A/N: It's been a week so here's a new chapter! I have one more chapter already written that will be posted in another week, then after that you guys gotta wait for me to actually write some more, lol. Anyways, thanks so much for all the reviews so far! And now, Soul's POV this time!
Disclaimer: Don't own Soul Eater, Apple Inc. technology, or Campbell's soup.
Chapter three: In which Maka really needs help, Soul really wants to sleep, and Blair really stinks.
There were few things in life that Soul hated more than being woken up early on the weekend.
One of those things was being woken up in the middle of the fucking night on the weekend.
From: Maka Albarn
Received: 3:48 am
Soul
From: Maka Albarn
Received: 3:51 am
SOUL EVANS
From: Maka Albarn
Received: 3:52 am
SOUL ANSWER YOUR PHONE I NEED YOUR HELP
Soul wipes the crust out of his eyes and reaches behind his bed to pull back his curtains, taking a tired glance at Maka's house. As far as he can see, nothing is on fire, so he sends back a decisive:
To: Maka Albarn
Sent: 3: 55 am
n o
Two minutes later she is calling him. He remembers liking her, really liking her, and kissing her face multiple times a day, but by God, right now he can't remember why.
"Maka," he says, and doesn't even bother hiding how sleep-scratchy his voice is. Because he was sleeping. "It's four in the morning. Why the fuck are you doing this to me."
"One, it's 3:57—" Soul almost hangs up right then and there "—and two, doing this to you? You don't even know what happened yet. If anything has happened, it's happened to ME."
"If you don't get to the point in two seconds I'm hanging up and blocking your number."
"Soul!"
"Maka, it's SATURDAY."
"…Blair was sprayed by a skunk and I don't know what to do, okay?"
"Noooooononono," Soul says. "There's no way you're getting me involved in another one of your cat escapades. Not at 4 am. Not on a Saturday."
"But she likes you best! I know if you're here you can keep her calm long enough for me to give her a bath!"
"If you think for one goddamn minute that I'm going to walk over to your house in the middle of the night to soothe your skunked-up devil cat while you wash her, you have another thing coming, Albarn. She is not. My. Cat."
She's quiet for a moment, so much so that Soul thinks he might have actually won this round, and that he'll be able to go back to bed and sleep in until ten like he was destined to do. But then Maka finally responds, in her softest, most mournful voice.
"Please, Soul?"
And that's how Soul ends up sitting in Maka's bathroom at 4:11 am with a putrid-smelling cat in his arms and permanent frown on his face.
"You're both dead to me, I hope you know that," he says as he sits on Maka's closed toilet seat.
Maka kisses him on the cheek, smiling brightly. "You're the best, you know that?"
Manipulation at its finest.
As it turns out, Blair not only got sprayed by a skunk, but she fought a skunk. The tips of her claws are still red from where she must have scratched it, and while the lack of injuries on the blue-gray tabby indicate that she probably won the fight, honestly it can't be much of a victory if you end up getting sprayed with rancid gland juice.
Soul feels like the real loser right now. In order to hold (a really awful, awful-smelling) Blair in his arms without being clawed to death, he has to wear elbow-length rubber gloves. Which wouldn't be so bad if he wasn't also wearing a plastic yellow SeaWorld poncho.
"So you don't get Blair's skunk smell all over you clothes," Maka had told him when she dressed up his half-asleep body in this ridiculous garb. But right now with patient zero sitting on his lap, Soul's pretty sure the stench has already embedded itself a few layers deep in his skin. He's lucky the only person he ever tries to impress is standing right in front of him, smelling just as horrible. He supposes that's the only part of this situation that's lucky.
"Alright, I think I have everything I need," Maka says, looking down at her phone at what Soul assumes is a cat-bathing checklist. She's also dressed up in her Blair-proof armor, complete with dorky goggles. "Brush, check. Cat shampoo and conditioner, check. Towels, check. Safety gear, check. Cat grooming companion—" she looks at Soul and grins. "—check. Now it says here that tomato sauce is good to help get rid of the smell, but all I have is tomato soup. Do you think that it works the same way?"
Blair squirms violently in his arms, thrusting her rank-smelling tail into his face. Soul swears he's gonna puke. "If I say no does that mean I get to go home?"
Maka scowls at him for a moment before returning to her checklist. "Three cans of tomato soup will have to be good enough. Siri, remind me tomorrow to buy more soup to go with my grilled cheese."
As Maka's iPhone repeats her new to-do list back to her, Soul tries to get a better hold on Blair, who is currently tearing about forty holes into his ugly plastic poncho.
"I thought you said that me being here would calm her dOWn—" his voice spikes at the feeling of Blair's claws scraping at the side of his neck.
"You shoulda seen her before you got here, then. Trust me, this is the closest we're going to get to 'calm,' apparently. Blair doesn't seem to like baths."
Soul peers up at Maka. "What do you mean 'doesn't seem to like baths'? Are you saying you've never given Blair a bath before?"
Maka shrugs. "I take her to a groomer."
Soul blanches. "And you didn't think to do that THIS TIME?"
"Can you not smell my house right now?" Maka practically shouts at him. "Do you really think I'm going to let Blair roam around my house like this til morning?"
She has a point. The smell is so thick that Soul can hardly bare it, and that's only an hour after Blair was sprayed. If Blair is left to her own devices then Maka's whole house will smell rank as fuck by the time the sun came up. And knowing Soul's luck, then she'd probably get into his house somehow too. Stupid cat.
"Fine, just tell me what do so we can get this over with," Soul says, trying to bat Blair's deadly looking claws away from his head.
"Okay, well it says in the tutorial video that we shouldn't have Blair in the room when we fill the bath because the noise makes cats antsy." Soul doesn't even say anything to this because he's too busy wrestling Blair into sitting the fuck still, goddammit. Maka watches him struggle for a moment, then pulls off one of her rubber gloves and nods. "Point taken. Let's just shut the door and let her roam while we fill the bath. It's not like she can get any worse than this, right?"
Soul really wishes Maka wouldn't have said that.
The sound of the tub filling up with water makes Blair lose her goddamn mind.
Soul knows, objectively, that cats are fast, but he's never seen one tear around such a small space before. Blair's probably lapped the bathroom about thirty times (Soul's too busy pulling his feet up onto the toilet seat to count) before Maka can turn the water off, screeching like the devil, and Maka's thin plastic poncho now looks like Swiss cheese from the amount of claw marks in it. Soul was not ready for this when he woke up 20 minutes ago. He misses his bed. He misses sleep. He misses a time before he had cat scratches covering 90% of his body. And from the look on Maka's face right now, she's beginning to regret this decision too.
She shuts the water off as soon as human possible, with just enough water to cover the bottom of the tub a few inches deep. If she waited any longer she probably wouldn't have had any poncho left. If Soul was still holding Blair he definitely wouldn't have had any face left.
When the faucet finally stops flowing, the bathroom is filled with an eerie, pregnant silence. Then, Blair begins to wail. She sounds like she's being burned at the stake.
"Okay, is this normal?" Soul finally asks, from where he is now standing on the toilet seat, one leg pulled up near his chest as twists away from the floor, hoping to get as far away from the manic cat as humanly possible.
"Well, cats don't like water, right? That's a thing that everyone knows about cats," Maka says, trying to sound factual but looking incredibly defeated as she smears a tiny bit of blood that's welled up on the back of her ungloved hand.
"Maka, you know nothing about cats. You're not even a cat person. This whole thing was a horrible idea. I think it would be better—"
Maka glares at him. "If you say you want to go back to bed one more time —"
"Forget my bed, I just want to live through this experience!" Soul says, and Blair only proves his point more by hiding in the corner of the bathroom farthest from the tub and hissing hellishly. "You see! She's scared and definitely capable of killing both of us, so why don't we just put her in her carrier for the night so she doesn't stink up your house, then take her to the groomer tomorrow!"
Which is actually a pretty rational and well-thought out plan. So of course Maka hates it.
"We're already in here doing this, so let's just get it done, okay? We got this." Was this her rationale when she first broke into his house all those months ago after he finished his shower? She'd already committed so why not go all the way?
He's very tempted to let her do this on her own. He really likes Maka but he also really likes having all ten fingers, and these two likes are beginning to feel very at odds with each other giving the current terrified cat hunched up in the corner of the bathroom.
But then he sees Maka's determined pout as she scoots on her knees towards Blair, arms held out and definitely about to be torn off by her psychotic cat. Her dorky goggles are slipping off her head a little bit, her pigtails askew from Blair's most recent attacks, but very much ready to give her stinky cat a bath just because she put her mind to it. Soul sighs. If there's anyone in the world that he'd be willing to lose appendages for at four in the morning, it's this woman.
He exhales slowly and climbs down off the toilet seat. "Wait, wait. Let me help you. She likes me better."
He gets down on all fours and crawls next to Maka, then slowly, slowly, he begins inching towards Blair.
"Hey there, girl," he says softly. "We know you're scared. We promise to make this as easy as possible. We're not going to hurt you."
"You sound like you're negotiating with a criminal," Maka whispers to him, and while that's…actually pretty true, he waves her away with a rubber-gloved hand and continues his soft crooning.
"There, there," he's only about a foot away from Blair now, and notes with some success that she's stopped her wild hissing and has resorted to pitiful mow mow mow's. Poor cat. "It's gonna be alright, stinky. We're gonna get you all cleaned up so you can go back to harassing animals who you can actually beat in a fight, kay?"
He reaches his arms out for her, and Blair YOWLS. She swipes at him desperately, and Soul shrinks back towards Maka, who also skitters back on the tiled floor. Even in their Blair-proof dork armor he still feels terribly exposed to those claws.
"Maybe you're right," Maka says.
"About what?"
"Waiting until tomorrow. I don't want to make Blair even more uncomfortable than she already is, and I don't think getting mauled to death is worth the tradeoff of having a clean cat."
Soul watches as she takes off her goggles and gloves and sets them on the bathroom counter in defeat. Tired as he is, Soul still feels for her. Her house fucking reeks, and now it's only going to be worse.
"Hey," Soul says as he removes his cat-bathing clothing too. "If you want, you can stay at my place for the night so at least you don't have to smell this all night."
Maka smiles as him. "Sounds like a good idea. Hey, can you stay in here for a second with Blair while I go get her carrier? I don't think we can both get out without her racing off."
Soul nods, and goes to sit on the toilet seat with his feet up in case Blair starts running again. As Maka goes to the door, she makes shooing motions towards Blair to move out of the way, but the cat doesn't budge.
"Come on, Blair, move. I gotta get through. We're not gonna bathe you, so you can stop being a scaredy cat now. No pun intended."
The tabby continues to sit by the bathroom door, lolling onto her side and stretching her legs out languidly.
Maka scoffs and turns to Soul. "Can you believe her? It's like she knows what we're saying. How is she not freaking out anymore?"
Soul watches as Blair continues to rolls around on the floor, whapping her tail back and forth contentedly now that she isn't forced to bathe. He doesn't understand it either, not until Blair's tail rattles one of the cupboards under the sink and causes some of their cat-proof armor to fall to the bathroom floor.
Blair haunches shoot straight up, and within seconds of her practically purring as she rolled about on the tile, she's now back to hissing like a wild animal, ears pressed to her skull and teeth bared.
Maka leaps back. "What is wrong with her?"
But Soul finally understands. He gets off the toilet seat. "I can't believe it. After all this time this—" he bends down to scoop up the rubber gloves, "—is what she's been afraid of."
And he's right. Once the offensive pieces of pink rubber have been lifted from the tiles, Blair's ears flick back up and she quiets. He can actually see her claws retract back into her paws.
Maka blanches. "You're shitting me."
He tries not to let himself get too over-confident as he bends down before Blair and holds out his bare hand. "How about now, Blair?"
And after only a moment's hesitation, Blair leans forward and presses her head into his open palm.
Maka's voice echoes from behind him. "Are. You. SERIOUS."
Soul rolls his eyes and holds his hands out for Blair, who compliantly walks right between them. "Come on, you dumb cat."
He lifts her up into his arms (knowing full-well he'll have to burn his PIANOMAN t-shirt now) and walks her over to the tub. She meows quietly at the sight of the water, but Soul runs his fingers through the stinky fur on the back of her neck until she quiets, then sets her gently in the water. And then, bafflingly, she begins to swim in small circles.
Maka stands beside Soul, gaping.
"So…" Soul says. "I guess Blair likes baths?"
The rest of the night is so comically easy that Maka is the one who spends most of it bitching. As they rub cat shampoo and Campbell's soup into Blair's fur Soul can still hear her muttering "Rubber gloves, Blair? Really?" but he just continues gently pouring cups of water over the cat and making shushing noises to both. Her grumbling continues all the way until the bath is finished and Soul has to remove Blair from the water (almost forcibly, goddamn this cat loves swimming) and all they have left is towel-drying Blair and brushing her fur through a few more times.
"All that time we spent almost dying, and she likes bathing. What kind of cat even are you?" Maka asks Blair, hoisting her up by her armpits to scrutinize her face more closely, like looking Blair in the eyes will give her the answers she's seeking.
Soul snickers and tugs the damp cat out of Maka's hands, setting her on the floor to roam the bathroom.
Maka sighs and leans back against the cupboards from where she sits on the floor, dropping her shoulders dramatically. At least it's finally over.
"Thank you, by the way," she says. "I never would have been able to do this without you here to help."
"Ahh, 's no big deal," Soul says sheepishly, despite making it seem like a very big deal less than an hour ago. "So what are you going to do now?"
Maka looks at Blair, then her mucked up bathroom, then towards the door, where the rest of her stinky house awaits her. Her shoulders sag even more.
"Alright, I'll tell you what," Soul says. "You come back to my house with me and get cleaned up. You can stay at my place for the night so you don't have to smell all that—" he vaguely gestures towards what's outside her bathroom door, "—and then tomorrow I'll help you de-stink your house. And now that's she clean, Blair can even come too."
Maka smiles a bit before crawling up beside him and kissing him senseless. "You're the best, you know that?"
He knew there was a good reason for helping out his neighbor tonight.