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Death City comes alive during the month of November, its bones still buzzing from the vestiges of a Halloween sugar high. Jack-o-lanterns are replaced with decorative skulls and colorful streamers that sag between lamp posts. Novelty food stands line the sidewalks, the scent of fried dough and meat weighing down the autumn wind. Children and adults alike crowd the streets in costume, death masks fixed over their faces and long cloaks dragging behind them.
Soul watches the festival preparations from his bed. He had waited until Maka left to shower before cracking open the blinds, slices of sunset illuminating the room like a prison spotlight: the dust heavy in the air, food wrappers piled on his desk, dirty clothes strewn across the floor. It exposes him too, human and hollow, peeling back the comfortable darkness that he’d made his home in. The natural light hurts his eyes, but he continues watching anyway, careful to keep his gaze away from the dimming sky.
Outside, a group of children race down the cobblestone streets. The leader waves a model scythe made of PVC pipes and cardboard, red and black blade bobbing above the crowd. It’s a handmade replica of Soul’s weapon form. The kid twirls it around her knuckles and the other children holler and cheer, reaching for the handle of the toy.
He smiles and wonders if the children know the truth about the cigarette burn in the sky where the moon once was. He wonders if they remember what it looked like, or if they would still celebrate him knowing that it was him that took that view away.
It’s been two years since anyone had last seen the moon.
He feels her before he sees her, his soul reaching out for hers the moment she opens the bedroom door. They’re always resonating nowadays; the apartment is too quiet without Crona, and while Crona never made much noise to begin with, their absence invokes a sort of silence between the partners, the same way one might be compelled to whisper in an abandoned church or graveyard. Even the song of their resonance is more subdued, the thrum of three reduced to two, wavelengths circling the empty space where Crona’s once occupied like dogs waiting for their master to return.
“Kid invited us to speak at the opening ceremony again,” he tells her as she settles onto the bed beside him. The water in her hair seeps through the sleeve of his t-shirt.
“Did he?” She pauses to think, though they both know her answer already. “Maybe next time,” she says, the same answer she gave the year before.
There’s exhaustion in her voice too, and Soul wonders how much of it is her own and how much is his diffusing through their link. Guilt rises to his chest like bile, but it’s not enough to get him to break their resonance. He’s greedy like that, now that he has her all to himself.
(There was one point in his life when he would’ve preferred it that way. He knows better now, knows that Maka deserves so much more than what he alone can provide).
“I miss them,” he says.
“Me too.” Unlike him, Maka keeps her eyes fixed on the sky as she speaks.
Her fingers reach for the spaces between his and wrap around his knuckles. His left hand, the one that is empty, is cold.
After another long moment, Soul sits up and closes the blinds.
It was Maka that had invited Crona to live with them.
They didn’t have a room to themselves— Maka and Soul’s apartment only had two— though their tattered couch was an improvement over the moldering cell underneath the DWMA. The concept of cohabitation had initially frightened Crona, but, as with most things about their new life away from Medusa, they learned to adapt. Slowly, painfully, they got better.
And when months later Crona began to crawl into Maka and Soul’s beds, sandwiching themselves between the two partners, sighs warm on their skin and baby pink hair tickling their cheeks, that was an adjustment, too. The three teens fell into each other’s rhythm the same way a house of cards falls, the blood that linked their souls together with a violent current blurring the line between love and desperation.
The twin-sized mattresses feel too big now, even though Soul’s sprawling limbs dangle from the edge and Maka’s toes push against the foot of the frame. They fill the empty space with each other instead, arms wrapped around torsos and knees knocking into each other, lips mouthing the number of the breaths to remind themselves that they’re still here.
It’s a dream and a memory all at once.
Inside the Kishin’s soul is a starless sea of black blood. Fear rushes down his throat and fills his lungs like cold tar. He tightens his grip around Maka’s hand, and she does the same, her familiar calluses scratching against his palm.
Gradually, constellations of the world’s souls light a path into the abyss. They follow them deeper and deeper into Asura’s soul.
Then, they meet Crona.
“All I want to do is repay you,” Crona says to Maka after explaining their plan to seal the Kishin. “I’ve only ever received courage from you.”
Maka tries to protest but before she could, Crona turns to him, eyes shining with something he’d never seen before.
“You understand, don’t you, Soul?”
In his dreams, he speaks. Maybe there’s another way, he says, or You don’t have to do this.
Come home, please.
But his voice gets caught in his throat because he does understand. He really, really does. He thinks of everything Maka had ever given him that he never deserved: courage, kindness, love— a chance— and knows that he’ll spend the rest of his natural life failing to show her just how much she means to him.
He understands that this is the only way people like he and Crona could ever find peace. Because they speak in gestures. In sacrifice.
So he worries his knuckles and nods silently and he lets them go. Crona smiles. It’s the last time he ever saw that smile outside of his dreams.
Crona caresses Maka’s face before pulling her into a hug. Soul watches, heart aching, and tries to ignore the look of betrayal in her wide eyes.
Novembers are hard to get through. Grief transforms them into grotesque parodies of themselves, stretches and contorts their souls like funhouse mirrors until they’re near unrecognizable.
Soul’s trademark laziness decays into listless fatigue. Rarely does he leave his room, and when he does he’s a ghost, lost and translucent, clad in clothes that look like they haven’t been washed in weeks. He keeps his pilgrimages away from his bed brief; the only evidence that he’d left in the first place is an extra dish in the growing pile in the sink and a raised toilet seat.
Maka swings hard in the opposite direction. A restlessness itches underneath her skin, a perverse kind of hope that borders on recklessness. While Soul is burnt out, she is burning, burning, burning, so hot that heartache doesn’t have a chance to settle until her head hits the pillow and the nightmares take over. She can’t bear to be in the apartment— one filled with memories tinted honey-sweet— so she traps herself in the library for hours until the janitor forces her home at dusk, arms heavy with books on madness and space travel.
When she opens the door to their apartment, Soul is waiting for her, and they come together like magnets in a desperate embrace, grabbing fistfuls of the other’s shirt and holding on so tight their knuckles whiten and shake.
Nobody dares tell them that this wasn’t what Crona would’ve wanted.
Missions are harder without Crona.
It isn’t because they’re lacking in numbers; Soul and Maka have fought pre-kishin for years before they met Crona, and they will continue to do so for years to come. With or without them, life moves on.
But Maka is more distracted now. She creates openings for nobody to follow up on, leaving her vulnerable to attacks. Meanwhile, Soul’s piano continues to play for a trio rather than a duet. His music is off, somehow, like a band missing its rhythm section, a song without a heartbeat.
Neither of them noticed that the creature had lunged until its claws were halfway into her torso, a flash of steel against a sea of red.
In the infirmary, Maka sleeps deeply. Her breathing is ragged, her chest bandaged and raw. Soul keeps vigil by her side, so focused on her that he almost misses it when Kid enters the room.
“You can always take a break if you need it,” Kid tells him after a moment. His voice is so full of understanding that it makes Soul want to punch him. He gets as far as squeezing his hand into a fist before shoving it into his jacket pocket.
“We’re fine,” he says, voice harder than intended. “It was just an accident.”
Kid’s expression twists but he doesn’t say anything further. He leaves shortly after that, unable to bear the guilt of watching the DWMA’s best and brightest slowly burn themselves to ash.
They say there are five stages of grief, but Soul’s pretty sure they’re each trapped in one. Because Maka is so, so angry: at herself, at the world. And though she never admits it out loud, she’s mad at him, too. She doesn’t blame him, not in the way he knows she blames herself, but sometimes she looks at him like a problem that she can’t solve and he is reminded of the fact that they had loved Crona in entirely different ways.
He loves Maka, he really does. But there are parts of him that she’ll never understand, not in the way Crona did. She’ll never understand the anxious buzz he feels when within crowds or while talking to new people, or how on some days, keeping the black blood at bay takes up so much of himself that it’s all he can do to get out of bed in the morning— to do so anyway because he has people that love him. People he loves.
Most of all, she’ll never understand the insatiable drive to sacrifice everything for a chance to repay an imaginary debt to someone, to see the borders of one’s own love expand until the realization dawns that they have nothing left to live for on their own; the resigned comfort that comes with that notion. The fear that nearly smothers it whole.
She’ll never understand why he let them go.
The day Soul suggests they throw Crona’s stuff out of the apartment is the day of the biggest argument they’ve ever had.
It’s a fight of titanic proportions. Things are thrown and tears are shed and it hurts to argue with Maka like this, as if they were temperamental teenagers again and not on the cusp of adulthood. It hurts because he knows Maka holds on to the hope of Crona’s return stronger than she holds on to him.
Soul spends that night at the Gallows. Liz is the only one that dares to approach him, and she drags him out to the balcony with a forced air of casualness.
Only the tip of her cigarette is visible in the midnight dark, an amber speck fluttering from her mouth to her hand like a firefly.
“I thought you quit,” he says.
She takes a drag and a bit of the firefly turns to ash. “I did.”
Liz continues to smoke in silence.
“Kid’s worried about you two,” she says eventually. “We all are.”
He fidgets with his hands and resists the urge to ask her for a cigarette even though he’d never smoked before.
“You know you can talk to us,” she says. “We’re here for you.”
It’s the slight hurt in her voice that gets him to respond. Because Liz had lost people she loved, too. They all had.
Nobody ever said they had to bear that hurt alone.
He swallows. “Yeah,” he says, looking up. “I know.”
The firefly wobbles in the air as she smiles softly.
Their friends become more insistent after his visit with Liz. They’re busy with the festival preparations, but they make time for them when they can. Tsubaki brings over their favorite food in Tupperware containers, leftover hamburgers and pasta piled high in their fridge. Black Star invites Soul to basketball, and while Soul can’t find the energy to play, watching his friend shoot free throws in the sunshine is refreshing, and he finds himself feeling slightly better after each hangout.
The girls take Maka to the bookstore where she buys Austen and Homer and Woolf, works unrelated to the things she checks out from the library. She brings him home something, too: a pocket-sized journal, black and leather-bound.
“I read somewhere that writing down your thoughts can help,” she tells him. “I won’t read whatever you write in it. I promise.”
So Soul begins to write. At first, it's simple entries: what he had for lunch, the activities he did that day, ideas for piano compositions. But he finds that the more he journals, the less restrained his thoughts become. He lets his emotions and guilt and love unspool onto ink and finds that he feels better afterward. Lighter. It reminds him of the piano, before his parents made it about contests and accolades, back when he could pour out his soul to the keys and listen to it sing back.
He tries poetry.
And slowly, painfully, they get better.
It isn’t all easy, though.
They’re lying in bed together after another fight, one that he doesn’t remember the cause for but had escalated into a shouting match that had rattled the apartment walls. Yet after every explosive episode, they still find their way into the other's arms, red-faced and puffy-eyed and apologies bitter on their tongues.
“I love you,” he says into her collarbone. “You know that, right?”
“I know.” He feels the words rumble in her chest as she speaks.
“I don’t want you to keep blaming yourself for what happened.”
They’re silent except for the soft hush of her fingers running through his hair.
“They didn’t deserve that,” she says eventually. “Sometimes, I wish it were me up there instead of them.”
He feels her breathing hitch in her chest and he thinks she might be crying. He holds himself closer to Maka as if he were the balm to her pain and presses his lips against her forehead.
“I’m glad you’re here,” he says.
Then, not knowing what else to do, he hums, a simple lullaby his Grandma used to sing that he forgot the words to. He does so until her breathing evens out and her snores fill the room, then continues for a little while longer before sleep overtakes him as well.
All of Crona’s possessions fit in a single large cardboard box: a composition notebook of unfinished poetry, a travel bag full of clothes, two vials of hormones, and a well-loved stuffed octopus plushie they had bought together during a mission near the Monterey Bay Aquarium.
Maka looks at the toy before lifting it from the top of the box and tucking it under her arm. Its tentacles dangle towards the floor, fabric brushing against her calves.
“Just in case,” she says, not clarifying what.
Soul nods and closes the hallway door.
The desert is cool the evening of the festival, the sand almost ocean blue underneath the dusk. The tires of his motorbike cut through the landscape and dunes and for a brief moment, Soul feels like he’s sailing. For the first time in a long time, he feels free.
He parks his bike in the middle of nowhere, near a large rock formation that stretches upwards towards the stars. He and Maka sit against it and gaze towards the city, its jagged points and peaks jutting from the horizon, the lights from the festival stark against the moonless dark.
Soul tosses Maka a can of soda and pulls the tab on his own. He’s about to take a sip before he pauses. He stretches his arm outward and tilts the can downward instead. The sand darkens into a deep auburn, a small puddle forming where he pours half of his drink.
“For Crona,” he says.
“For Crona,” she echoes.
In the distance, fireworks erupt over the city, sparks grazing the blacked-out moon. Scarlet red. Baby pink. Meadow green. He pushes himself closer to Maka, leaning his head against her shoulder.
He’s not looking at the fireworks when he says, “It’s beautiful in a way, isn’t it?”
She hums in agreement. “Like an eclipse that never ends.”
The symphony of the desert embraces them: the howling of coyotes, the trilling insects, the steady hush of wind brushing and shifting grains of sand. Soul and Maka remain silent, taking it all in.
And when the moon finally speaks, they listen.