Latin; All things change and we change with them.
June
It's only when Marie speaks that Maka becomes aware of the dull ache in her lungs and realizes she's holding her breath again.
"You're getting the hang of this," the clairvoyant says as the van pauses at a deserted intersection, drumming her fingers against the steering wheel. "I'm impressed."
"There's not much I need to do." Maka tries to keep her voice low, but Fire still stirs in her lap. A small tendril of smoke drifts out of his mouth as he snores, something that'd alarmed her the first time she'd seen it, though Marie had immediately assured her it was the least of her concerns when dealing with a pyrokinetic.
Kilik leans forward from the back seat, clapping Maka's shoulder. "No use trying to keep quiet, this is our stop anyways." His gaze softens as he moves to pat Fire's arm. "Time to wake up, buddy, we got work to do."
Beside him, Thunder's face pops into view and a wicked grin spreads across her face as she jabs Fire in the stomach and ribs, showing no qualms about roughly waking her brother up, unlike Kilik. Instantly, Fire's eyes fly open and he springs up nearly as fast, letting out a tiny grunt as he scrambles over the front seat to leap on his sister.
"Save that for the mutant wasps waiting in there." Kilik slides open the van door to reveal a particularly decrepit office building in Pyram, a mid-sized town east of Moricio. The two cease their mock fight, looking at each other and gasping in unison before making a beeline for the door, although Kilik seizes them by the back of their shirts before they can jump out.
"You need to wait for me," he scolds lightly. "How can I let you go with Miss Marie or Azusa by yourselves when you keep running headfirst into danger like this?"
Thunder huffs sheepishly under her breath and Fire ducks his head. They lean back and wait in their seats as Kilik dons a jacket stamped with the DWMA's skull logo, although it only takes Kilik stepping out of the van for their excitement to get the better of them again, springing from their seats and dancing beside Kilik as he finishes zipping his jacket.
"It shouldn't take us more than an hour to clear out the area," he says to Marie, pushing up his sleeve to check his watch. "Maybe a bit longer if they've spread out into the neighboring buildings."
"Will you need a ride?" Marie asks as Maka hands him the boxing gloves Stein modified to store Fire and Thunder's powers. Like Marie, Kilik is a medium, but instead of purification, Kilik's abilities lay in channeling the powers of others. With Fire and Thunder, he had dispatched more Rift creatures and banished more poltergeists than many veteran psychics in the DWMA, despite being only a year older than Maka.
"Nah, there's a portal nearby," he says, offering a gloved hand to Thunder. Her hands flash with tiny blue-white sparks as she charges the glove. "Besides, I promised the twins pizza after this."
Marie smiles at the way Fire and Thunder's faces light up at the mention of pizza. "If you change your mind, call me. I still have a few things to take care of here."
"Roger that." With a two-fingered salute, Kilik turns to the twins. "Ready to roll?"
In response, Fire and Thunder bolt forward onto the concrete path leading to the building. With an amused shake of his head, Kilik gives a wave before following the two.
"They're so eager." Maka watches as the Thunder yanks on Fire's arm to reach the door first. Dusk barely touched down less than an hour ago, and she can still clearly see the impish grin on Thunder's face as she sticks out her tongue at her brother and disappears into the building. "They don't seem afraid at all."
"Kilik does an excellent job at making the twins feel safe," Marie replies as she shifts the van's gears. "However, before he found them, Fire and Thunder lived on their own. When you see monsters all your life and have to fend for yourself, you have to decide if you're going to be afraid of them or not."
"That's not a very fair thing to ask of children." She presses a tiny crescent into her skin with her nail. From outside, the shriek of a poltergeist pierces the dark of the budding night, garbled but not completely lost. Eventually, it will have to be dealt with, but only when Kid or another reaper is in the area.
The thought digs under her skin. Without a weapon, she's useless as a reaper; since she came back from the Rift, she's been relegated to supporting reapers and meisters like Kilik, using her perception to detect hordes of Rift creatures and to help Marie find weakened and corrupted areas during her post-reaping purification ritual.
It's humiliating to no one but herself but it still burns. Biting her lip, Maka shifts her gaze away from the window and nearly misses Marie's reply. "It's not," the clairvoyant agrees as they turn onto a main road and into a less desolate area of Pyram. "But the options you're given aren't always fair."
"Having to work for the DWMA isn't one of them at all." Her words come out more argumentative than Maka means them to be and she swallows, eyes darting to Marie and then back to the road. She's not sure why she's looking for a fight when Marie isn't the one she's angry at.
She's not even sure who she is angry at.
"When we found Kilik and the twins two years ago, Kilik made it very clear he would be accepting no help from us unless it was left up to the twins to decide if and when they would begin working for the DWMA. Something that I agreed with," she says. Marie's voice remains mild and soothing, though her gaze rests briefly on Maka's face. "Imagine my surprise when they came to me last year and demanded to join Kilik on his missions."
Maka's eyebrows rise. "They talked to you?"
"In their way." The van comes to a stop and Marie pulls the keys from the ignition. "Neither Kilik nor I could change their minds, so he began taking on the less dangerous missions so he could keep an eye on the twins. Seeing as their control has improved and their trust has grown to include others than just Kilik, I think it was the right decision," she says.
"A good choice, at least." The flash of anger in Maka has already dimmed and a faint kind of embarrassment settles in. She glances out at the empty storefront in front of the van. "Another haunted attic to cleanse?"
"Not quite." Cold air bites at her skin as Marie opens the door and exits the van. "We have one more stop, but it's not here."
Maka frowns and moves to follow Marie out of the van, trailing her to the store. "You said you had more things to do in Pyram."
"I do. You're done for the night. How-" At the door, Marie pauses, rummaging in her sleeve and crease furrowing across her brow before she brightens suddenly and pulls out a key. "Found it!"
A cloud of dust wafts into Maka's face when Marie opens the door and she gags, spluttering and wiping her eyes as she follows Marie inside.
"Sorry," Marie apologizes, closing the door with her foot and flicking a switch. A poorly burning light bulb in the middle of the store flickers on, useless except for showing how empty the store was. "We don't come to this portal often."
"Portal?" Rubbing the last of the dust from her face, Maka watches Marie walk behind the store counter and reach under, concentrated look on her face as she apparently searches for something. "Why are we going back to the DWMA?"
"I think it's better to explain once we're there." A click echoes softly and Marie smiles, straightening. "There."
Something moves at the bottom of Maka's vision and she looks down, gasping as the checkered floor folds on itself and folds downward, transforming into stairs. Although the portal is directly below the lightbulb, the portal is only illuminated a few steps before plunging into a darkness that appears solid.
Looking back at Marie, Maka toes the border of the portal with her shoe. It's useless to demand an explanation from Marie when she's already refused, but another question crops up. "Why is this portal different than the ones in Moricio and the forest?"
"The DWMA had to make the portals in smaller towns more elaborate since they aren't used as often." Marie locks the door and flicks off the light as she speaks. "Only people registered with the DWMA can unlock these portals."
"Seems like it should be that way for all portals," Maka says, examining the portal's familiar darkness.
"The DWMA has been around for a long time and modern technology hasn't. It takes a while to catch up." Sweeping the room with a final glance, Marie nods and begins moving down the stairs. "Let's go, the portal will close as soon as we're through."
Silence descends as they walk down the portal's stairs; the steps eventually even out, but it still feels like they are moving downwards instead of across. The soft hush of Marie's breathing is the only sign that Maka isn't alone in the dark and she holds onto it in the same way she held onto her flashlight when she was little. Still, the darkness rests heavily on her skin, enfolding itself around her as phantom tendrils brush across her face and the back of her neck. The sound of their breathing morphs into the whispers of the monsters in the Rift, into his voice. Maka's fingers do a nervous dance against her side as she struggles against the memories frothing beneath the surface of her thoughts.
Don't think, don't think, she chants to herself, but she is no longer the eleven year old girl who could bury the loss of her ghosts and her mother's abandonment in the crevices of her mind. She's not even the fifteen year old girl who could freeze out the ghost bound to her soul through sheer willpower.
Something brittle, rotten, and immovable had cracked and crumbled away when she decided to trust Soul, when she decided to rebuild herself, and now she feels and feels, bleeding out all of the emotion she had buried until she could pretend it didn't exist. Who she is now staggers under the weight that one person's absence can bring, feels Soul's desertion with raw, exposed nerves, and yet nearly doubles over from the ache to talk to him again.
Maka sucks in a breath, counts to ten, and lets it out. A numbing pain in her fingers makes her realize how how tightly her hands are clenched and she releases her grip slowly, tiny pricks of pain running up and down her palms as blood rushes back into her fingers.
"How are you doing?" Marie's voice startles Maka, sounding far off.
Clearing her throat, she quickens her step. "I haven't tripped yet."
"Oh, I didn't mean that," Marie answers. "Though I'm glad you didn't, I hope you don't," she adds quickly. There's an awkward, weighted pause. "It's just I know our answer wasn't what you wanted to hear and I wanted to check-"
"It's been almost six weeks since I asked." Maka's heart thuds in her ears as she cuts Marie off, her mouth going dry. "Why are you bringing it up now?"
"I have a tendency to worry," Marie says apologetically. "Especially after what you've been through."
"I've gone through worse and made it out just fine." An involuntary sharpness makes her words biting. She stops for a moment, runs her tongue over her teeth, and tries again. You don't need to worry," Maka says, staring up into the darkness. The sound of her footsteps are muffled here-it makes her feel like she's being swallowed up. "I didn't like your answer, but I accepted it."
"Okay." Another beat of silence follows and then Marie speaks again. "But what about what happened in the Rift?" she asks.
An ironlike tightness squeezes around her heart. "What about it?"
Marie takes the hint, although not entirely. "Soul didn't give you any kind of explanation before he went to Abeyance?"
The darkness hides the way Maka flinches, though it doesn't erase the white-hot sear in her mind that flares at every mention of Soul's name. Swallowing to keep her voice steady, she answers, "I already told you that he never said anything."
It's neither the complete truth or a whole lie; logic argues she should have told the truth from the beginning, but she knows what she saw in Soul's eyes right before he disappeared through the Rift and she was not built for abandoning people she still had faith in.
"And there wasn't anything else that happened while you were in the Rift?"
The sensation of when Soul possessed her in the Rift crawls up Maka's arms. She rubs her wrists. "Isn't what happened enough?"
"I know," Marie says. Her voice is gentle, which is somehow worse than the interrogation Azusa put her through the day after she came out of the Rift. "And I know you don't want to talk about it, but if something else did happen, it's important that you don't keep it bottled inside."
A steadily growing pinprick of light signaling the exit to the portal comes into view. Maka swallows her panic-she can't talk about these memories in the light. "Listen, I'm not pretending to be okay with what happened, but there's nothing I'm holding onto," she says. "Soul left, and I don't know why, and even if I did know why, there wouldn't be anything I can do to find him."
They're nearly at the exit when Marie speaks finally. "All right, but I do need to know one thing."
"And that is?" Dazzling light blinds Maka as she steps out of the portal and feels the desert heat of the Death Room clamp around her.
"You haven't felt any lingering connection with Soul?" Marie asks, turning around to face her. "Any sign that your bond still exists?"
Maka's stomach lurches and her throat closes. She works to free her voice, keeping her head ducked as if she's still adjusting to the light. "No, I haven't felt anything at all."
Studying her, Marie's face is serious for a moment and then she gives Maka a smile. "Okay, I just wanted to be sure. Moving on is difficult enough, as it is."
"Right," she murmurs, falling into step behind Marie as the clairvoyant keeps walking. As they walk, she catches the mirage-like shimmer of Azusa's demon sniffers peeking out from the field of crosses spread across the Death Room. They follow Maka with their unblinking gaze.
Unpleasant memories surface, twisting Maka's stomach into knots. She won't be able to do any searching tonight if they keep her in here as long as they did last time. "Are you going to tell me why you brought me here or do I have to guess?"
"Nearly there." The stone table that lies in the center of the Death Room comes into view, Stein recognizable by his grey hair and tattered coat and Azusa by her all-black outfit and the glare of her glasses. Another person is with them, though it isn't someone Maka has seen before.
It's not until they reach the stone dais and the stranger's faint translucence becomes apparent that Maka understands.
The sharp light of the Death Room blurs in her vision and she stops walking. "No."
Azusa rises and speaks as Marie places a hand on Maka's shoulder, though she's not sure if it's to soothe her or keep her from running. "We're just here to discuss your options, Maka."
Her cool composure provokes the anger clawing its way from Maka's chest to her throat. "Options?" she spits, hands curling into fists. "I'm about as interested in listening to you as you were in listening to me."
"Looking for Soul isn't feasible, and even if it was, it's not a risk we can take." A hint of annoyance creeps into Azusa's voice. "Soul going into Abeyance is highly suspect, no matter what you bel-"
"It's not what I believe, it's what I know." Maka's words crack from the effort it takes not to raise her voice. She wrenches her arm out of Marie's grasp and glares at them all. "Soul would never sell out the DWMA to the witches, and he's not a demon either. I don't know why he left, he just-" Abruptly, she breaks off.
"He just what?" Stein asks quietly.
All of the anger and frustration that rose up drains away. "I don't know," Maka says, answer barely above a whisper. The tears that were stinging in her eyes are now streaking down her face, though she doesn't remember when she started crying. She rubs her eyes with the edge of her sleeve and looks back up at the three. "But I'm not giving up on Soul and I'm not going to bond with another ghost to forget about him."
"I'm sorry." Her eyes travel to the ghost, who watches her impassively as she hovers behind Azusa. Phantom water steadily drips in a rhythmic cascade from her long dark hair and grey overcoat. Clenching her hands together, Maka looks back at the three. "I quit."
Twisting around, Maka walks away, though it gradually turns into a run and then a sprint. She doesn't stop until she reaches her truck, lungs aching as she hunches over the steering wheel, gasping for breath. Attempting to blindly jam the key into the ignition with trembling fingers results in the keys slipping from her hand and landing somewhere underneath the seat.
A sound bubbles on her lips, although she's not sure if it's a laugh, a sob, a scream, or perhaps all three. Leaning back, Maka stares up at the stars through her windshield, even though the night sky is mostly hidden by storm clouds, and lets her tears flow freely for once.
She can never quite outrun the ghosts in her head and she can never outrun herself.
On her way home, Maka stops outside of the old cemetery. Her truck begins to idle at the entrance as she fights with herself, hands clenched around the steering wheel and eyes trained on her feet. The ghosts drifting around are unusually quiet tonight; their silence pounds against her eardrums, matching her heart's thudding in her chest.
Licking her lips, she looks up, and gazes out across the cemetery. Soul's grave is buried in the back, hidden by overgrown hedges-she'd have to trek nearly the entire cemetery to even get a glimpse of it, although there is nothing inside. His body was never found, had probably been stowed away somewhere in Giriko's house until it was destroyed last Halloween.
She starts at the rapping on her window.
A man with greying hair and a name patch embroidered on his jacket taps the glass again with the flashlight in his hand. Maka recognizes him as one of the undertakers of the graveyard as he speaks, voice muffled by the glass. "Cemetery's closed."
Rapidly, Maka nods, putting the truck in gear.
She doesn't look back at the cemetery as she drives away.
Soul isn't there anyways.
"Your mother called," says Spirit as Maka walks into the living room. He mutes the channel he was watching on the TV and looks up at her. "She says you weren't answering your phone."
"Did she?" Maka tosses the bag of library books onto the floor and unfilled scholarship applications she's been using as her excuse to go out for the past two weeks. Lying on the couch, she digs in her pocket for her phone and looks at the screen and the three missed calls from her mother. "Guess I had it on silent."
Closing her eyes, she hears the creak of Spirit's chair as he gets up and moves to stand over her. "Did something happen between you and her?"
"What? No." She opens her eyes to see his face, upside down. "We're going to get breakfast together tomorrow."
"She told me about that when she called." Some of the apprehension in his expression disappears. "It seems that things are going well."
"I suppose." Sitting up, she shrugs. The aftermath from crying is setting in, leaving her head throbbing and her mind in a fog that's hard to think through. "Maybe, it's hard to tell."
Spirit sits down in the area she vacated and brushes a stray lock of hair out of her face. "What makes it hard to tell?"
She shrugs again. "I don't know." Biting her lip, after a pause, she says, "Myself, I guess. It's not like she hasn't been trying."
"It's a hard situation to handle." Spirit shifts in his seat to better look at her. "There's no one way you should make yourself feel about it."
"Sometimes I really want to talk to her," Maka says quietly, picking up her phone. "And other times, I never want to see her again." She studies the missed phone calls again. "But most of the time, I feel somewhere in the middle."
"There's nothing wrong with that," says Spirit. It's the same thing she's told herself, but hearing it from her father is different. "She knows she's the one who hurt you and that she has to be the one to put in the effort to make things right."
"I still feel guilty." The admittal surprises her, cuts to a place she had kept guarded for a long time.
"That is because you're you," Spirit replies. "You try to take responsibility for everything."
His answer pulls a smile out of her, the first one she hasn't had to feign since Soul left. It fades as she leans against Spirit's shoulder and stares at the TV. "So what do I do then?"
"Keep pushing but take it at your own pace." Spirit's arm comes around her and she relaxes slightly; it's not a shield against monsters like it was when she was small, but the comfort is the same. "Are you comfortable with breakfast tomorrow?"
She nods.
"Then breakfast is good," he says. "See how you feel afterwards."
The knot of pain, guilt, and anger surrounding her mother loosens slightly. "Okay."
For several moments, they are quiet, Maka staring absentmindedly at the TV before a new thought occurs to her. She glances up at Spirit. "Did you ever try to find Mom?"
"I knew where she was in the beginning and a while after that." Her eyes widen with Spirit's answer. His eyes are distant with memory and then he blinks. "But she wasn't in a place where she could be convinced to come back."
Maka frowns. "What did you feel when she first left?"
A faint wince crosses his face. "It wasn't pretty. There was a lot of anger and hurt and a lot of bad days because of it." He hesitates. "It may have been because I still loved her very much."
Fiddling with her phone, Maka feels a pointed kind of nervousness hook into her gut with her next question. "Do you think she left because she stopped loving or caring about you?"
He shakes his head. "The way a person feels about you doesn't change like that from one day to another. Your mother reached the breaking point for herself and leaving was her way to cope, even if it wasn't the best choice."
The words hit with a quiet and unexpected violence, leaving her breath hitched in her chest. She forces away the dull sting of fresh tears pulsing in the corner of her eyes. "Is it dumb to love someone who left you?"
Spirit doesn't answer right away. "The thing about feeling like that is that you start to feel that way about everyone you love," he says finally. "You never know who is going to leave and who is going to stay, so it becomes hard to trust anyone at all. It becomes a very lonely way to live."
"Which I guess is my way of saying no," he adds on, after a moment.
The laugh that tumbles from her lips edges towards a sob. Her head aches for sleep, to be away from her mind, but there's one more thing she has to know. "So if you had known she was going to leave," she says, "Would you still go through it again?"
"Yes." Spirit's immediate answer startles Maka and she looks up at him. "You wouldn't be here, otherwise."
Maka rests her head on his shoulder. Her throat closes, but the storm in her mind subsides a little. "Thanks, Papa."
When Maka wakes up, she's not dozing on the couch next to Spirit anymore, but on her bed. She blinks up at the sudden darkness-the last thing she remembers is the glare from the TV and the vague feeling of being lifted up. Outside, the sky is still dark, while inside, the house is filled with the fragile silence of sleep.
Stiffness makes her movements awkward and rigid as she rises and heads to her desk, switching on the lamp that sits in its corner. The desk drawer creaks as she eases it open just wide enough to pull out the map she copied from the library over a month ago.
Unrolling it, Maka spreads the map flat across the desk and moves back some of the sticky notes that had slipped from the places she had stuck them on the map. She takes the permanent marker clipped to the corner of the map and uncaps it, pondering the map for the millionth time. After the events of last week, she's had to alter her plans in her search for Soul. Sighing, she puts down the marker-tonight would have been the perfect opportunity to sneak into Stein's lab, but after the Death Room, the only thing that had been on her mind was running.
Her fingers brush over the X that marked where she was hit by a truck two years ago, the place where she met Soul. He'd saved her in Abeyance without knowing who she was, then later turned up to fight the demon with her even after months of being shut out.
When I agreed to stay, I meant it for everything.
The memory hurts less after her talk with Spirit; it still stings, but it also fills her with a determination she hasn't felt in a long time. Maka stares at the map until her own words don't make sense to her and a strange lightheadedness spreads through her head. Rolling up the map again, she places it back in the drawer, switches off the lamp, and goes back to bed.
Just as sleep begins to muddle her thoughts, the idea that tonight might be the night she sees Soul again occurs to Maka. A slight frown spreads across her face as she rolls on her side-she's not even sure if her dream was actually real or whether it was her subconscious fulfilling her wish to see him again.
She lets sleep drop back down over her. In the end, it doesn't matter-she's going to find him.