Just finished watching the anime on Netflix and hot damn am I in love with Soul/Maka! Wish I had found this earlier. Might or might not write for the fandom, but got bitten by a bunny and decided to try my hand. Maybe I'll go out and find some manga as well. Unsure. If there's lots of Soul and Maka interacting then I'm totes sold!

Just a little thought. Maybe worth a couple of chapters since they resisted it being a oneshot.

Disclaimer: I don't own Soul Eater characters, I just want to smoosh them together in my mind a bit.

His fingers lazily danced over the keys, tapping out the tune that had been circulating in his mind earlier that day. With only half his thoughts on performing the exorcism that was creative expression, Soul definitely noted the moment the blond woman walked into the sweltering bar.

In a rather prim business skirt and jacket, the kind that was a lint free jet black that couldn't be anything but much too hot in this weather, she was pulling at the white collar of her shirt and striding with purpose down the steps. Practical low-heeled shoes clacked on the cement floor as she carefully navigated her way down inside and then made a B-line for the bar.

Black Star, the only person Soul knew who had tried to trademark his name in preparation for impending fame and idol status once his acting career took off, waggled eyebrows at Soul. No doubt he saw her as a challenge to upsell the expensive liquor. Since Black Star was incapable of doing anything at less than full volume, the nearly empty bar was quickly filled with the resonant projection that was better suited for an auditorium than a small basement.

"Hey lady, whatever you're lookin' for I promise you I, Black Star, will exceed your expectations and pour you so perfect a drink you'll find it a practically religious experience!" Soul snorted to himself, the tenor of his freeform jazz expressive with his amusement. He knew for a fact that Black Star used the same line on women in clubs, with only a small adjustment, to little success. Black Star was only as successful as he was with the ladies because he played the numbers, having a thick enough skin and a thick enough skull to simply approach every woman until one said yes.

The woman, sweat beading on her forehead, was in the process of putting it up into twin pigtails and examining the dusty drink menu on the wall. It appeared she had totally ignored the blue haired ignoramus, who was still engaging her in one-sided conversation. Soul applauded her good sense, and then allowed his attention to fade away from the spectacle.

"… I have an almost godly sense when it comes to mixing drinks. I bet you a hundred laps around this bar that I will serve you something that will knock your socks off!"

"I'm not wearing socks." Her voice was as crisp and purposeful as her walk. "And I'll take a beer. Whatever is on tap. If it's bitter, then all the better."

Black Star continued to extoll the virtues of the various (expensive) mixed drinks he claimed would cure all her ills while pulling her a dark beer. Soul flicked his eyes up in their direction once more to see the woman tapping her foot as she tolerated his bombastic claims. It only took Soul a second more to see she was following the rhythm of the piano. Testing her out, he switched up the tempo to find her switch her tapping almost as quickly. Breaking into a toothy grin, Soul realized that he had somehow procured an audience of one tonight.

Drink in hand, those long legs of hers brought her nearer to him and she carefully placed a napkin first under the beer on the ancient and stained table before setting down her purse in a chair and stripping off her black suit jacket. The diamond of sweat on her back made her white shirt see through enough that Soul could make out the outline of her sensible white camisole. No wonder she was sweating buckets in this heat with all those layers.

Realizing he had played the same phrases over again while blatantly checking her out, Soul tried to detach his interest and play it a little cooler. He saw attractive women all the time, usually actresses in proximity to Black Star who kept somehow landing roles despite his height (and personality). Drifting in and out of that world was a lot of trouble, though, and Soul hadn't liked the drama that had resulted from dating any woman drawn into Black Star's well of ego. It had a sort of gravity all its own, always attracting the crazy.

He watched the woman crack her neck and her knuckles, it was such a masculine gesture he played a flat note, discordant and surprised. She took a long draw from her glass and then allowed her rigid posture to soften ever so slightly. Turning to face him he felt like those light green eyes of her pierced into him and saw something he couldn't, and he was sure the temperature went up another three degrees. At this rate he was going to pit up his shirt.

"Do you take requests?" She pulled a couple dollar bills from her purse, eyeing the empty tip jar, and before Soul could say anything she had walked over to drop a few dollars in the cracked container.

With a dry mouth he watched the woman undo the top two buttons of her shirt, and he immediately wondered what she would be like in bed: reserved, controlled, impatient, or maybe criticizing every move. Then again maybe none of those things. He knew he was gaping at her like an idiot, mind wandering as she calmly waited for him to answer her question.

"If I know it, I guess so." He wanted to smack himself in the head for such a dorky response. Something about this woman made him unreasonably eager to please her, he thought. He didn't owe anybody anything, he just came here to play this detuned piece of shit when Black Star was working bar and he felt too bored to lay around in his apartment.

"Do you know Life on Mars?" Her lips quirked into a half smile and Soul wished he were in on the joke.

"I can fake it a bit." He had a general idea how it went, not that he could remember a single lyric. It was one of those piano pieces he vaguely remembered playing around with back in the day. Launching in he heard her hum along to a couple measures before turning around to head back to her seat. He didn't want to let her get away, suddenly, and blurted out. "So you like Bowie?"

He played, adding in his own improvisations due to both a spotty memory of the music and to stave off the boredom of simply parroting what he remembered. She stopped mid-turn and arched eyebrows delicately at him before gracing him with a smile that was shockingly sweet where up until now all she had given away to the world was severity.

"I think I just like that it starts with the lines 'it's a god-awful small affair, to the girl with the mousy hair'. I guess that sounds pretty self-centered." Her smile went wider, touching her eyes now, and Soul wondered how he didn't see how damn beautiful she was the moment she walked in here. His heart sped up and so did his tempo just a tad.

"Not a lot of songs about guys with white hair so I can't say I can relate." He grinned at her, wondering if his unusually pointed teeth were a turn off or turn on for her. They tended to be polarizing, with some women a little too enthusiastic about them. After running into a couple of girls with vampire fetishes, he started being a little more circumspect about flashing them around.

"You know how it is when you're a teenager though, everything feels like it's about you anyway. And that line in it about mom and dad… well sometimes unrelated things hit a nerve at the right time in life."

"Problems with the parents? I can relate." He hoped her childhood had not been as dysfunctional as his. Emancipation at 16 had been both the best and worst decision of his life: the struggles, the fights over the phone, and the disappointment from his brother… not that he felt he ever really escaped that life.

"I'm Maka, by the way, Maka Albarn."

"Soul."

She snorted. "I guess you were born to play music then, with a name like that."

A little too close to the truth of things, he returned to the music until he calmed his reaction to her words down a bit. He had strayed far off the melody of Life on Mars anyway, so he took the opportunity to circle back around to it. Maka was leaning on the side of the piano, still remarkably stiff.

"Bring your drink over, Maka." He liked the way her name rolled around in his mouth, and he immediately wanted to say it a few more times.

Giving him another one of her gentle smiles, she did just that, carefully transporting all her things to the table next to the piano. He moved away from the Bowie into an indirectly inspired little hook that was pulling at the back of his mind. Something like 'Maka's theme', perhaps, if he worked on it a little more sometime and polished out the rough parts that he just felt like might not be her. Not that he knew her, but he felt like he should.

After moving her things Maka swiped her arm against her forehead to get the beads of sweat threatening to fall, but it did nothing for the drip that formed near her collarbone that ran down into the gap at the top of her shirt. Soul, catching it in the corner of his vision, felt desire tighten his gut and pounded on the keys a little harder to distract himself.

Maka hadn't planned on going to a bar on a Tuesday evening, being someone who adhered to her schedules with clockwork precision. Maka Albarn was, above all things, responsible and mature. So when she came home to her cozy apartment to find her papa sitting on her couch and watching TV she immediately thought two things: giving him a key had been a horrible idea, and something was wrong.

"Papa got thrown out, again. I know you won't turn out your dear papa, Maka!" His wobbly voice and puppy eyes were greeted with Maka pressing her lips into a thin disapproving line.

His newest girlfriend must have gotten a clue that she wasn't the only one, as they inevitably did. Usually he had secured a second girlfriend who was less aware and could simply transfer his possessions to the next apartment like a hermit crab moving from shell to shell, but this one must have gotten wind of things faster than expected. This happened maybe once a year since she had gotten her own apartment after college. The sigh she felt building in her mind didn't quite escape her lips.

"You should really get A/C, Maka, it's too hot in here for you!" Which really meant it was too hot in here for him. She was content with cold showers before bed during this heat wave, but her papa wasn't the kind of person who could tolerate much physical discomfort. The pampered consultant for fortune 500 companies spent most of his time in nice hotel rooms across the country, and she would bet money he was rarely alone in those rooms. He must be between consulting jobs as well as women, then.

Keys still in hand, annoyed at her childish parent and unwilling to get into a fight about the merits of various appliances she might or might not need, Maka did the most logical thing she could think to do and told her papa she was going out to get a late dinner. He was all solicitous attention, telling her to eat something healthy and drink lots of water because it was so hot here. Didn't she worry about dehydration?

At a certain point she had to tune out his saccharine tones born of true parental concern with a dash of selfishness and simply leave. At first she had thought to truly go get some food, being the kind of person who wanted to turn what had started as a lie into the truth, when she had seen the flashing neon sign that had led her down into this bar. Beer was liquid bread, right? That might be close enough, and she wasn't so far she couldn't walk home after. It was the kind of night she felt like she needed a drink. Or a few drinks.

The short bartender with the practically electric blue hair was squawking at her about something as she picked out a drink, unfamiliar with the various beers but mostly just deciding whatever she got needed to be cheap enough that she could drink a lot of it before she went home without feeling like she was wasting money. Being drunk enough to sleep through her papa's late night TV watching was going to be key to her sanity this first night of who knew how many he would be staying on her couch. Concentrating on the piano helped her tune out the loudmouth as well as forget the buzzing worry in the back of her mind about her papa, and by extension herself. How long would it be before her papa acted like a real grownup?

Turning towards the piano with her drink in hand, she saw the man playing was arrestingly handsome. The realization hit her hard, almost stopping her in her tracks, because she wasn't the kind of woman who had her head turned often by any man. Bedroom eyes, messy white hair, an untucked red dress shirt with the sleeves rolled up exposing strong forearms ending in long fingered artistic hands that would glide over the keys gracefully. He seemed intent on what he was doing, so she took a seat and finally relieved herself of her dark blazer which had been perfectly reasonable at work in her frigid office building but was doing her no favors now.

It felt great to let her stress go a little as she indulged in cracking her knuckles loudly, the popping of her neck a terrible accompaniment as she tasted the bitter beer she'd ordered. Not really liking beer, she was hoping the bad taste would prevent her from overdoing it too much on an empty stomach. A long time ago, before she had the option of going to bars, she would use her room to escape her reality. When mama and papa had been getting into those screaming fights shortly before the divorce she remembered tuning them out by closing the door and turning up her music loud enough to make it her own world. Maka's heart ached in her chest in chorus with fourteen-year-old Maka's pain.

What she wouldn't give to be able to plug in and tune out the world right now.

Digging in her purse she found a few loose bills and wandered over to the handsome pianist. Maybe he knew some of the standards of her young isolation. His smile made her stomach flip as he turned burgundy eyes in her direction and pinned her to the ground. As he asked her questions she reflected on how this was not the song she remembered blasting over the sounds of her parents fighting but she liked his version better. He puts emphasis on parts she didn't even notice before and added in things she didn't even know she wanted to hear until they vibrated the air. Never being a musical person, Maka had to stifle deep envy at how easily it seemed to come to him. Some people are gifted with incredible powers, she supposed.

They chatted for a bit and Maka was amazed someone like him wanted to talk to her, but then it was probably part of his job to chat up the customers. At least he was better at it than that pushy guy at the bar. Soul, and she doubts that's his real name but isn't about to call him out on that, is the kind of man that Maka knows she can't stay away from and she worries a little bit about that even as she eagerly took a table closer to him at his insistence.

It felt like a million degrees in here, her cold beer so bitter that she can't drink it fast enough to get relief, and she wished she had a tissue or something to mop at her forehead. Wiping away some sweat, she heard Soul shift his tone at the piano and wondered how many hours it would take her to be able to express herself like that on an instrument.

"I couldn't do that." Maka sighed wistfully and sipped some more beer with a grimace.

"Do what?" She loved how gravelly his voice was. It's the kind of voice she would assume would be accompanied with cigarettes, but he didn't smell like anything except faint cologne and sweat this close. It wasn't unpleasant.

"Play like you do. It's incredible." He shrugged at her words, but that toothy grin of his broke out again giving her a little electric jolt. She knows her sincere words have pleased him. "I know I could learn to play, and I could probably be technically skilled, but I don't have that piece of me that drives me to be creative like that."

Soul seemed to come to some sort of conclusion and turned to face her with his full attention, his slightly slumped shoulders and lazy eyes at odds with how intently he examined her.

"You're probably right, not a creative bone in your body." He made eye contact with the man at the bar and held up two fingers before turning his attention back to a slightly irritated Maka.

"Jerk! You don't have to put it like that." She huffed and tried to vent some of the heat of her body by pulling at her shirt. The smile wiped off of Soul's face until the loudmouth bartender arrived with two drinks. Her beer was still half full, but she thanked him as gracefully as she could.

"Don't know who you are lady, but you must cough up gold coins or repair rare motorcycles because I haven't seen this cheapskate buy a girl a drink practically since we threw out those fake I.D.s back in…"

"Black Star shut your face and go back to cleaning glasses or something!"

Maka watched carefully as an unspoken argument seemed to pass between the two friends entirely through facial expressions before the bartender backed off with a laugh and disappeared into a back room. They were truly the only ones in the whole place and normally being left alone with a guy would put her on the defensive, but she didn't know if it was the alcohol or if it was Soul because she was more relaxed than she had ever been before. She felt like she was in exactly the right place at the right time with the right person.

If you had asked Soul to describe his dream girl an hour ago he would have said something along the lines of "pretty and chill with huge tits," but now he felt like the world had turned on its axis and the stars had realigned because if a girl like that had cut in to talk to him while he was with Maka he would have brushed her off like a fly. Maybe his dream girl was more like a sandy blond with eyes that stripped his reason, a flat chest, and legs for miles.

"…and then he just showed up tonight, unannounced like usual eating what is probably the last food in the fridge and complaining about the A/C—or lack thereof—and I just don't know if I feel up to it this time. Maybe I should pay for a hotel for him, or something." Maka was nursing her third beer but clearly drinking on an empty stomach had made her more forthcoming than she might have been otherwise. "I'm sorry I just told you all that, I guess I'm just another stupid drunk with a problem whining at you. You must hear it all the time."

She seemed to think he worked here, like Black Star, and he hadn't disabused her of the notion yet because he liked hearing her talk and he thought it might be different if he told her he was just hanging out to play piano.

"How can you not own an air conditioner?"

"Not you, too!" Maka groaned. "Why buy a huge bulky thing that I would only use a couple weeks a year? I take a cold shower and go straight to bed, I don't run very hot when I sleep so I've been fine."

"Your job must not pay you very much. Air conditioners aren't that expensive."

Maka sighed. "It isn't the money. I just don't like owning a lot of superfluous stuff, except books. My apartment looks like a library, practically. It makes me feel really relaxed to know I can just go home and grab a book off the shelf before bed."

Soul wasn't really much of a book person. He'd sooner see the movie adaption, or have a friend sum it up, which is how he got in trouble in English class time and again in high school. Between the two of them, Soul was shocked he and Black Star made it out of high school with a diploma of any kind. Not a great testament to the public school system that it evaluated them fit to move on to the next level of education.

"My office is full of books, too, but tax regulation reference manuals aren't everyone's cup of tea. I think they don't make for any worse reading than, say, a medical textbook…" Soul didn't think either of those sounded like any fun to a sane person.

His expression must have given away something because her dreamy smile became guarded. Soul tried to backpedal so she wouldn't do something crazy like leave him all alone at the table.

"Hey, I mean, whatever makes you happy right? Your thing is books, and my thing is music. You have to have something that gets the stress out." She ran a finger around the rim of her empty glass and Soul tried not to think about how he'd like to get some stress out with her help right then. What was winding him up was how oblivious she was to her own appeal. Normally attractive women flirted with him casually, and he flirted right back but Maka wasn't playing games. It was throwing him off that he couldn't get a bead on if she saw him as a man or not.

"Don't worry, you don't have to make me feel better. I know I don't have the kind of job or the kind of hobbies that endear me to people. When I'm not reading I'm at the gym on weekend mornings taking Tai Chi." She made a fist and then flattened it out slowly on the table before swirling her fingers against the condensation left on her glass. "I was thinking of dropping those and taking up kickboxing. I think I need something that helps me get out a little more aggression." There was a glint in her eye that made Soul swallow the last of his own beer to relieve his dry throat.

Soul wondered how someone so spindly could want to put herself in harm's way, but he supposed everyone had their own demons to fight. Not everyone could turn it inward like him and sit on it. That little voice in the back of his head had never told him to fight, it had always told him to roll over and fall asleep and let the world pass on by. Maka's fighting spirit was almost invigorating to just hear about secondhand.

"Ugh," in the comfortable silence, Maka huffed and sighed as she pulled at her shirt. "I thought it would get cooler once the sun was down but it's just more humid somehow. I don't want to give in an get an air conditioner on principle but I'm half considering sleeping in my office at work if it's going to be like this."

"You could come over to my place for a couple hours." Soul felt the words blurt out of his mouth before he could properly think them through. Maka gave him that sideways glance that told him even though she had three beers and no food in her that no man inviting her into his apartment was going to be trusted.

"That sounded bad."

"You bet it did." She agreed with him.

He ran a hand through his hair, feeling like he had flubbed this totally and should just retreat home anyway. "I don't live alone, I have a two bedroom a few blocks over and my roommate is a chick," He might have said 'lady' but he was not entirely sure linking Blair to the word lady would be offensive to her or to ladies. "She works weird hours, so I couldn't say if she's home or not, but it's not like I'm planning on anything weird. We can watch a movie, you can cool off and sober up, and then you can go home to your dad…?"

Maka made a low noise in the back of her throat, a kind of hum that seemed to take the place of words while she decided to trust him or not.

"How about I have some water here, sober up, and then we go watch a movie in your air conditioning? I mean your apartment!" Her blush after the slip made him laugh and at least let him know the real draw in his invitation. Soul didn't take it personally, he was just happy she was going to trust him even a little bit so he had a little more time to win her over.