Chapter Seven: Hoop

Soul Eater was playing B-ball with the locals of the neighborhood. He wasn't good enough to dunk perhaps, but he was fit enough to keep up with the routine players on the field. His team constituted of a couple younger teenagers and a young man whose wife was sitting in the shade with their newborn.

Soul had dug out his old headband for the occasion. It was shirts against skins and the bright orange of his band no doubt looked weird against his white dress shirt that was sticking to his sweaty skin. He looked like he walked out of a business meeting and slapped on something to look archaic and "hip." But there were strangers around him who were dressed weirder.

On a team the concept of stranger broke away. Instead there were people whom you wanted to uplift and whom you expected to lift you up. In sport the language barrier and the acquaintance barrier was surpassed.

Someone in a shirt called, "Aqui! Aqui!" And Soul managed to slip around an opponent before tossing the basketball. The Spanish-speaking player dunked. After a couple of whistles and pats on the back, scores were called out and sneakers noisily positioned themselves nilly-willy across the court.

The court was surrounded by lush trees and benches and multi-coloured apartments beyond. The street was lower than the court so one couldn't see much of a passing car. It was late afternoon.

Someone fell and a member of the opposite team helped them to their feet. Later the newlywed said that he had to take his family home. The teams disbanded with hearty handshakes.

A glass bottle appeared in front of his forehead when he was preoccupied with the laces of his Converse. He stared at it for a moment: the liquid within seemed an obnoxious bright green that, for some reason, reminded him of a little girl in red ribbons throwing a tantrum.

"It's lamune," Maka said. "I used to drink this all the time when I used to live in Tokyo."

Soul took into consideration that Maka looked thin, pale, harassed and weak. Her voice was no indication nor was her posture, but because he lived with her he could see it. The signs were too subtle to describe.

His first reaction to her sudden appearance was to shout at her. But he could imagine she had probably swallowed pride and stubbornness to approach him as she did. So he at last accepted the drink with gruff thanks and moved his bag so that she could sit down next to her.

She was in clothes he didn't recognize. She said, "I saw you in my lecture today."

Yes, he'd made a cameo appearance at the last seat in her NOT Meister-Weapon Genetic History class. No one seemed to recognize him because he was in a hoodie and had his head down for the majority of the class. He was planning on ambushing her to talk. He fell asleep when she reached European Martial Arts.

"Soul," Maka said working their way up to the nitty-gritty: "I doubt myself a lot. I doubt myself too often for me to consider myself an affective asset to DWMA. I wonder if I have a right to be here and if everything that I've accomplished with you and our friends has been a sham. I don't want to hold anyone back more than I already have."

"Maka, what are you talking about?"

"I'm weak, Soul."

"Who isn't?" Soul barked, "What, you think just because Black Star and Kidd are outrageously strong that means that everyone else has to be too?"

"It's different if it's a matter of my strength being my own."

"Of course it's your own! Whose else's could it be? Were you really not coming home for the past week because you thought that you were dead weight?"

She didn't answer. He felt like hitting her back into her senses. He swallowed that sudden swell of irritation for later. She looked too despondent to take any sort of blow. He said, "When you took Jacob to be your partner I was pissed like hell."

She looked up with genuine surprise. "You were?"

His smirk was half self-pity half humor. "I figured that I was the only one who'd ever be your partner and I was pissed that you didn't think the same way."

She said, "But…but Soul, you were assigned to Shinigami-sama's side!"

"Yeah, there was that." He dismissed as simply as one skips a difficult math problem. "I kinda went overboard cuz it wasn't cool but I…I uh, I was really glad Kidd paired us up again. Bouncing off walls even."

He flushed and clicked his tongue like he just realized what he said and heard how less cool it was aloud than in his head. He figured that she needed to get the message however so he continued with as much bluntness as he could muster. "I was sorta grossed out by how happy I was that I figured I'd tone it down but I ended up pissing you off. You still got no fuckin' right to leave home for a week just because you're depressed, by the way," he said this with sudden venom.

She was quiet so he said clearly, "I'm here for you to talk to me, Maka. Have you forgotten that's what partners are for?"

Her hands were fisted in her lap and her head was bowed. Her voice was congested as she apologized. Soul rubbed her head and breathed out. "It's cool."

That was one hurdle.

Soul did not scold her later as he thought he would have had the energy to do. Whenever she stopped moving and was staring into space—when she was obviously not reading—he purposefully interrupted her with a light pat on her head each time he passed. The more often he did it into the progressing night the lighter the mood got. Eventually she hit him with a pillow and called him "gross." He pulled on her cheeks in counter-attack.

The rest of the week ended with the long awaited recording session with Michael Lee. In the abandoned openness of the Nevada desert the experimenter was moving back and forth toggling different twigs of machinery. He had an assistant nearby who was in goggles and headphones. His countenance could not be discerned.

Lee explained over the roar of a robust generator, "Soul Resonance works by a meister and weapon matching the frequency of their soul wavelengths so that the meister can send their frequency to the weapon who sends it back like an echo. Unlike an echo, the wavelength is preserved and amplified until its eventual release. How my tools work is that it reacts to the energy released and sends the reaction to a computer that converts code into music. I'm effectively downloading your soul resonance," for the majority of the explanation he was speaking in monotone because of the loudness of the equipment.

Soul stuck and thumbs up and Maka nodded. They subsequently performed several examples of Soul Resonance of different amplitudes recorded and performed at longer and longer intervals.

"It'll take a few days for the computer to sort through," Michael Lee said. "It's a lot of information."

Soul asked, "So what if you don't hear any anomalies? What if there's no proof that the Black Blood is still in there?"

Michael Lee smiled with deceptive good humor. He replied, "Success is the result of continual failure, Death Scythe-san."

And despite himself, how Soul watched him hesitantly in the lazy sunlight struck Michael Lee that he was pretty cool.

It was in the middle of the night some several days later—perhaps it was a week—when Soul was roused out of bed violently. The collar of his sleepwear was balled up in the tough hands of his meister. He began to question groggily. As his eyes cleared her voice gushed with inconsistencies in inflection and content. She was already in gloves and coat but wore her pajamas beneath. Half a minute later they were in the skies of Death City.

Soul didn't hide his yawn. "You mind filling me in on what this is about, Maka?"

"I hear something on the wind," she replied abstractly. "It's almost as if it's calling me. But my Soul Perception isn't…"

"What if it's a trap?"

"The energy doesn't feel malignant."

"Alright." And so they resonated and her Soul Perception became larger and grander than anything she ever could have experienced alone. It came slowly and as it did she felt a bit less and less aware of her body. Balancing on the staff of a flying Soul was automatic and supplemented by his movements.

Then there was music, and they both heard it.

Fly me to the moon, where we can land among the stars—there was the sound of someone playing in sand. Soon to follow there was the sound of the ocean breathing on the shore. In other words, hold my hand: when Maka opened her eyes again she was standing barefoot on a beach. In her right hand was Soul's hand. In her left was a colder foreign hand.

In other words…Maka's eyes grew glassy from tears. A part of her knew it to be illusion, that her physical body was still floating in the cold sky above Death City, but with their combined power Soul, Maka and Chrona had come to share the same mental space. It was like a Chain Resonance: that's what it felt like.

An unspoken law ruled in their subconscious that they were not allowed to let go of one another's hands. It made Maka's embrace of Chrona awkward and limited to her chin on their slim shoulder. Chrona's pale face flushed from the compassion Maka offered.

Chrona spoke softly and gradually about their rousing. They realized that they needed to get in touch with Maka and had therefore attempted to communicate via long distance resonance: the only way Chrona could contact anyone from the moon was in brief bursts of concentrated wavelengths. In the attempt to reach Maka something happened to the pre-kishin of the world, as though they were sedated as they would be by anti-demon wavelength.

Chrona had synthesized a form of anti-demon wavelength. The idea immediately aroused Maka's scholarly side. Her questions began to resemble those of a researcher than meeting a long lost friend. Soul cleared his throat to remind her.

Also, there was not much time.

If Chrona was awake then it was possible for Asura to rouse as well. This was not easily done, but the possibility robbed the friends of their time. Maka was predictably in tears. Soul asked why she needed to contact them so earnestly. Chrona described that what woke her was an incomplete seal. The Black Blood wasn't finished: they needed the piece that was in Soul.

Soul said he didn't know how to give it to her. Chrona told him to open his hand. In his free hand, his right hand, was the little demon, red faced and impish in all meanings of the word. He kicked his heel and bid bon voyage to Soul Eater and his partner, snapped to the jazz of Frank Sinatra. When Chrona held him he became a puzzle piece so black and opaque that there was no material to liken it too: it simply looked like a hole in Chrona's bone white hand.

To part ways broke Maka's heart. She promised to find a way to release them. She had to release them. Chrona smiled widely and Soul felt, in another context, Maka had already released Chrona from more pain and bondage and fear than either of them could imagine. Chrona let go of Maka's hand and they brutal returned to their mortal bodies.

Quickly, quickly, and with the suddenness of a dropping guillotine, Chrona's wavelength vanished entirely, scoured from the atmosphere. Somewhere in Death City a kishin egg suddenly became very hostile. The incident slowly spread around the world. Normalcy descended on the world and Maka, stunned and drained, didn't cry until they were safely indoors.