Maka Albarn stood beneath the shade of a gnarled tree on the DWMA grounds, nose buried in Advanced Soul Resonance Theory Vol. IV. Her brow furrowed in perfect concentration— until she heard the unmistakable sound of you tripping over the same bench you tripped on yesterday. And the day before that.

She didn’t even look up. “You’re not subtle, you know.”

You groaned from the ground. “I wasn’t trying to be! That was an entrance. Like in those rom-com movies where the guy falls, and the girl realizes she still loves him.” Maka slowly lowered her book, her unimpressed stare slicing through the air like one of her scythe swings. “You fell flat on your face. That’s not romance. That’s karma.” You stood, brushing off your knees. “Okay, sure. But what if— just what if— I serenade you? Like, out loud? In public?”

Maka blinked. She then turned red— not from affection, but from secondhand embarrassment. “You’re going to get banned from campus.”

“I’ll just haunt the stairs like a love ghost.”

She sighed, pinching the bridge of her nose. “Look. We broke up for a reason. You’re chaotic. You tried to give Soul a friendship bracelet and a love confession note to me in the same envelope.”“That was an accident,” you argued. “Besides, he said the bracelet slapped.”

“It bit him.”

There was a pause. “Okay, yeah, but that was just bad enchantment placement. Point is, Maka, I still care about you. I miss our late night book-reading sessions. I even read one of your weird symmetrical poetry things!”

“It was Death the Kid’s poetry notebook,” she said flatly.

“..That explains a lot actually.”

She closed her book with a sigh, clearly at the end of her patience. But then her expression softened ever so slightly. “You’re ridiculous. Loud. Embarrassing.”