At least she's getting some use out of the day planner she used in high school. She fills the days with interviews and odd-job openings, meal plans and Soul's ever-packed schedule. Now that autumn is trying to take hold in Death City, Maka keeps a keen eye out for seasonal work, though most places have begun putting up their own addendums with crap like 'not accepting applications from E.A.T. alumni,' which surely must be discrimination.

She's talked Kid's ear off about it, but he'd only countered with, "And who do you suppose was the catalyst for that? Harvar was bad enough, and convincing Japan to take Star for three months was no easy task." Then he'd lifted his mask to take a sip of tea that did nothing to smooth the irritated canyon creasing his forehead. "I'm doing what I can, but keep in mind I cannot continue to pay for your property damage. Yours is not the only tight budget in Death City."

So it's another day in the apartment, trying not to listlessly pace a hole into the floor. Thankfully, it's cool enough to keep the windows open and be able to breathe, which takes the slightest edge off her cabin fever. Tsubaki and Angela have come over for a visit, the former finishing up an email on her little laptop and the latter sprawled on her stomach, doing fifth-grade homework on the floor with her feet swinging behind her.

"Thanks for feeding us," says Tsu, stretching her arms overhead for a long sigh. "I'm swamped with translation work. I'm sure Star would've come if Father hadn't dumped him on a mountain with no cell service again."

Maka scoops leftovers for them to take home and yearns for some hardcore training in high elevation, wrestling mountain bears and giving Nakatsukasa-trained warriors the slip for a whole ninety days - a place where one can't be fired for roundhouse-kicking opponents right in the cash drawer. "Lemme know when he gets back," she says. "I can feel myself growing rust."

With a wry laugh, Tsubaki says, "I'll be happy to. He'll challenge anyone breathing whenever he finishes that kind of thing. Oh, before I forget." Out of her very chic-looking laptop bag, she pulls a battle-worn three-ring binder, stuffed to bursting and held together with enough washi tape to be considered a work of art. "I brought my notes!" It makes the dishes rattle when Tsubaki plops it on the table. "I donated the textbooks to the library a few years ago, though, so you oughta check there too."

Maka hands her a scuffed Cool Whip container with still-warm leftovers in payment. "Thanks, this'll help a lot."

"Thanks for this too," says Tsu, hefting the container for emphasis. "I'm glad the notes can get some more use, but why the sudden interest in massage? Are you trying to get certified?" Even Tsubaki's soul seems to light up at the prospect of Maka not being perpetually unemployed.

Her stomach does a guilty little somersault, because wanting to learn had purely been for the sake of her weapon, not about digging herself out of an unemployment hole; it had been the only productive thing she could think of that seemed to fit the bill of fighting without hurting anyone. Quietly, she says, "Um, not exactly, I'm-"

Angela cuts in with a proud, "DONE!" She holds up her worksheet in one hand, waving it like a victory flag. "Maka, can you check it for meeee? Please."

"...Only if you're spiritually prepared to have the hardest-grading kishin take a look at it," Maka says with her chin head high, though Angela knows this routine well enough to simply giggle.

As Maka takes the sheet and glances down the line of division problems, she says to Tsubaki, "Anyway I just wanted to find a way to help Soul a little." She hands the worksheet back to Angela with not an entirely forced smile. "You get to live another day. Good work, smartypants."

The girl parades around with the worksheet once more, performing a very Black*Star-esque victory dance. It's startling to see something so familiar performed by a person so small - and even more so to realize that in three years, Angela will be the same age Maka had been when she met Soul.

Trying to wrap her head around that idea creates a strange numbness, as if every constant which defines 'Maka Albarn' shrinks to something small and smothered within the shell of herself. Like a compass losing north, she can't discern where she is on earth; where it is she's supposed to stand. What is her role, now?

What is she doing here?

"-sically why I studied it too, for Black*Star," Tsubaki is saying with an encouraging lilt, bringing Maka back from her weird detachment from the present moment. The weapon holds out a hand to Angela's head, pausing the girl's extended dance session. "Alright, pack up your stuff, we'll get dessert on the way home."

Angela tilts her head up beneath Tsubaki's hand, which pushes her tangle of strawberry-blonde curls over her eyes. "How many."

"One," says Tsu.

"Why's it never more than one?"

A voice from the living room replies, "'Cause you only got one stomach, Tiny Dino." Soul shuts the front door behind him, and Angela tosses her homework aside with an overacted gasp.

She dashes to the door and leaps into his startled arms the exact way Patti used to with everyone in school. "Grasshopper!" she says, her skinny arms encircling his neck.

Maka watches her partner not-so-smoothly stifle a wince as he hefts the girl a bit higher in his arms. Tsubaki seems to notice this as well, walking over to them with a worried, "Ange, we've talked about tackling people right after work..."

"It's alright, this is just a pipsqueak anyway."

"Hey!"

Looking over Angela's explosion of hair, Soul finds Maka still standing by the kitchen table. "I'm home," he says, smile tired with a weariness she can nearly taste.

Maka crosses her arms, holding her elbows for a lack of anything better to do. "Welcome back," she says, automatic.

He tries to glean something from her behavior, but it's reflex to hide from that questing wavelength now. Upon seeing the mess of middle school paraphernalia on the floor, Soul turns his face to Angela and says, "How'd you manage with the homework?"

"Death has had no victory, Grasshopper," Angela replies, sage.

Tsubaki laughs outright at Soul's perplexed frown, and Maka yearns to join them - but upon seeing Soul in a suit and Tsubaki with her laptop bag in the crook of her elbow, both chatting with a girl at an age Maka still easily remembers being, there's a gulf spanning the living room that she doesn't have any means to cross.

Instead, she turns around, gathering Angela's things into her school bag.

"Black*Star got her hooked on rewatching Kung Fu. Again," Tsubaki says with false annoyance.

"But shouldn't you be the grasshopper, Tiny?"

Angela makes a disappointed cluck of her tongue; a dead-ringer for Kim, age seventeen. "Star said you're the 'prentice 'coz you suck so bad. You keep gettin' beat up every day."

Maka looks at the binder of Tsubaki's notes and resolves to cross the sea to Normal or die trying, because this guilt is too much to bear.

The clouds part for all of five seconds. It's the first time he's bested Spirit strategically (as opposed to scraping by with sheer, desperate luck), but Death Scythe just laughs from the floor. Soul watches his five seconds of victory evaporate. This weasel of a human being has a terrifying level of tenacity.

Oh. That's probably where Maka gets it from, come to think of it.

"Finally," Spirit says, dusting off his suit as he gets back on his feet. "Alright. Set him loose!"

Soul shakes sweat away from his eyes with a toss of his head, nervously watching the Death Room and its fake, coiled clouds streaking by. Nothing happens.

Spirit glances over his shoulder at Kid, who's perched in his throne with a tablet, an ankle resting atop a knee like some corporate-goth businessman. Without looking up from his SkullPad, Death dully repeats, "Set him loose."

Then Liz, dressed in a very flattering three-piece power suit, sashays over to a wall Soul hadn't been aware of because it's painted freakishly sky blue like everything else. She presses an intercom button and says, "Set 'em loose."

Which is the most low budget, DIY-bureaucratic chain of events Soul has ever witnessed. He'd like to say as much, because he's the only one in the room beat up and heaving for air, and bitching about it should be his given right, but Patti's voice booms over a speaker system before he can get a word out.

"Releasing the mountain-twunk in three...two...one-"

Fine. Bring it on. He might be just a former rich kid still alienated by half the crap in this city, but right now he's ready for anything: from weird eldritch creeps popping out from behind the throne to the sky opening up and Asura himself appearing.

Nothing still happens. No creaking trap doors, no alarms or sirens.

Just around the moment he begins to wonder what a twunk is, Black*Star silently assaults him.

If only because in recent weeks he's become accustomed to sensing when he's about to die, Soul manages to reinforce his spine with enough demon steel to prevent permanent damage, but it still sucks when he gets two very Black*Star feet in the back with enough velocity to slam him into the floor and be ridden like a skateboard through the Death Room's grave markers.

Bastard probably learned that from Kid. "Uhg, you're too quiet now," he groans from the floor.

Black*Star steps off Soul's body and loudly stretches like disembarking from a long train ride. Cordial, he looks down and offers a hand. "Time carves you, Grasshopper," he says by way of cryptic-ass greeting.

Soul takes the hand and creaks upright. He wants to ask, 'Why are you so lame?' and 'Why so much Kung Fu?' and 'What does that even mean?' because it sounds like he's just been congratulated for being old and out of shape.

Instead, he just says, "God you reek dude, what the hell."

Star shrugs. "Been trainin' on a mountain for ninety days. Didya miss me?"

No. In fact, Black*Star had not crossed his mind once because Soul's been so busy kissing geopolitical ass and fighting for his life against Maka's old man, desperately trying to catch up to the adulthood pace of everyone else.

He knows sarcasm is a weakness, but he just can't help himself. "Oh, absolutely," he says, flat as a coffin lid as he shakes gravestone dust out of his hair.

Now that the amount of pains in his ass in the room have increased by two-hundred percent, Soul leans to one side to say around Black*Star, "I seriously doubt your training went like this. Now you're pitting me against a guy who can eat lasers?"

Spirit smiles like it's the best day of his life as he sidles over to the two of them. He puts a hand on Black*Star's shoulder. "Worse! He's gonna be my partner."

Soul closes his eyes for a good second and reluctantly opens them again only to find everything exactly how he remembers it.

"Full offence," says Black*Star, shrugging from beneath Spirit's hand, "you're not my type - you're like my third dad." Then he adds with a sunny smile, "Also, sorry, I'm taken."

Spirit makes a face like he's just stepped in fresh dog poop with a bare foot. For once, Soul sympathizes. And then, from the throne, Kid monotonously says, "Sorry, he's taken."

The highest ranking weapon in the literal world pinches the bridge of his nose because he is, in this exact moment, not the most obnoxious person here. "That's not what I-"

Black*Star has already turned away and abandoned him and Soul, bulleting towards Kid at a speed that nearly leaves a vacuum of air behind him. "I knew you missed me!"

Before he gets to the throne, a glowing shield the shape of a skull materializes between him and Kid. Soul expects Star to slam headlong into it - or maybe through it because, shit, the guy can levitate so who even knows anymore - but he comes to a tidy, respectful halt a half-foot away, still looking utterly pleased with himself.

Kid taps a few things on his tablet's screen. "Focus, Black*Star."

Star makes a show of pressing a chaste kiss to his hand and then using it to smear his affection all over the shield with a shrieking squeal his palm like a vulgar window washer. Liz gags from the other side of the room.

"Same," Soul says.

Black*Star throws an arm behind him without a backglance, unerringly pointed in Spirit's direction. "Alright let's do this Number Three," he says, and Soul suddenly remembers what's going on here.

Spirit transforms and arcs into Black*Star's waiting hand. At first, Spirit weighs the meister down, Star straining to hold him off the ground, but after a breath, Death Scythe's true talent shines, adapting to his partner's wavelength.

When Star hefts up Spirit like he's made of air, it's reminiscent of Maka in a very not wistful nor nostalgic way. Then Black*Star turns his head and focuses.

"As a non-autonomous weapon I would just like to state, for the record," Soul says, sprouting blades out of his arms more out of nervous reflex than any kind of premeditation, "that I think this is very, very unfair."

Liz, who holds up a video camera so they can all watch him get his ass kicked in high-def slow motion later, says, "They wouldn't bring out this kinda torture already if they didn't think you were strong enough, yanno." The camera beeps as the lens cover opens.

When framed that way, it almost sounds like praise. Soul doing objectively well is not something he'd considered as a possibility. He's stunned.

Then Black*Star shifts his weight just the slightest, Spirit twirling effortlessly in his hands. The hairs on the back of Soul's neck stand and silently scream in terror. "No stress bro," Star says. "Let yourself be shaped according to your nature."

He's pretty sure that 'shape' will be retired at twenty-five, and he wants to go home. Soul steels his nerves with an imitated confidence he hopes will someday truly arrive, and says, "Do your worst, then," because the faster he can get through this, the sooner his meister will stop worrying herself into another dimension.

He'll never ask for a massage, but he never denies her if she offers. He melts under her hands, and after she's worked even a fraction of the tension in his neck, the harsh edge to his eyes eases. He smiles a little wider. He sleeps.

But in the past few weeks he's been coming home so twisted up that Maka just doesn't know how to help him. Tsu told her she'd donated her massage textbooks to the library, so Maka pushes through the heavy glass doors on a mission. Soul keeps pushing himself to make up for her inability to be a Normal Adult; it's the least she can do.

The Death City Memorial Library had been built roughly four years ago, unveiled on the anniversary of the Sanzu Lines connecting. It's a staggering building, with multiple wings packed with looming rows of bookcases. In a word, paradise.

She hasn't quite memorized where everything is yet, but the fault of that mostly lies in her being too short to scout the upper shelves without either finding a ladder or doing some parkour - the latter of which is banned six-hundred times over per the signs displayed in every nook and cranny of the building.

Maka double-checks a slip of paper with a book title she'd written down before shoving it back into her jacket pocket and making her way to the reference section. The wing is fairly empty, barring a few harrowed-looking civilian students and a handful of elderly folk, so it's criminally easy to pick out the sounds of someone playing Animal Crossing above her.

Playing a video game on hallowed ground aside, looking up and recognizing Harvar Éclair's Spartoi-edition loafer twitching back and forth to the 5 PM background music of AC:New Leaf as it dangles off the edge of the bookcase is more than enough to ignite her with indignant rage. She, a public threat comparable to Black*Star, must suffer eternal unemployment, yet this jerk who's as much a problem death-child as she is has a job and gets to catch bugs for museums on the clock.

Something in her snaps. Maka drops her bag, the noise causing that foot to pause. She takes five steps back so she can wall-run up the bookcase, yank Harvar back down to the floor, and violently sling him by the ankle into the Ornamental Plants and Garden Design section.

Steel-reinforced and intensely displeased, Harvar had been alert enough to not take injury when slamming into the shelves and crashing to the carpet, reference books falling around him in disarray. His ankle still in her grip, he glares undiluted murder at her, which she returns in kind.

"What the shit, Albarn," he says lowly. She's ready to fling him across the aisle into the other bookcase, but his ankle promptly sparks in her hand, electricity crackling and popping until she backs off to a distance he deems acceptable.

He gets to his feet, and this is when she notices him cradling something in his arm. He'd protected his 3DS with his life and it only makes Maka madder.

"If you're just gonna play games, give me your job instead, asshole!"

He gives her a blank look before carefully stowing the 3DS on the nearest shelf. He says, "Firstly, please lower your voice, we're in a library," you moron silently tacked on the end as he straightens a twisted pant leg.

Maka simply yells, grabbing the nearest books and hurling them wholesale at his face. What he can't zap out of the way, he deflects with a transformed arm, slowly scaling back up the shelves to get higher ground.

"Does your weapon know you're here?" he sneers.

She gets post-annoyance flashbacks to Ox at the police station. "He's not my keeper," she spits back, itching to kick him right in the cash drawer but forced to stay at long range. Maka grabs a book as thick as her leg and flings it at him. "At least my weapon doesn't slack off on the job!"

Harvar makes a face, bemused as the book crashes at his feet with smoking pages. "What? Well, at least my meister gets a paycheck."

With a roar, Maka cat-leaps and grabs the top of the bookcase with both hands, hauling herself up as he backs away a few feet. From this vantage point, she finds the tops of all the bookcases in the wing are littered with furniture, with chairs and cushions and rugs scattered across the entire reference section.

"Have you been living here?" She punts the smoking textbook out of her way, stomping after him. "GIVE ME YOUR JOB YOU UNGRATEFUL PIECE OF LEAD!"

This, of all things, seems to make something snap in Harvar as well. His lips pull back into a snarl as he says, wild-eyed, "I am two-hundred-and-fifty percent more conductive than lead!"

Which isn't relevant, but he's pissed and she's pissed and that's enough justification for her to grab the nearest oversized potted plant and heft it over her head. Just as she's about to hurl it at him with every ounce of strength she has, something dawns in his face and his attitude completely reverses.

He rushes to stop her from throwing the plant, hands held up in wary surrender. "Woah, okay I'm lead- Albarn you win, I yield...just put the ivy down."

"I'm gonna put it down your throat-"

"You can have my job," he hisses, reaching for the plant. "Just chill out, please."

Oh, that's right. 'Chill.' The stuff of which she reportedly has none. Her arms relax a fraction. Maka skeptically asks, "You'll really give me your job?"

Harvar takes the pot from her grasp and huffs. "I mean, I guess. I don't understand why you want it, it's not like I'm getting paid."

"I… what? You're not?"

"This is volunteer work," he says, looking over the plant's many vines. "Or maybe community service, I don't know."

The temperature of Maka's face skyrockets. Desperate to salvage any part of her pride, she petulantly argues, "W-well, that doesn't give you a free pass to be lazy on the job."

Harvar blinks, unimpressed. "Technically, today is my day off," he says, and the fact that she'd attacked him without warning speaks for itself.

Her mouth falls open and stays that way until she decides she has nothing she can say and just covers up her face entirely with both hands. "Why are you even here then," she whines.

"If you're back to being rational, please realize who you were about to throw this plant at." Confused, Maka parts her hands and watches Harv edge to one side, revealing four children at the far end of the book case, piled together on a rug and watching a tiny TV. Marie's five year old, Shelley, sits in Angela's lap, wedged between pots of Thunder and Fire, all four of them wearing wireless headphones and transfixed by the screen.

In unison, they attempt to mimic a quote they've heard back at the TV.

Helplessly, Maka says, "They're watching Kung Fu."

Harvar returns the plant to its rightful place. "It's our turn to babysit them tonight, but Ox got called in. The library has all three seasons on DVD."

Not that that explains why they're watching it on top of the bookshelves instead of the media wing, but Maka is too ashamed to bring it up. "I'm really, really sorry."

The weapon shrugs. "It's...frustrating. I get it." When she says nothing in response, he sighs. "Things change and we have to adapt. But, even if I'm bad at it right now, I'm trying to help how I can," he says. "Is that not enough?"

It's clear he isn't asking because he needs an answer - he already has one. He's only brought it up for her to figure it out for herself.

Behind him, Angela says to the TV, "That what is simple is rarely understood," too loud over her headphones.

Maka considers all this for a long moment before slowly taking the slip of paper out of her pocket and holding it out like a peace treaty. "Can you help me find this?"

Harvar glances at the title and freezes before he can take the paper from her. "Uuuuh oh."