I do not own Soul Eater or Hitchicker's Guide to the Galaxy.

They're about twenty seconds into mind-numbing commercials when he decides to do something about it.

"Hold still a sec," he murmurs, leaning probably closer than he should on the couch and swiping the bridge of her nose with a finger. She doesn't shy away, which he takes a bit of guilty satisfaction in. It makes him a little giddy but also makes him feel kind of like a creep. Crushes are not things someone should have at this age.

Her vivid eyes are comedic when they cross to focus on the eyelash on the tip of his middle finger. "Oh. Thanks?" she replies just as quietly, though why either of them are being quiet is unknown. Her eyebrows furrow. There's an awkward silence as he continues to present the offered eyelash near her face, commercials on the television creating a white-noise of domesticity in the background. "Um…"

"Well?" he prods.

"Well what?" she shoots back, her breath faint and still somewhat warm as it reaches his knuckles. He's too aware of these things, he thinks.

"Make your wish, already," he grumbles. "I don't wanna hold this all day."

Maka blinks, her eyes crossing again, the crease between her brows deepening. "Wish?"

It's his turn to blink, at a loss. "Yeah. You know… you blow." Wow, he'd thought he was beyond feeling embarrassed by saying things like 'blow' in non-sexual conversation, but he's so wrong. "And make a wish. Like a candle," he says, his ears heating burning.

"It's not my birthday…"

The more he explains, the more he feels like he shouldn't have brought this up because it's making him feel stupid and maybe a bit like he's thirteen again. "It's not a birthday thing, it's— augh. How have you not heard of this?"

Maka is not fazed. "Probably because it sounds stupid."

Soul struggles for words for a moment. "Well— Okay, it's kinda childish," he admits. "But it's not any more stupid than the stuff you come up with."

She leans back at this, glaring at him. "What?"

"Man, whenever something completely random is amiss, you 'death children' assume someonedied. It's morbid as shit. At least this is harmless," he insists, indicating the hand with her balancing eyelash.

Her mouth opens to retort, but nothing comes out. It closes with a click and she looks off to the side, contemplative. "But… Hm."

"Yeah." He leans back as well, as the weird little 'moment' he'd been feeling is now dissipating into that sour taste he gets when he realizes he's pathetic and about as smooth as sandpaper. "If you're not gonna use it, I will," he flatlines, mildly disappointed at the uneventful end of the commercial interlude.

He does not anticipate his meister clinging to the subject with a tinge of desperation in her voice. "You can do that?" she nearly hisses, hand clamping around his wrist. "It's my eyelash— I grew it."

Soul scoffs, resisting the tugging on his arm and keeping her eyelash out of reach. "What? It prolly doesn't wanna even grant the wish of someone who thinks the whole thing is 'stupid'."

Her eyes narrow. "Oh, so it's alive now?"

He ignores the jab, musing aloud. "What should I wish for… eyelashes are pretty rare—" and that's when Maka makes the squeakiest of whiny growls in the back of her throat, yanks his hand back to her face, and hurriedly blows across the tip of his finger. The tiny golden hair disappears in the living room to mingle with the commercials.

She's pretty twitchy when he gives her a pointed look. Maka attempts to casually release his arm like nothing absurd has happened at all. He can't stop the twinge in his lips as he halfway smiles at her behavior. "Nerd."

"I'm sure you would have wasted it on something stupid, like a lifetime's supply of sushi."

He wouldn't have, for the record, but he laughs anyway. "What's wrong with that?"

Maka shrugs, drawing her legs up to the couch and settling cross-legged while she pretends to focus on an advertisement for toothpaste. "Wishes are for more important things," she says, voice taking on her usual no-nonsense lilt.

He hums, two parts interested, eight thousand parts distracted. Her legs being crossed causes her left knee to take up some of the space meant for him on the couch. It rests on his right thigh, overlapping on his hand. He draws his arm out of the way, but doesn't know where to put it. He hazards resting it on the back of the couch, stretching behind her.

He is too happy about this setup. It taints his voice when he asks, "So what did you wish for, then?"

It's not that she visibly stiffens, or even moves on the couch at all, but he chalks it up to knowing her for as long as he has to catch the subtle shift of anxiety around her before she says, carefully neutral, "I'm not telling."

Needless to say, she has his attention, though it's not that she hadn't already and has for the past several years. "What, a new book?" he teases. "Extra credit?"

The glance she gives him is withering, and so legitimately unamused he's wondering what he's just stepped into. "I should've wished for a new weapon," she drawls.

"Ouch— hey, now," he says, placing a hand on his chest in mocked pain, though he couldn't say how much of it is truly fake. "You wound me." He looks away to the television with a smile that's hard to keep, unable to stomach the bite in her eyes, even in jest. He'd like to think he can handle most anything she can throw at him, but that's just a little too close to those whispering fears that never really go away.

On the screen, the commercials end and return to whatever show they'd been watching. He's annoyed that he has no clue what's going on, because he'd spent the entire first part of the show watching her instead, which is how he'd found that damned eyelash in the first place.

He's kind of hoping for her to refute her last statement, but it's not coming. That sour taste is back with a vengeance. He hates this constant roller coaster ride of his hopes flying higher than he ever wants them to go only to crash and burn in two minute intervals.

And they take off again without his consent when she sighs and says, "If you must know, I only have one wish."

He does not want to take the bait. He takes the bait. "Oh?"

She nods at the television. "Mm. I always wish it. On birthdays, at fountains, on falling stars."

Feigning curiosity is beyond him, now. "What is it?" he asks, candid. He watches light from the TV playing on her face when her lips do that poofy, pouty thing they do whenever she's amused and playing innocent.

"Secret." Maka leans back into the couch cushions looking pleased with herself. Her hair rubs against his shirt sleeve and lights him on fire.

He shifts a little on the couch and she lifts her knee to let him get situated. She leans it back on him when he's finished. An unbidden part of him causes the hand resting behind her to tingle with an imagined sensation of what her thigh might feel like, if he had put it there instead of the couch.

Soul tries to sound bored as if to somehow make up for how on-edge he really is. "You didn't even know you had a wish to make until I told you."

She shrugs again, pout overrun by a big grin. "If I told you, it might not come true." And, mysteriously, that grin is short-lived, fading into something that might be a little bit wistful, a little bit sad, though it's hard to tell from this angle. "I'm not risking the jinx."

"Wow. Hardcore wish."
"Yeah."
"So… how many birthdays are we talkin', here? Like, all of them?"

A little chuckle bubbles through her, and he's fucking proud of it, because that muted smile hurts him so subtly and quietly he'd do anything to make her laugh. Her head tilts back and it rests with a soft 'thunk' in the crook of his elbow. "Nooo, not all of them," she replies to the ceiling, the angle of her neck making her voice throaty and lower than the usual. It's sensual and confidential and it makes it hard to concentrate. "A few, though," she admits.

Soul racks his memory for something his meister wants and has apparently wanted a long while, and the fact that she is purposefully withholding this information even from him gets under his skin like an insatiable itch.

That voice in the back corner of his heart labelled 'Pipe Dreams' announces a few things he'd really like for her wish to be— all of which involve himself and a more intimate variant of their relationship— but he snuffs that voice out as best he can. Shoving his own wishes into someone else's heart makes him feel shitty at best.

Still, he needs to know like his lungs need air to breathe. "Not even a hint?"

Maka smiles, close-lipped and serene, gazing through the ceiling as if the answer resides somewhere in another galaxy. She gives him nothing.

He sighs, looking back at the television, disgusted with himself. What had he even anticipated when bringing up her eyelash, anyway? For her to blush and shyly puff her breath over his hand? For her to give him doe-eyes and admit she wished for a kiss? Get real. This is Maka Albarn— she'd never do any of those things. Certainly not with him. They're too comfortable with each other for that kind of bashful pre-teen shit.

Well. She is, anyway.

Honestly, he may have just wanted the excuse to touch her, which doesn't make him feel like that great of a person, in retrospect. Regardless, he hadn't expected to find out his meister had some boss-level wish that no one had top-secret clearance to. Or to get worked up over something as benign as a wish a girl wanted to keep to herself. Or to feel pitifully inadequate to have his closest friend be halfway lounging on him but have her eyes look so far away.

These constant crash-and-burns make him want to scythe his face off. He hates feeling this much. In his mind he knows none of these things are even remotely a big deal, yet it's like a disease that's becoming rapidly and irrevocably terminal. When he feels her head roll across his arm to look at him, he damns the universe, because he doesn't want to look back-- he isn't prepared for another plummeting crash over the most minor of turbulence because his hopes are a tissue paper airplane— but he knows he will.

He looks, and she's too fucking Maka right now, her face seamlessly girl and woman and meister and friend in equal parts, simultaneous. The distance between their lips is something his brain now uselessly, constantly monitors when she's this close.

Maka doesn't say anything— merely stares at him as if weighing the second-rate cheeseball thoughts running rampant in his mind— so he blurts, "What."

There's still a nerve-wracking silence before she responds. With a quirk in her lips that make all the vowels in her words sound like an inside joke, she says, "I'd never wish for another weapon."

Well, add that to the list of things he hadn't been expecting. He's shell shocked and somewhat touched, really, but mostly he's just confused because Maka Albarn's train of thought follows tangible, comprehensible tracks only seldom.

"That's a relief," he deadpans, trying to grapple with any sense of logic in this conversation. He can feel the silence between them, colored by that quirking lip and the television dancing on the edges of her eyes, and he's suddenly swamped in That Moment again. It's a disparaging thought that he may be the only one who feels the electricity snapping between the air molecules, who would suffer awkward, romcom electrocution just to bullshit about childish superstitions with her. "I really didn't wanna hash out any résumés today."

Maka raises her bent knee and bops him on the leg with it. "I'm serious though," she murmurs, and it's true— her face loses all trace of jest. "It was a cruel thing to say."

He doesn't know how to respond to this, and would truthfully prefer to flee the couch and bullshit about anything else to lighten things up, but he only looks at her and her eyes and her lips and the bridge of her nose he still remembers the shape of and whispers, "Okay."

Which doesn't make any sense as a response. It's not like she'd asked him a question! He could have literally said anything else and it would have been better, like 'You've said crueler things before you've had your coffee', or 'I knew you were joking because I'm the coolest weapon anyway', or 'You don't have to apologize because I wasn't going to cry myself to sleep about it', or even just a fucking 'Thank you'.

Despite his inability to be coherent when his meister is approximately twelve inches from his face, she somehow miraculously understands him and whispers, "Okay," back.

How can this make his face so instantly warm? She made a joke in passing, he played off the sting, she caught it anyway and apologized, and now he can only wonder what it would take to just turn his body slightly, to bring his free hand to her cheek and kiss her. It would be so easy right now. Would she shy away or would she simply wait for him to reach her?

It's while he's musing these fruitless thoughts that she breaks the silence with, "I'm gonna go to bed."

Just like that, she's up and away from him, padding around the coffee table. The sudden change in everything he'd been absorbed in is like the icy shock of jumping into a lake too early in spring. "U-uhh, alright. G'night," he tries.

"Night," she replies, disappearing in the shadows the television can't reach. "That was your hint earlier, for the record."

"Oh."

Her bedroom door clicks shut.

Oh.

What?

He's terminal. "I'm terminal."

"What was that?" Maka asks, looking up from her wallet with confusion.

"Nothin'." He watches her pull a coin from her wallet, scrutinize it, and put it back. She does this several times.

It's been weeks since the Eyelash Non-Incident. He has run her 'hint' through every imaginable thought process he can muster, only to feel like he's been blindfolded, spun around, and compressed with the pressure to find the piñata without falling on his face.

Soul leans on the motorcycle seat and waits for her to find the penny she'd found on Shibusen's front steps four days ago. He's long since stored the groceries in the saddlebags.

Now that he's aware of it, he's figured out her superstitious habits. Lucky coins, wishing fountains, and dandelion fluff are all standard fare. When they drive home later, he'll feel her chest swell as she holds her breath for the tunnel on 4th Street. When she's interested in whatever ambiguous message she's found in her fortune cookie on takeout night, she makes sure to eat the entire cookie and keeps the slip of paper in her wallet.

Maka makes a growl-like victory noise— so not feminine at all— finding her special coin, clutching it in the palm of her hand, and closing her eyes. Right now, that mystery wish is playing through her head, probably memorized after years of practice. He's seen her do this a hundred times, but had never really cared, only assuming she'd been wishing for him to not skip out on class or something. He feels pretty stupid about it now, having treated her wishes as trivial given the type of heavy ones he holds in his own heart.

Fuck, he really wants to know what it is.

She blows into her fist and tosses the coin over her shoulder into the fountain nestled at the heart of Death Bazaar. She doesn't look back to see the splash. When she sees him watching her, her cheeks dust with pink. A sheepish giggle escapes her as she shrugs.

Maka stows her wallet into his jacket— doesn't even hand it to him, just takes the initiative and gets all up in his space— because she isn't wearing anything with pockets today. "Figure it out, yet?" she teases, climbing onto the motorcycle.

God, she's probably been wishing for him to fall in love with her, and every fountain, fortune cookie, birthday candle, dandelion, and falling star has steadily brought him to ruin.

Soul grumbles, mounting and starting the engine without comment. She wraps her arms around him and he feels her laugh sink through his body.

It hadn't been a conscious effort, but he finds himself holding his breath for a few seconds on 4th Street.

He's wearing a tank in public. This doesn't happen very often, as his scar reaches just high enough to make an appearance at the lower neckline, and he's had enough 'my eyes are up here' incidents to empathize with well-endowed women.

Still, he'd worn his jacket over it for the quick drive to pick Maka up from her meister training. It's too damn hot to make her walk home from what he essentially considers a boot camp, and it's too damn hot to be bothered with a thicker shirt under his riding jacket, too. That being said, he hadn't anticipated seeing her sitting at the bottom of the steps with a mangled blouse, her sports bra visible and held together with what looked like dental floss.

She hadn't even explained what happened, just greeted him with, "Hi. I'm starving. Let's go get a chicken!"

So they're getting a chicken. Or rather, he is, standing at the deli counter of the local grocery while Maka meanders around the display of different cheeses. He's wearing a tank; she's wearing his jacket. He hadn't mentioned it's her turn to cook tonight— he figures if her training was rough enough to destroy her clothes she probably could use a night off.

The woman behind the deli counter is taking the bird off the rotisserie spit and settling it in a take-out container. He has an itch between his shoulder blades and has an arm thrown behind his back, ineptly trying to reach it with his fingers while he waits.

It comes out of his mouth before he realizes it. "That still have the wishbone in it?"

The deli employee looks startled for a moment, then quietly laughs. "Yes it does. Be sure to dry it out before you use it," she smiles.

He feels embarrassed for various reasons, though none of them he can exactly pinpoint. He gives up trying to scratch his itch. "Uh, yeah. Thanks." He waves Maka over, since his wallet is in his jacket. She makes over-exaggerated moans of starvation that he's pretty sure she's stolen from his compendium of noises as he pays.

His mind is back on the subject of wishes and the one cryptic hint she'd given him.

(I'd never wish for another weapon.)

He can only figure this means one of two things: her wish has something to do with being a meister, or her wish has something to do with him.

Unfortunately, whenever he thinks about the latter option, the Pipe Dream department immediately takes over, bringing him to all the absurd conclusions that aren't allowed, god damn it. He refuses to swim around in giddy daydreams and cheesy scenarios.

He's still trying to get his own wishes out of his head when Maka climbs behind him in the grocery store parking lot. She distracts him by scrubbing her nails between his shoulder blades.

"AH-haha, oh, oh fuck yeah fffff—" Soul arches his back like a cat and Maka laughs, scratching faster and rucking up his shirt.

"You're like an animal," she says not un-affectionately, rubbing the spot with the heel of her hand when she's done. His tank is so thin he can feel the heat of her palm.

He rolls his shoulders, goosebumps running down his arms despite the early summer heat radiating from the pavement. "Who was the one foaming at the mouth at the deli counter?" he says before starting the bike and revving.

Her arms are warm around him, his jacket she wears absorbing the heat of the sun. Pitched to carry through the wind, she says in an almost-sexy voice near his ear, "Dibs on the wings~"

"Share!" he shouts back, unbearably happy with this moment in the universe.

She does end up sharing, albeit grudgingly. They camp out on the floor in front of the television, both having given up watching whatever show is on again. He's gnawing on the wing joints in his mouth while simultaneously prying apart what's left of the decimated chicken carcass. Maka pulls her legs to her chest and rests her chin on her knees.

"Is thish a sign you're turnin' into uh schych'path," she garbles around a leg bone.

He scoffs. "Don't mish'take me for Schtein."

Maka pulls the bone from her mouth and offers it to him. "All you're missing is the scalpel."

Soul rolls his eyes, then finds the sweet spot in the wing joint and takes a moment to appreciate it, slurping. He tosses the remains on the little pile of bones they've amassed on a paper towel. "No one appreciates my dedication. Here I am, wrist-deep in a dead body just to find my meister a wishbone, but no—"

He restrains from laughing at how abruptly her face lights up. For someone who had called blowing an eyelash off a finger 'stupid', the mention of a potential wish still gets her childishly excited. She rocks to her knees and hurriedly crawls over on them to help dig in.

This is probably the weirdest time to find her attractive. She's taken off his jacket to not get roasted chicken guts all over it, and he doesn't exactly stare at what her trashed shirt exposes, but his eyes take note of it. Then he gets a sudden urge to just touch her hair out ofnowhere.

It's pretty right now, framing her eyes at an angle just so, and he would like to touch it. He doesn't, of course, because: A) his hands are covered in poultry juice and, B) that's generally not something he should do regardless of the cleanliness of his hands. He would also like to stop having these horrific romcom urges at all hours of the day because it's mentally nauseating and kind of makes him want to puke.

Speaking of, "So on a scale from one to gross, where does 'rotisserie autopsy' land for all the wishes you've collected?"

Bones crack. "Pretty high up there. This is certainly the most morbid," she chirps, not looking disgusted at all. "Ugh I'm still starving. I could eat ten more of these."

"Ice cream after?"
"Ooh, yes."

"…Where in the shit is thing supposed to be, anyway," Soul murmurs, picking through the remains. "Can we include this as 'bonding time' for our partnership report or will Stein call BS?"

She chokes on a squeaky giggle and he can't keep from grinning. "He'll probably give us extra points, considering."

They end up needing to Google wishbones on her laptop. After orienting themselves and what's left of the chicken, they realize it's staring them right in the face, still attached to some breast meat.

"Oh! I think this is it—" It's like finding buried treasure. Maka carefully extracts the Y-shaped bone and holds it overhead in victory.

She offers one end of the bone to him, all business. He shakes his head. "The deli-lady said it needs to dry out first. It's prolly too soft right now."

Maka wilts and stares at the wishbone in her hands.

"Oh come on, you can wait a few hours," he chides.

"Okay, okay." She grimaces. "I have chicken under my nails."

This is the strangest time to be in love with her. He's a lost cause. "Let's get ice cream."

They run into some Spartoi at the ice cream parlor by accident, and he's happy to see them for about two seconds before he realizes his alone-time he'd been enjoying with Maka the past hour will now be cut short.

That and he's still wearing a tank, which isn't a big deal around this particular crowd, but despite having showered and donned different clothes, Maka had put his jacket back on.

He'd given her a puzzled look for it and she'd only returned the look with puppy eyes with zero explanation as she shoved herself further into the confines of his jacket, daring him to deny her. Soul hadn't bothered to pry. Plus, he's so guilty of enjoying her wearing his stuff it's probably criminal.

Anyway, she's wearing his jacket. Spartoi does not fit in the parlor's booth by any means, either. They're crammed together like a can of rowdy sardines, and Maka is as close to in-his-lap as a person can be without actually sitting on them. His thighs are spread as wide as he can in the small space allotted so she can perch on the little bit of seat between his legs, and even though her wearing his jacket is netting him a lot of insinuative arching from Black Star's pencil-thin eyebrows, Soul thanks God she's wearing it because it's one more layer between her ass and his dick that's only three misplaced heartbeats away from full mast.

He's backed into the far corner of the booth, trapped on both sides by Kilik and Harvar, and this setup may or may not be the reason why he's draping all over Maka like an overprotective cape, concentrating on his poker face. The only way for him to stay engaged in the table's conversation (or at least appear that he's paying attention, because he most certainly isn't for what he thinks should be obvious reasons), is to rest his chin on her shoulder— he has an arm slipped under hers, holding his milkshake that he slurps from, though he's so preoccupied he can't even taste it. She doesn't appear to mind the outrageous proximity, but he thinks she'll mind a whole hell of a lot more if his dick gets hard enough to make itself known.

She smells like leather and fabric softener and whatever the fuck flavor her shampoo is supposed to be. Combined, the scents make no sense, but it's so familiar it hurts. Ox gives her hell for not dodging some obscurely-named obstacle in meister ass-kick camp this morning, and she quips something back about gullible people and sand traps, though Soul has mostly zoned out of the conversation at that point.

He's a little terrified that he's still entertaining the thought of kissing her neck, even in front of everyone else. He won't do it. But the desire to is formidable. What's worse is that even if he wishes for the rest of Spartoi to leave them be (which he kind of does), he knows he wouldn't kiss her then, either. Even if, by some unfathomable miracle, she'd be sitting in his lap like this (which she wouldn't), he still wouldn't try.

If he could narrow the hundreds of wishes he has down to a single one— one that he would ask on every candle and dark tunnel— he thinks he would wish for courage.

His shake tastes a little sour, now.