Day 1: Types of Kisses

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The weapon man put his hands on her shoulders and pushed her gently backward enough to look into her face. Damn her impetuous heart. Maka had the urge to turn and run, but that would only make things worse.

"Did you - did you just kiss me?" Soul asked, head tilted, voice rough enough to make her bones ache.

She had, in fact. After such a comforting hug, it had been instinct to plant a kiss just above the collar of his shirt. His skin was warm. There had been no thought process before it, but it was definitely not meant to be a chaste kiss.

"No! Well, I - yes," Maka spluttered. "But," she added as his mouth dropped open, "I didn't mean it like that. It was just friendly."

Something changed along the corners of his mouth; what it meant, she couldn't tell. It was soon replaced with a familiar smirk, the sign of a serious discussion postponed. "Whatever you say, human. You make life so hard for yourself, you know?"

Maka pouted and rolled her eyes, the bright evening sun flashing in her peripheral vision. "Whatever. Back in your scythe form - let's try one more time before I go."

"Yes, my meister," he simpered with a shit-eating grin, rematerializing in her hands as a huge weapon, a red-and-black blade on a silver shaft.

"Ugh, creep, don't say that again," she muttered, only partly serious.

After standing there and thinking very hard for ten minutes, they still couldn't resonate. Maka plopped down on the grass and Soul crackled back into his usual shape, looking her over with something like concern.

"Maybe it doesn't even exist," she said, staring at a leaf. "All the books seem to indicate that it's real, but maybe it's something else. Maybe not everyone can do it..." Her mind went back to the dark place it had been before: maybe it was her fault; maybe Maka just couldn't connect properly with another person; maybe she couldn't understand what she'd read; maybe she just wasn't good enough for soul resonance. Maybe she was wasting his time. But after Soul had shared a rare embrace with her to try and reassure her, and after she'd gone and made that awkward too, the least she could do was not start that shit again.

Soul shrugged. "Can't rush these things, I guess. Don't your books say it's really hard?"

Maka grinned, wry despite her mood. "They're everyone's books."

On the half-hour walk back to her own home, Maka made her way through the border checkpoint, waving at the guards - human and weapon alike - who had become accustomed to her frequent passage. Considering that she was a human, travel for her was easy. Poor Soul would have to deal with a lot more if he wanted to come visit her, so she always went to him.

Perhaps choosing an isolated, private little meadow to practice wielding her weapon-friend and experimenting with the mysterious soul-connecting technique had been a bad way to avoid falling in love with him.

Humans and weapons were not to be romantically involved. The ideal for most people seemed to be that relations between the two races would be cordial, perhaps friendly, without intermixing.

It hadn't been Maka's intentional plan. She just lived near weapon country, and despite feeling some trepidation about being in weapon-heavy territory, she sometimes liked to cross the border and explore, observing the differences between life there and life in what she thought of as "the outside world." There were many similarities, of course, but there was much heavier security in weapon country. It was definitely a less-wealthy place, with smaller homes crammed closer together and dingier alleyways. If she had to generalize the mood there, she would say the weapons were a polite but reserved people, for understandable reasons - they were widely misunderstood by the rest of the world. At first, everyone knew Maka was not a local and would give her strange looks; most seemed at least comfortable with her presence by now, and she had even made some friends.

Maka met Soul as he frequented the same local cafe she did and constantly sat in the corner scribbling musical notations. From his odd features and his presence there, she had to assume he was a weapon rather than a human traveler, but found herself more fascinated than frightened.

She worked up the courage to reach out and found a harmless, lonely person not entirely comfortable in his own skin, someone itching for a different kind of friendship. He had been born in the outside world, which was not terribly uncommon, and stumbled through learning how to control and inhibit his transformations with a rather strict tutor his parents hired. The instant he was qualified to study music at a school in weapon country, Soul had moved here.

In her free time, Maka found herself more and more interested by books about weapons. Information was always spotty, but they had existed for hundreds of years by now, so she did find significant reading material - including mention of a mysterious ability called "soul resonance." Apparently it was not uncommon for magic users of different disciplines to use it for various purposes, but some older texts mentioned that it was at its most powerful in a partnership between a weapon and a human.

Her desire to try it with Soul was irresistible, and in him, she found a willing partner. Their work together had not yet culminated in a successful resonance, but it had let her get to know him at his most gentle and encouraging.

Kissing his chest that day had come so naturally that it was frightening, and she hoped the transgression wouldn't scare him away from their friendship.