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He isn't sure exactly when it started: sometime between childhood and his teenage years, the span of time when his limbs got too long too fast and his floppy bangs left zits across his forehead. Maka, her perfect skin scattered with freckles and scars, had poked fun at him for his night and morning ritual — but it’s nice for him. It makes sense.
And so Soul develops a skincare routine. It’s simple, as far as these things go, especially now that he’s settled into young adulthood and bid farewell to the worst of his acne: a gentle face wash and moisturizer twice a day, and a scrub every other night. Maybe a mask every now and then, though it’s less for the effect it has on his skin and more for the comfort of it, the way it feels, smells, how familiar it is. How Soul can take it off whenever he wants, and how when he does, he feels clean.
It’s not incredibly common for him to feel clean. There is an itch in his blood and a weight on his neck and he has lived so much of his life for someone else that it is hard, sometimes, to reconcile that with his own constant insistence that he doesn't care, that it’s fine, that he lives only for himself. And so when he catches the echo of his mother’s voice in his ears or the light of Maka’s eyes in his head, he cracks his knuckles and bites his cheek and scrubs his face until his skin feels like it belongs to him.
“You’re so rough on your skin,” Maka tells him, leaning a shoulder against the doorframe of their bathroom while she wrestles half her hair into an elastic. “You’re going to get wrinkles early, you know.”
Soul looks up mid-lather and locks eyes on the barely-there pink scar on her lip, years old and from a hit too quick and too close for him to have predicted; and his heart feels heavy, heavy, heavy. “Maybe,” he admits, voice unintentionally soft; when Maka glances up at him with a question in her eyes, he fights it down with a smile halfway to a grimace. “You sound like an old lady,” he teases, and can’t quite keep himself from watching that scar stretch and distort as she smiles.
“Maybe,” she says.
—
On Monday, Wednesday, and Friday mornings, he teaches a general theory class. His public image is that of strategy and power and a cool indifference and it’s important to maintain that for the kids that come to him, bright eyed and bushy-tailed and so ready to throw themselves into danger for a cause. He sees a reflection of Maka in all of them, and a little bit of himself; it makes his throat tight and his skin itch.
There’s a pair of girls, a partnership, who sits in the second row and spends the entire class bickering — but they come and go together, live together, achieve resonance within a week. The meister is a go-getter if he’s ever seen one, and lord knows that he has; and the weapon tries so, so hard, waves her partner off when class ends and comes to him with questions when they're alone, all warbling voice and wringing hands, a mess of nerves and metal. There is so much love in that, in all of that — and it’s heartbreaking, in a way he never expected it to be.
“One of my other teachers told me,” she says, quiet and intent, like a secret, “that if a fight goes sour and only one of us is making it out, it should be me. That — that Sadie is useless without a weapon, but I can still defend myself. That if there’s an emergency, I have to leave her.”
She doesn't ask a question in any verbal way. Under his shirt, his scar aches.
He drums his fingers against his desk, recrosses his ankles. “Let me tell you a story,” he says.
—
Soul loves Maka more than his own life, and he’s come to accept his life more as he’s gotten older, if not love it. There is still the feeling in him: that he should do more, be more, that he isn't enough and he couldn't be enough because he never figured out how to follow the rules that no one ever read to him. But the feeling is a feeling; it doesn't have to be real.
Soul loves Maka, and he’s not a possessive person; he isn’t. At the very least, he tries so, so hard not to be. Whatever he and Maka are and whatever it is that lies between them stated and unsaid has never made him feel like he has the right to own her. His demon cackles in the beating of his heart and he beats it down, fiercely: it isn't right, not now and not ever. He isn't right in that.
Maka laughs with her entire soul and with all of his, too; he feels her laugh in the back of his throat even when it isn't him causing it. Watching her down the hall with his hands in his pockets talking to someone else, someone brighter and better than him, he bites down his jealousy with blood and teeth — and he was never meant to keep her.
At home, she talks with her fork halfway to her mouth about the research grant she’d applied to, about the many people she’s had to speak to and how some of them are so, so nice, and he wonders if the way their souls are linked is enough to tether her to him. Bites it down, viciously; he won’t be a tether.
She offers to do the dishes. He goes to the bathroom sink and rubs his skin raw.
—
Having been a child soldier is hard enough to come to terms to without the added weight of continuing the tradition as an adult; the DWMA needs new blood and sometimes that’s more literal than he’d want it to be. Kid does his best but he was raised in a culture built on bone and Soul feels the whiplash between that and normal society less and less as he grows. There is something frightening in it.
In some ways, Soul has always lived in a world where his body was a weapon, but it was a weapon in different ways: in money, in talent, in prestige. It was a relief when he was young to melt that potential into steel — not quite a boy and not quite an object, but able to control the shift from one to the next. To feel his own objectification in the physical change of his body, and to be able to turn that off, a real boy once more. He had a choice in it.
His demon calls him a control freak and maybe it’s true, but there is a comfort in the consciousness of changing forms. He does it less and less nowadays, as far as full-body transformations go; Kid’s hands feel wrong on his body and Maka is off doing things too great and too important for him to assume any part in. He just wakes up, goes to work, comes home, makes dinner and washes his hands of it. He does a lot of washing, nowadays. It gives him something to do.
Tuesday and Thursday afternoons are his weapons-only combat classes. Weapons are different without their meisters: listless, maybe, or homeless. Every time a door opens, their eyes all turn like abandoned dogs waiting for their masters; and despite himself, his do, too.
He sees too much of himself in any of them to think he can keep them safe, but he goes over blocks and swivels and tries, to the best of his ability, to help them stay alive.
Blackstar laughs just before handing the phone over to Tsubaki, across a world and a life and a million decisions. He’d helped them pack up their belongings when they’d moved, even when Maka wouldn’t — and he misses them too, he does, but he gets it. He’s happy for them.
“Your students are well?” Tsubaki asks, sweet and layered, and he wishes he wasn't as fluent in undertones as he is.
He tucks his phone between his shoulder and ear, scrubs his hands red at the kitchen sink. “They're fine,” he says over the rush of the faucet. “I’m teaching a combat class again this year. All weapons.”
Tsubaki is quiet for a moment. “I hope your students are well,” she repeats, slow and intentional, and she doesn't ask a question in any verbal way. “I think Star wants to talk to you again.”
The call is short after that. Under his shirt, his scar aches.
—
Every so often, Maka comes to visit him in his office, drops oyster boxes full of Chinese food on his desk and stays with him into the night, sharing pens and chopsticks and hushed inside jokes. It feels soft, intimate, feels okay in a way that things rarely do for him nowadays. They see each other less now than he thinks they ever have, and he realizes with his heart in his throat that he misses her.
“Star and Tsu say hi,” he says, not looking up from the exam he’s grading, and feels Maka’s wince even as he doesn't see it.
“That’s nice,” she says.
—
One of the harder parts about getting older has been watching Kid stretch himself thinner and thinner, watching his wrists get knobby and his skin get pale and the edges of his face shift from striking to gaunt. He looks more like his father now than he ever has; he looks more like him every day.
Every day, his edges grow more sharp. It shows in the gold of his eyes as he watches Soul sit back down at their table, left for a moment in the middle of lunch.
He’d patted his face dry enough, but the water clings to the collar of his shirt; he sees Kid’s gaze drop to it, thoughtful and harsh.
“There are treatments,” Kid says simply, concerned and detached all at once; and Soul is certain that he cares for the man too much to hate him, but he feels less certain, now. He waits for more words, the messy rush of Kid’s familiar nervous ramblings — but it doesn't come.
He lets his eyes pass slow over the identical crescent-shaped scars between both of Kid’s pointer fingers and thumbs, raised and ugly and not so many years old; one of them, he knows, was entirely by accident. One of them was not so much.
“Right,” he bites, a flash of eyes and a flash of teeth; and the rest of lunch is silent.
—
Maka goes away for a week, just a week. “Field research,” she tells him, bright and pretty, pen tucked behind her ear and knife strapped to her thigh; he drives her to the airport with his knuckles pale on the steering wheel.
He gets the call two days later: an accident, they say; unforeseen, they say. Fighting kishin was never the safest career path but studying them was supposed to be safer, he thought it would be safer — and he’s shoving his shoes on before Kid can even finish his sentence, keys in hand.
Her coworker took her notebook when he dropped her off at the hospital, bruised and bloody; Soul wants desperately to find him, bully administration into giving him his hotel room number so he can tell him that he was supposed to help, was supposed to keep her safe, that what’s the point of a weapon if she can’t use him.
But when he lands, he’s getting a cab to the hospital before he’s aware the words are coming out of his mouth. But when he swings open the door to her room, her eyes are bright and her neck is bruised and she croaks, “Soul,” like she knew he was coming. Maybe she did.
She’s so pretty and she shines so bright, and he’s tired and it’s the wrong time for any of this, to be thinking of any of this — tired and it’s her heart that beats in his chest and his blood that spills out of her wounds; he’s so, so tired and he stays up late long after she falls asleep with her hand in his and thinks, I want to be good enough to love you; by God, I want to be good enough to love you.
He wakes up with bags under his eyes and skin that feels all wrong under his fingertips, bolts for the closet of a bathroom on the other side of the curtain and scrubs at his face until it starts to feel like his again.
—
They stay in a hotel nearby for a few days once Maka’s released from the hospital. He doesn't call Kid about his classes; he doesn't have to. When he arrives home, his students are already gossiping about their substitute teacher's pink-haired wife, and Soul makes a mental note to send some sort of thank you card to Jackie the next chance he gets.
Maka is finishing up an email to her coworker and scheduling airfare to go away again when he gets home — but when the door clicks closed and she sees him standing there, she immediately closes her laptop and steps to the kitchen to start dinner.
The two of them make macaroni and cheese like they used to when they were teenagers, three types of cheese and breadcrumbs that have been in their pantry a little too long. He’s different now, and he knows that: twitchy fingers and reading glasses, hair clipped short at his neck. And maybe she’s different, too, because she has her hair in a ponytail now and it’s too long down her back, and he realizes that he doesn't recognize all the names coming out of her mouth. In his chest, his heart feels heavy, heavy, heavy.
“You could come with me, if you want,” she offers, voice just bordering on shy and just edging on hopeful. “We could always use more hands.” Her research is the most important thing to her, he knows, has overtaken his spot as the first thing in her heart; and there is so much love in that. It’s heartbreaking, in a way he never expected it to be.
But Maka makes futures, and Soul makes soldiers. His skin itches; his throat feels tight.
He takes a sip of his water. “I think I should stay here,” he lies with a shrug. “I’ve got students, you know? Probably shouldn't up and leave in the middle of a school year.”
Maka’s mouth twists shaky into a smile. “Right,” she agrees, “yeah. That makes sense. Maybe next year.”
He watches the scar at her lip stretch and distort. “Maybe,” he says.
She offers to do the dishes. He goes to the bathroom sink and rubs his skin raw.