your name au collab with happyisahabit who did accompanying art

He heard the echo of his own voice bouncing off the mountainside, and he doubled back slowly around the edge of the crater. There was nothing there, and yet he felt a pull of strings beckoning him to reach out, to touch what ever or whoever was waiting on the other side. A name was dripping off the tip of his tongue, and he swears that he'd just been calling it moments before he turned behind him, but he'd forgotten it now. Just like how he'd forgotten why he came there in the first place.

Still, he drew out his hand into the empty space and tentatively made a grab for the air surrounding him. What he got in return was the feel of skin and the warmth of a person. With the sun beginning to set to reveal twilight, his eyes adjusted to the change and there in front of him was a girl whose presence felt like home. As her face registered his and shined with recognition, she began to tear up and her hand shot up to cover her mouth.

So she knew him too, he thought. So you know me too.

She dropped into his chest and let him wipe her cheek.

Of course I do. How could I ever forget you.

But they couldn't stay like that for long; they had other impending things to give their focus to, and they had other people relying on them in the town just below. There was only a couple of minutes at most, but surely that was enough time to say what they needed to, wasn't it? He was just starting to remember the little details that tied them together again.

Maka was a high school student, born and raised in the city where she drew and where she worked long evening shifts at a restaurant ran by her friend's brother. She had no other siblings, but she'd been living at home alone for as long as she'd been able to; her father was never there and god knows how her bills were still getting paid on time. Her classmates came to her for their worries and she somehow gained their utmost respects throughout the time of her class presidency, keeping up the good image of the school with her own ambitious talents and supporting even the more troubled students who wanted nothing more than to see her fall. But she was a lonely soul, lonelier than anyone Black Star had ever seen, lonely as he was in his small town at the foot of the mountain.

He'd always dreamed of going where she had the luck of living, and she'd always wanted the comforts of a close community in a tranquil space. Trading lives every other day was a strange gift that gave them more than they could ever offer in return, but the strangest part was how they'd both managed to fall in love without ever once speaking to each other outside of the written word. She left little sticky notes in the folds of his family's ancient books, and he left her scribbles all over her sketch pad. They recorded their days through the use of Maka's tablet, but rather than speaking into a diary, they were speaking directly to each other, laughing and exchanging notes to the point where the moment he looked forward to the most was reading her thoughts from the night before.

And now… he was sure that it was the very last time that he would see her in a long time. Certainly if he failed his mission that night, it would be the last time he would see her... ever.

Before they left each other, they agreed to write their names on the inside of their palms. They wanted to remember each other as clearly as the day they'd switch bodies, as clearly as the meteor that approached them overhead in the sky. But rather than his name, he wrote instead in the neatest handwriting he could muster that he loved her so that she never forgot. He was going to find her again if it was the last thing he'd do, he promised. They would find each other again, and he swore he would never stop chasing her until he was at her side.

He passed the marker and stretched his hand in hers, but when the black ink streaked across his heart-line, she vanished along with her name.

Written for MaStar Week 2017 Day 6 Bonded