Disclaimer: I don't own Soul Eater or Disney. Or a cat, actually.

Chapter two: In which Maka flirts with her new neighbor and Blair becomes intimately familiar with his undergarments.

"You're a rotten liar, you know that?" Maka says into the receiver of her phone, which is currently wedged in between her ear in and her shoulder in way that's definitely cramping her neck.

She can hear Soul shuffle on the other end. "…Is this how you begin all phone conversations? No 'hello, Soul. How was your day, Soul?'"

Maka tip toes around her kitchen, doing her best to avoid crunching the millions of pieces of cereal littering the floor. Blair jumped on the refrigerator while Maka was in her room cleaning up a different mess that Blair made, and now there's a sea of Cornflakes where there used to be dull gray tile. She finally spots what she's been looking for, her dustpan, and mock-hopscotches her way toward it. "Seems you're bad at avoiding questions, too."

Her neighbor sighs into the phone, and though Maka hasn't known him long, she can already tell that he probably has a hand to his temple and his eyebrows scrunched up in a mixture of mild annoyance and resignation at her antics. She almost giggles at the thought of it, but thinks better when she remembers that she's pretending to be serious.

"Fine," Soul says, "I give, what makes me a rotten liar?"

"Well, you know how my cat is in love with you?" she asks.

"And by 'love' you mean she tolerates me more than she seems to tolerate you?"

"She literally escapes to your house every chance she can get. She definitely loves you."

"Do you know how many pee stains I've had to clean up since meeting you? I had to buy my own litter box for a cat I don't even own because of how often she comes to my house!"

"Ahh, so you see my point." Soul groans loudly into the phone and Maka laughs. She uses her hand to begin scooping handfuls of wasted cereal into the dustpan. "Anyways, I was cleaning up my exercise room the other day—"

"You mean the extra room in your house covered in books and dirty laundry that happens to have a treadmill in the corner?"

Maka scowls. "Will you let me finish my story?"

"Fine, fine."

"I was cleaning it up when I found something very peculiar."

"Again, no offense but you quote unquote 'exercise room' is a dump, so I'm not all that surprised."

Something in Maka stirs, and she can't be sure if it's her annoyance at him criticizing her house or her giddiness at the fact that he's in her home often enough to be comfortable criticizing it. After the initial Blair breaking-and-entering incident, Soul and Maka have hung out quite a bit. All casual, of course. Soul just moved here from his hometown in New England and is just getting to know people, so Maka has been careful to remain as platonic as possible, which isn't as torturous as she would have imagined.

While Soul appears pretty antisocial when it comes to almost everyone else he's met, he seems comfortable around Maka. He comes over to her house on his way home from work with pizzas and beer almost once a week, smiling his sharp-yet-lazy smile and inviting himself in. They've made a routine of sitting on the overstuffed red couch in her den and watching Disney movies together, paper plates balanced on their knees and Blair circling in and out of their legs. Maka has even gone so far as to make a list of all the movies they need to watch together, since Soul was apparently deprived as a child and wasn't allowed to watch Disney.

They've only been hanging out for a little over two months, so it's sometimes still hard to tell if Maka is being too casual with her hot next-door-neighbor or if they're legitimately close enough to razz each other about their quirks. Despite him calling her exercise room dumpy (which is a total exaggeration, there's like maybe one load of laundry on the floor, he's so dramatic), Maka feels a little bit gleeful that he feels he's earned the right to say that.

She of course doesn't let any of this show, though, and instead scoffs into her phone as she attempts to readjust it on her shoulder. "As I was saying, I found something peculiar. Of yours."

The background noise from the other end ceases for a moment, meaning he's probably gone still. "What do you mean?"

Maka dumps all of the cereal she could scrape up into the trash and swipes her hands across each other a few times to get the Cornflake dust off. Then she heads towards the aforementioned "exercise room."

"Well at first it was just that headband you said had gone missing last week. The one with the mouth and the squiggles on it that says 'Eat' or something."

"Wait, my old band headband from high school? How the hell did you get that?"

Maka finds the worn headband hanging over her (regularly-used) treadmill. She picks it up and fingers one of the frayed edges. "Remember how I said my cat was in love with you?"

There's a pause, then Soul groans, loud and long. It's a noise Maka is very used to, since she's made a similar sound almost every day since she decided she was keeping Blair as her pet. Biggest. Mistake. Ever.

When the cat-induced groan finally stops, Soul speaks again. "So you're telling me not only does your cat regularly sneak into my house, but she's stealing my stuff?"

Maka laughs. "'Fraid so."

Soul sighs very softly. "Fuck Blair." Then, "Are you home? I'll come over and get my headband now if you are."

"Headband and other possessions."

"Shit, are you serious?"

Still holding the tattered headband, she walks over to the closet and pushes one of the doors open with her foot to reveal a stash of clothing that doesn't belong to her. "Apparently it isn't your dryer that's been eating all your socks. Blair's just been slowing swiping every piece of clothing you own. The key's under the mat, by the way. Door might be locked."

She can hear some commotion from the front of her house, which she assumes to be Soul attempting to unlock her storm door. The lock sometimes sticks.

"God, she's been getting into the top drawer of my dresser," he realizes. "I can't believe I didn't notice so much of that stuff had gone missing." Maka can hear the door open, and is amused when Soul continues to stay on the phone with her as he walks through her house to find her. "Should I ask why there's half a box of cereal on your floor rather than in a bowl? Is this some new diet thing?"

"It's a I-definitely-need-a-new-cat kind of diet. Blair apparently thought the cereal looked better there."

"Of course she did. Rotten cat. Wait—what the hell does any of this have to do with me being a rotten liar?"

"Well, that's peculiar part," Maka says, bending down a little to paw through the pile of clothing hidden in her spare closet. "Two of Blair's catches of the day happened to be pairs of boxers." She hears the groan of the old wooden floor in the doorway behind her, and turns around with a pair of Soul's underwear in her hands. Soul's eyebrows shoot up. "Disney boxers."

Soul rubs the back of his neck as he steps closer to her. "Well, you see—I just—"

"See what a mean?" Maka says with an airy laugh. "Rotten liar. You totally have seen Disney movies before! No one else would own Jiminy Cricket and Lady and the Tramp underwear if they hadn't. When we watched Pinocchio you thought Jiminy was a frog!" Though Maka is clearly more bemused than she is upset, Soul absolutely refuses to make eye contact with her. In fact, his face happens to be a couple shades pinker than normal too, thought she can't fathom why. "Why'd you pretend you hadn't seen them?"

"I just—ah shit I wasn't trying to—" He clears his throat. "I just wanted to keep having movie nights, okay?"

Maka blinks. "Huh?"

"Look, after I said that I hadn't seen Tarzan before—which I really hadn't, I swear—you got all worked up and decided we just had to watch it now, and it was really fun, so I—I don't know. I just wanted to keep doing it so I mentioned another one. And then you started making a list and it just seemed like a good excuse to keep hanging out, I guess." His eyes are practically burning a hole in her floorboards now, and she didn't really think it was possible for his face to get more red, but it is. "And, I don't know, it's been fun watching you sing all the songs and hold Blair up like she's baby Simba and try not to cry when Rapunzel's hair gets cut off and—and just watching you watch the movies makes it better."

Maka doesn't really know what to say to all of this. On the one hand, it's super sweet that he went through the trouble of pretending he hadn't seen every iconic movie in history just so he could watch them with her. On the other hand, Maka totally would have watched them with him anyway even if he had seen them. She'd do basically anything to spend time with Soul, which she thought had been embarrassingly obvious.

She decides not to mention either of these facts, though, because Soul's head looks like it's going to explode from concentrating so hard on not looking at her, and she doesn't want to embarrass him further.

So instead she laughs a little and flings a pair of his boxers at his chest. "See? Rotten liar. I totally thought you were mouthing the words to 'Hakuna Matata.'"

He seems to deflate a little in relief, his shoulders sagging and his normal slouch back in his posture. "Yeah, it's one of my favorites."

Maka shakes her head a little, then stands up the rest of the way and turns to leave them room. She tries to keep her voice casual as she looks back over her shoulder at him. "Alright, well grab all of your stolen clothes and I'll go order us a pizza. Little Mermaid was next on the list, right?"

He finally looks at her, and gives her one of his crooked smiles that makes Maka's face begin to feel a little hot. "Yeah, I think it was."

And so their Disney movie nights continue as they normally would. Well, not totally. Now that the cat's out of the bag, so to speak, Maka does her best to try to get Soul to sing along to the musical numbers (which she's only partially successful in, since half the time Soul calls it uncool to sing with her) and Soul does his best to do a Sebastian impersonation awful enough to make Maka snort soda out of her nose (which he's a lot more successful in doing). Maka still ends up dancing around her den with a very unhappy Blair in her arms during "Under the Sea", and Soul does his best to calm down the irritated cat while Maka gazes starry-eyed at the screen when Ariel and Flounder return to Ariel's cove of treasures.

Perhaps the biggest difference in their dynamic comes about halfway through the movie, when Soul takes the song "Kiss the Girl" extremely literally, and suddenly the movie doesn't seem so important anymore.