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It was the socks. It was all her new socks that were doing his head in this way. He was sure of it.
It had been cold this winter, but of course, Maka being Maka, she hadn’t traded in the signature pleated miniskirt for jeans or chinos. No, she’d had a better idea this year: she’d invested in longer socks. Thigh-high socks. They left just the barest sliver of her legs peeking out from beneath the hem of her skirt. It was true that he’d always appreciated her legs – though he’d never have admitted it before recently; not under pain of death – but oh, fuck, those stupid goddamn socks were seriously damaging what little capacity he had left these days to think.
He had to wonder if she knew what she was doing to him. It was hard to believe that she was really oblivious enough not to have noticed, given the way things had been between them of late. But she certainly didn’t act like she was aware of the effect she was having on him. A year or two ago it would have been infuriating, but by now he’d more or less resigned himself to it, at least for the time being. Hell, she might even have been doing it on purpose, for all he knew – she was devious enough for that, absolutely. And the way she crawled into his bed damn near every night, now, tangling herself up in him before they went to sleep, it definitely didn’t seem like she minded his hungry hands gripping at her bare thighs, pulling her close around his waist and doing his best to keep her there.
No, she was just as ravenous as he was, really. They spent all those years bickering, no matter how close they grew as partners, and now he was pretty sure he had confirmation that it was just as much a love language to her as it was to him. Love language, or maybe foreplay; it was hard to tell one from the other. He wondered sometimes when things had changed for her – when she'd decided she needed him willing and able in her hands even while they were as far from battle as they could possibly get. If someone asked the same of him, he didn't think he could answer, really: it had been an unstoppable slide from that first day, like tripping down the side of a sand dune. At what point did it become something other than what it had been when it started? He didn't know, and not least because he'd done everything he could to deny it for a while there. There was no denying it now, though, not when she slipped between his covers in the safety of the dark, pressed her skin impatiently to his, thrumming with want even before he felt the edge of her soul curve against his own. He could pretend that he was so receptive just because he was her weapon and she was his meister, because his body was hers to command at the drop of a hat, but what was the point? The only thing that mattered was that she spent so many of her nights in his bed, evidently determined to exhaust them both before either of them were allowed to sleep.
“My sheets are full of all this long, dirty blonde hair, for some reason,” he grumbled at her one laundry day, with his back to her because he couldn’t keep from grinning a little. He was just looking for a reaction. Anything to get a rise out of her, even after all these years. They’d still been just kids the time he’d first called her hair ‘dirty blonde’ in passing, not really thinking about it, and she’d whirled on him with a book to his skull and a haughty correction. It’s ash blonde, thank you very much. She knew that the exact terminology used to describe her hair colour was a stupid thing to get hung up on, but she couldn’t seem to help it, and of course that was a great way to guarantee that he’d never call her anything else again as long as they lived. It still pissed her off to this day, but she knew his game, so she wasn’t going to give him the satisfaction of an argument.
“Maybe you should wash them more often, then,” she sniped back, nose high in the air, flicking him in the back of the head.
Soul snickered to himself, shutting the lid of the dryer and then glancing over his shoulder. She was facing away again, sorting her dirty laundry out into colour piles. “Are you kidding?” he teased, deciding to push his luck a little. “I’m lucky if I can get away with going an entire week between washes, lately, the way you–”
That did it. “Not another word,” she snapped, turning on her heel to deliver a full-power chop to the top of his skull. She only faced him for the fraction of a second it took to hit him, but he saw her lowered brows and reddened cheeks; she’d argue it was anger, but he knew better. “Don’t be gross, Soul!”
He smirked. “Pfft, you’re telling me,” he scoffed under his breath as he went to get another load into the washing machine. She heard that, too, and took another swing at him, but he’d learned something in the years they’d spent together, and he managed to dodge the blow.
Honestly, he’d be lying if he said he didn’t find some kind of fucked-up satisfaction in still being able to aggravate her so much. The banter that he now knew got both of their engines revving, that was one thing, but this was a different matter – this was about genuine, non-sexual frustration. That said, he also probably already had a lifetime’s worth of head trauma, so he didn’t always let her smack him.
He mused, sometimes, that the nuances of their relationship could be startlingly well-mapped by the evolution of the Soul says something stupid, Maka chops sequence over the years they’d known each other. Early on, it had often been a multiple-times-daily occurrence, because he was obnoxious and she was violent when annoyed. As they’d begun to grow – and, notably, to become better, stronger partners – her use of the Maka Chop on him had diminished a bit, thanks both to an increased understanding between them and his own personal growth. He wasn’t embarrassed to admit that he’d matured a lot in that time; most of it really hadn’t been optional. If he hadn’t started to take life a little more seriously, they probably wouldn’t have made it through the whole Kishin ordeal alive, let alone victorious. But whenever they had the time just to be kids, to relax and be themselves, he found that he defaulted back to getting on her nerves – only it was on purpose, now that he knew which buttons to press. Because that was their dynamic. He enjoyed it, and he’d usually been pretty sure that she did too, no matter how much she played at being exhausted with him.
It was through that stage that he’d started learning how to anticipate and dodge the Maka Chop, with some practice. She could be unpredictable sometimes, maintaining her composure through a great deal of his teasing only to explode and attack with unprecedented speed and power, but eventually he figured out her tells. For a little while, they’d gone through a phase where she kept a careful mental catalogue of his transgressions, and every so often she’d chop him seemingly out of nowhere, then listing off all the things he’d done in the last week to earn it. It was the only way, she claimed (with her tongue in her cheek), to effectively punish him for being an ass.
There was considerable comedy to be found in that method, Soul had to admit, but it had gotten old before long. He didn’t exactly relish cohabitating with an unstable grenade. And, more importantly, it actually took more than a little of the fun out of annoying her on purpose, when he knew she wouldn’t blow up at him in the moment. So for a while he decided to stop dodging, at least most of the time. Eventually, he supposed, she caught on, because without them ever discussing it, she went back to chopping him while she was mad at him, instead of saving her violent impulses up for a rainy day.
And more recently – the last three or four months, probably; definitely less than a year – the Soul speaks-Maka chops dynamic had begun to shift yet again. How often she assaulted him had waxed and waned with time, naturally, but he didn’t think she’d gone after him in quite a while, now, for anything he’d said in earnest. The classic Maka Chop was reserved for when he was getting under her skin on purpose, and even then, he really had to work at it. Mostly she’d roll her eyes and scoff and take much more half-assed swings, swatting him more like he was a misbehaving pet than anything else. And for some stupid reason that he really tried not to think too much about, he kind of missed it when she hit him like she meant it, so he went out of his way to provoke her.
“That’s a pretty fucked up way of flirting with each other,” Black*Star had observed drily one evening. Soul had only grinned and shrugged and taken another swig of his drink, deciding not to point out that it was really only one half of how they flirted.
Because the thing about the Soul speaks-Maka chops pattern was that it was strictly for times and spaces in which they were only Soul and Maka, friends-partners-roommates. By some unspoken agreement, they’d kept it very deliberately away from SoulandMaka, lovers. That wasn’t to say that there was no teasing or getting on one another’s nerves when the lines between them were blurred, but he wouldn’t go pressing those specific buttons, and she wouldn’t hit him with concussive intent.
And as much as he loved their stupid back-and-forth, their constant bickering and prodding and play, he couldn’t honestly say he loved it more than he did the time they spent just the two of them, when they pretended there was nothing and no one else in the world. That was just theirs, even more than the pissing each other off was. It was private. It wasn’t entirely a secret, because the people closest to them knew at least the broad shapes of what they were these days. Tsubaki had picked up pretty quickly that something had changed between them, as had Kid, and the others had followed. But it still wasn’t something that anyone else actually got to see.
He had to admit, there was something appealing about that level of privacy. About spending all day around other people, watching her go about her business in that tiny skirt and those deathforsaken thigh-high socks, trying not to make it too glaringly obvious he was counting down the minutes until they were home and he could touch her like he wanted to. That wasn’t to say he wouldn’t mind being a little more public – sometimes he really did just want to hold her damn hand, and not only in the safety of their own apartment – but the fact was that Maka made the rules. Just like always. If she wanted to parade down the street with their hands in each other’s back pockets like in an ‘80s teen romance movie, he’d gripe and bluster and complain and then he’d do it, grinning like the smug asshole he was the entire time. But as things stood, he was only allowed to cross those lines when she crossed them first.
And he was fine with it, really. Even though he had it bad for her – so bad he was sure the entire world must already know. Maybe he was fine with her drawing such strict boundaries because he had it so bad for her.
Waiting for her to make the first move wasn’t all that terrible, most of the time. After all, it happened pretty much every day, now. Even if she didn’t cross her ankles with his under the table while they were eating, or decide to lean on him on the couch, he almost never had to go the night without her anymore. Once in a while she would ask him to come to her room, but far more often she’d appear in his, after they’d gone through the motions of saying good night and getting ready for bed separately. He didn’t know why that was still part of the routine – or, well, he did; it was part of the conceit she used to distance herself from this, but he still shook his head at it a little – but he wasn’t going to complain. He’d learned quickly that if he questioned her too much, she’d get self-conscious and cover it up with annoyance and maybe even leave his bed cold for a night. It was amazing how huge, how empty, his stupid little twin mattress felt when he laid there alone, now that he was used to having her in it with him.
So she’d slip softly into his room, usually after he’d turned out the light, often clad only in a short nightie and her underwear, and she’d pad wordlessly across the fake hardwood and climb in under his sheets with him. On top of him, usually, at least for a while. She liked his room better than hers, she’d once sleepily claimed; liked the dark red walls and the bit of a breeze they could catch when he opened the window a crack.
“You’re mine, you know?” she’d murmured one night, almost frowning at him, nose-to-nose with the curtain of her hair blocking out the rest of the world. “You’ll always be mine.”
Once she’d gotten whatever it was she wanted from him – and he’d always be more than willing to give it, to give anything – she’d settle beside him, arms and legs still looped around his own, and she’d drift off to sleep. Soul was almost in awe of how well she slept: she never seemed to lay awake, the way he so often did. But his nights awake weren’t nearly so bad with her there. She was warm, and soft, and regardless of what she said while she was conscious, in sleep she held him and she didn’t let go.
You’re mine, you know? – You’ll always be mine. He thought of those words often, while she slept soundly next to him and he listened to a late-night delivery truck or street sweeper rumble past beneath his window. It was something she’d said impulsively, without much forethought; he didn’t think she’d meant it to mean anything more than it said outright. And what it said outright was, frankly, true: he never would belong to anyone besides her. But he also thought maybe it did mean something more than it said. That it told him something about her real feelings, despite her clear intention never to tell him her feelings at all.
And maybe that was why he was okay with all of this – with her rules, with her caution, with the cagey way she talked around what they were or what she was thinking. Because he was starting to believe that she was in love with him, too. He’d known from the start that this was something with substance, and not just a way for her to let off steam, or some kind of result of the intensity of their relationship. Sure; he knew sometimes weapons and their meisters ended up sleeping together strictly because the kind of physical and emotional bond you had to have to work well as a team could create some off-the-charts chemistry. But this wasn’t just about their hormones getting too mixed up in their work – of that much, he was certain. Her attraction to him had a dimension to it that went beyond that. His own attraction to her, undeniably, went worlds beyond that.
It was all right, if she didn’t want to say it yet. She had more than enough reason to be cautious about it. And he was willing to wait, really. He’d probably wait forever if she asked him to. He loved her, loved everything about her and everything about what he was with her and everything about what they were together. So if she wasn’t ready to tell him that she loved him, even that she might love him, then that was fine. He could be patient.
That didn’t mean he didn’t try to encourage her, though, once in a while. He wasn’t pushing; he only wanted her to know it was safe. Wanted her to know that she didn’t have to play her cards so close to her chest, if the mood should strike her to be a little more open.
“I can tell your fortune, you know,” he’d teased one night, breaking the silence for no reason in particular, as they laid there with her resting on his shoulder, her dirty blonde hair tickling his bare chest, his arm scooped lazily around her upper back.
“What?” she snorted back.
“Your fortune!” he laughed. He stretched his free hand out toward the nightstand, searching without bothering to turn his head, and finally his fingers landed on folded paper. “Angela and I were telling fortunes all afternoon. Black*Star is going to live in a shack and marry Eruka Frog and they’re going to have eighteen children, did you know?”
She snorted again, smacking his chest with the least effort she’d ever used in her life. Grinning down at the top of her head, he worked his fingers into the little paper shape.
“I’m sure Tsubaki’s thrilled,” Maka said, her tone very dry, making extra-sure he knew how ridiculous he was being.
“Oh, she said she’d get over it eventually,” he assured her. “After all, there’s no arguing with the clairvoyant powers of MASH.”
“I am not playing MASH with you at one in the morning.”
“Of course not.” He stuck the cootie catcher in her face, then, grinning ear-to-ear because even if he couldn’t see her unimpressed expression, he could picture it clearly. “Pick a colour.”
“Oh my god.” If her face hadn’t been half-pressed into his skin, he thought, she might’ve stuck her tongue out at him. “You know I can barely even see the colours.”
“Oh, come on,” he laughed. “There’s enough light coming in the window to make them out. Pick one.”
“Go to sleep, Soul.”
“Maka, you have to pick a colour.”
There was a long pause, and he could feel her breaking down. “Purple,” she sighed finally.
“P-U-R-P-L-E,” he spelled out, then pointed the cootie catcher back at her. “Okay, now a number.”
She groaned. “Are you serious?”
“Of course I’m serious!” He couldn’t help laughing. “We can’t just quit halfway through!”
She smacked him again, still without conviction. “Ugh. Is that a seven?”
He brought the cootie catcher up to his face, squinting at his own chicken scratch in the low light. “Yes it is. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven. Pick another.”
She huffed. “One.”
“Perfect.” He held it up again and lifted the flap. “Look at that! It says the love of your life is closer than you think.”
He was pushing his luck again, and he knew it. But it was late, and she fit beneath his arm like she belonged there, and sometimes he just needed to come up with a stupid excuse that let him tell her he loved her without actually saying directly that he loved her. Saying it outright would freak her out, send her flying out of his room before he could even catch his breath. Saying something stupid like this, though – he could get away with that much, most likely.
“Really, Soul?” Her exasperation was as evident as it had ever been.
“Really, that’s what it says!” he insisted. “It even describes him, right here. It says he’s super sexy–”
“You should stop talking.”
“What? There’s no need to be embarrassed, M–” But she cut him off at that, pushing herself up above him for a second before closing her lips over his, and, oh– well, if there was something else she wanted him to be doing with his mouth, he was hardly in any position to deny her. Smiling into the kiss as she threw one leg over his waist, he dropped the cootie catcher back onto his bedside table, happy enough to change tracks.
Death, did he love her.
He hadn't known he could love her so much. (Hadn't known he could love anyone so much, really, but who on earth could it ever have been if not Maka?) He'd never expected to, in the start – hell, early on, there were a lot of times when he'd wondered if they could ever get along well enough to stay partners at all. He remembered those early days; remembered Sid watching them practice, telling them with a sigh that their wavelengths matched so well when they could stop arguing long enough to get something done, but that latter part was clearly posing problems. He remembered sitting next to her, both of them with arms crossed and brows furrowed, watching Black*Star and Tsubaki in their own sparring match, and he remembered her giving him a dirty look and saying, “You see the way Tsubaki goes along with every direction Black*Star gives her? She lets him call the shots, and that's why they work.”
He'd opened his mouth to retort, but he hadn't gotten the chance, because Ox swung Harvar in a low arc and swept Black*Star's feet out from under him. The self-styled ninja assassin landed hard on his back with a sharp yell, and a moment later Tsubaki was human again, fussing over him in spite of the way he tried to wave her off.
“I was afraid of this,” she dithered, hands hovering as Black*Star pushed himself up into a seated position. “We talked about this yesterday, remember? Ox and Harvar have a longer range than we do...”
“But I'm stronger!” Black*Star grouched loudly. Soul only turned to Maka, eyebrows raised as if to say, see?
She scoffed and went back to ignoring him.
If Soul went back and told his thirteen-year-old self where they were now, the younger boy would never have believed it. There was no way in hell. Sure, she was cute, theoretically– in the abstract; never in reality– not that he'd ever in a million years admit it– he wasn't into flat-chested nerds, no matter how long their legs were or how fiercely they could fight– listen, it simply wasn't possible–
He could only laugh at himself when he thought of it. No, he hadn't expected this in the start, nor had he ever been looking for anything at Shibusen except a good meister. He was ready for it, though – in fact, his readiness was almost as unexpected as the feelings themselves. He'd denied those feelings for a good while, sure, but only ever out of stubbornness and pride; never out of fear. Nothing about being with Maka scared him. He had every confidence in them as a team, and he found that he had every confidence in them as a couple, too, even if only in the hypothetical. Actually, as things carried on, he only grew more certain that this was right for them. They had only ever made each other stronger – and if she loved him like he thought she might, like he loved her, they'd be unbeatable.
He heard her unlock the apartment door and come inside in the late evening, after going out to see a movie with Tsubaki and Kim and Jackie, and he felt a little of the tension in his chest relax just to know she was home. It wasn't that he worried needlessly about her, he just– he just liked it when she was nearby. But he stayed where he was, stretched out on his bed, because leaping up to greet her was one of those things that might just scare her if she was in the wrong mood for it. Instead, he listened as she put her jacket away in the closet, then shuffled down the hall to her room.
She took him by surprise, though, when she appeared at his bedroom door, far sooner than he’d expected. She was still fully dressed, too, so for a moment he assumed she just wanted to talk to him about something, but she stepped in quietly and put her hand on the knob. “You busy?”
He blinked at her, then held up his phone so she could see the cheap rhythm game he’d been playing. “Do I look busy?” he responded, no real bite in his supposed sarcasm. He knew the look on his face was soft, because he’d still been thinking about how he felt better when she was close, and so he’d smiled maybe too fondly when she showed up.
She smiled back now, though, pushing the door gently shut like she usually did at night, and as she crossed the room she dropped whatever had been in her other hand onto the floor. He spared half a second to glance down, and realised that it was her pyjamas – a tiny pair of sleep shorts and a faded gym tee. He blinked again, looking back to her face, trying to mask his surprise as she climbed lazily onto the bed with him.
“How… uh, how was your movie?” he asked, watching her make her way from near his knees up to the narrow space between him and the wall, settling with her head on his shoulder and an arm slung across his stomach. The tiny exhale that escaped her as she relaxed against him was one of comfort, of utter contentment. He put his phone down on the windowsill so he could drape his forearm around her back in a loose sort of hug.
“It was good. It was nice hanging out just the four of us, instead of a huge rowdy group,” she answered, letting her eyes fall shut. “I’m sorry Crona missed it, though. I think they would’ve enjoyed it.”
“Yeah.” She was so warm, nestled in against his side there, and he found himself just… watching her. Usually he only had her there after bedtime, and rarely did she let the idle chatter about their day-to-day bleed into the time they spent intimate. There was Soul and Maka, and there was SoulandMaka; the two were usually clearly defined. “Uh, but I did hear from Kid earlier, after he stopped by to check on them. They’re feeling a lot better today. Mostly still just hoarse, from the sound of it.”
“We should take them some soup tomorrow, maybe,” Maka suggested. “I always found soup comforting, with strep.”
“Sure. We could make soup.”
Her eyes still closed, she snuggled a little deeper into his side, and Soul felt his heart spill over.
She was quiet for a minute, then, and he didn’t even really think much about it before he started to move his hand from the dip in her side, stroking first up along her rib cage, then down over her hip. It was a slow movement, absent-minded and fond, just because he liked having her there. The fabric of her skirt caught and hiked up her thigh a bit on the upstroke; the motion pulled his eye, and he found himself looking at the cuff of one tall, cable-knit sock.
And still without giving it any real thought, he picked his hand up from her side and trailed his fingertip along the skin of her thigh, right above what the sock covered. It wasn’t sexual; he wasn’t trying to nudge her in that direction – her appetite was nigh insatiable, anyway; he really didn’t need to push. It was just that she’d been wearing these thigh-high socks almost daily for a month or two now, and– well… he didn’t usually get the chance to touch her while she still had them on.
She hummed softly. “That tickles a little,” she added a moment later, in a tiny murmur, but her tone was unbelievably fond.
“Sorry,” he mumbled back, reluctantly slowing his gentle caress. “I can stop.”
“No, you don’t have to.” She shifted a little, picking her arm up from his middle so that she could tug his t-shirt out of his waistband and slide her hand up inside of it, splaying her fingers against his stomach. She settled there, pressing her entire hand into his skin, two fingers crossing scar tissue but not lingering there. He damn near melted beneath the gesture, warm and affectionate in a way that she normally reserved exclusively for the drowsy period between sex and sleep. But, since she’d given him permission, he continued to stroke that sliver of her thigh above the top of her sock.
“That feels nice,” she said quietly, after another few seconds.
“I’m glad,” he answered, placing his other hand on top of hers on his stomach, separated by the cotton of his shirt. “So does this.”
“’M glad, too.” Maka turned her head just a tiny bit, so she could press a kiss against his shoulder.
He still wasn’t entirely sure what was happening, as he stared down at the top of her dirty blonde-ash blonde-halo golden head, but his heart was thudding in his chest and it felt like, maybe, he could get away with… “I like being able to make you feel nice, Maka.”
Her mouth curved into another smile against him. “You’re pretty good at it.” There were a few quiet seconds, then, while Soul listened to his pulse in his ears, and then she muffled a yawn in his shirt and said, “I’m tired… Would you mind, if we got ready for bed early?”
He looked down at her, at her hand under his on his stomach, at his fingers toying with the cuff of her sock, then turned his head slightly and looked again at her pyjamas on his bedroom floor. Not because they’d tossed them there, undressing each other desperately, but because she’d brought them in with her, rather than changing first.
“Nah, I don’t mind,” he said, well aware that his soul was probably glowing in a way that she could see without even looking, but he couldn’t exactly hide it even if he’d been so inclined. “We can pack it in early, if you want.”
“’Kay.” Then she snuggled a little further into him again, her hand shifting a little on his stomach but not moving away. “In a minute.”