chest.

"Right…" Maka nodded her head slowly before running both hands down his thighs. "I think you kind of ruined my whole momentum with your own thing, Soul Albarn."

"Alright, Maka Albarn." He caught her hands, stopping the almost a little too pleasurable movement. "Scrap the mental script, then. Just jump in."

She laughed sharply, rolling her face from her chin to her cheek against his knees. "We've been together for a while, Soul. Since we were kids, but even this romantic relationship is edging closer to a decade." There was an extra sparkle to her eyes and he realized it was the tears that were threatening.

"Hey, Maka." He tried to move his hand but she grasped both of them, keeping them in place in his lap.

"It's OK," she sniffled before blowing out a long breath between her lips. "And I don't think I'm wrong when I say we're stronger."

"Yes," his encouragement was almost breathless, especially with all the wandering thoughts of where she was going. She already said we're not getting married and this would be the weirdest break-up speech…

For him, there was a conflict raging on her face as she let out a sharp laugh and a wave of tears down her cheeks simultaneously. "So can we try again?"

Soul was too concerned with the tears, forcing her to let at least one of his hands free so he could clear them. "Maka, try what?"

She laughed again, trapping his hand against her cheek. "I want to open the door again, Soul."

His eyebrows furrowed and he almost wished she would have stuck with her script because all he was drawing were blanks. When it finally hit him it was a legendary sock to the gut, worse than anything Black Star had ever given him, and he had to wait to regain the air. "A baby?" was barely a whisper from his lips.

"I know, not a great present, but-"

Soul had moved a thumb over her lips as he took another trembling breath. "You're ready?"

Maka peeled away the finger, freeing her mouth again. "If you are." She continued to pull at the pad of his finger. "And I know we've been using condoms so I kind of stopped my birth control a few months ago. I know I probably should have told you so please don't be mad, but I just wanted to make sure I was sure, you know and-" Maka cut off her rambling as she saw him firmly refusing to cry, knowing that tell-tale sign of the clenched jaw and the quivering swallows. "Soul…"

"It's fine," he croaked before sucking in a breath, still denying the burning in the back of his throat and the swimming in his eyes.

Maka traced the lines of his fingers as they still clung to her face, "So if you wanted to, we could even start trying tonight."

"Tonight," his voice crumbled away with another sigh as his hands both came to clutch at her face.

"Or we could wait," she offered quietly. "I, well, of course," she paused to laugh at herself for a second, "I made a schedule. I read that there's good times to try so I kind of planned out the next few months."

And I bet it's color-coded, too. He finally managed a real breath, the tears abated by how absolutely Maka that last sentence was. Soul cleared his throat to shoo away the last of the dregs before managing a weak laugh. "Maka, the last time we got pregnant on birth control, just because of a broken condom."

She smiled softly, playing with her bottom lip with her teeth before whispering, "I guess I'm just worried that because of what happened with Jack, it might be a little harder this time."

"Stein said it'd be no problem," Soul shot back without really thinking about the line, watching as her eyebrows instantly rose.

"You asked Stein about me getting pregnant again?" Maka wasn't sure if she was amused or disturbed.

He coughed out another laugh, "Yeah, but it's not like we discussed it, just a yes or no and he said yes."

"That's comforting, I guess." She bit at her lip again, pausing to let a slow sigh ease out of her. "But we can go as fast or as slow as you want. I made you wait, so I get it if you're still-"

"No," he laughed deliriously. "Tonight. We're starting tonight." Soul barely let the words out of his mouth before he was climbing off the couch. "Come here." He slipped his arms under her, lifting her up.

"Soul," she laughed out his name.

"And then you can show me the color-coded schedule after," he murmured in her ear as he carried her down the hallway, careful not to graze her head against the wall.

"It's not color-coded," Maka huffed.

"Liar," he whispered before planting a kiss on her cheek. Soul let her down right before the bed, forcing himself to take a moment to plant his hands on her hips. "I love you."

"I love you, and, Soul, I promise I'm excited." So excited that her hands were already at the hem of her shirt, throwing it over her head.

"Let me get the rest." He pushed her back on the bed, chuckling as she tossed herself against the sheets. His hands moved to her hips, sliding off her shorts and her underwear in one smooth glide down her legs. "Move up." He motioned her towards the headboard so he could climb onto the end of the bed. As his hands grasped her thighs, he slowly slid them down, parting them as he dipped his head between.

"You don't have to-"

He cut her off with a firm lap of his tongue before almost humming it against her skin, "I want to."

There was no more argument, Maka melting into the bed as his tongue kneaded away at her core. It was insane that she could rewind thirty minutes and see herself chewing-at-her-nails nervous, wondering if all of those old wants had left him. Instead she probably just could have offered him the simple, 'Let's have a baby' without any of the agonizing or fanfare and they'd still be right where they were now. Those tumbling thoughts were the only thing keeping her from groaning out his name in that last giant crash of a wave. "Soul, come here."

He only broke for a second, murmuring against her thigh. "Not done."

"Trust me." Maka leaned forward and teasingly tugged at his earlobe. "Come here."

Soul huffed in reply before starting the process of getting his own clothes off, throwing his shirt and struggling to find a smooth way of getting off his shorts and underwear. Maka was waiting for him when he finished, hands pulling him to her as her legs wrapped around him. There was no pausing, just an effortless glide into her as Soul leaned in to nibble at her neck. "You don't usually cum this way," he muttered as he pressed deeper, one of his hands gripping at her hip.

"Tell me when you're close," she whispered back. Her hands moved to his back, clenching into his skin as he continued nipping the skin of her neck between his teeth.

Getting close wasn't a problem, especially spurred by the soft gasps she was supplying right next to his ear, the moaning whispers of his name. He slowed his stroke, trying to ease back on the building tingling sensation. "I'm ready." Maka nodded and pressed a hand to his chest, creating enough space between the two of them that her hand could move down to her clit. Soul's mouth and fingers were amazing in their own ways, but Maka would always know her body. The moment he was back to thrusting, mind now completely lost on holding back, Maka brought herself crashing over the edge. He rode through her moaning cry, feeling her constrict around him while her legs started to loosen with that euphoric weakness.

Before she could recover, Soul let out his own low groan as he collapsed on top of her. "Same time." She patted him on the back as if he was the sole contributor, letting a weak laugh pass her lips.

"Yeah," he panted against her ear before leaving a kiss right under the lobe.

"It's supposed to help." This time it wasn't a pat but a slow glide, starting at his shoulder and trailing down his back.

Soul chuckled softly against her neck before raising his head. "Color-coded and tricks and tips."

"You're mean." She caught his lips quickly before breaking out into a grin. "But, fine, yes, it is color-coded."