#*throws garbage into the wind* i havent posted writing in ages so LETS START WITH THIS

[snorlaxlovesme]

SoMa Week 2019

Day 6: Hands

You know that hectic panic you get in when your mom is gonna be home in 20 minutes and you just remembered she had left a list of chores for you to do before she got back? This fic is like that. Except it's Soul with his arm stuck in the dishwasher.

This is a very serious SoMa Week fic.

“Alexa, record my last will and testament.”

“I’m sorry. I don’t know that one.”

Soul looks at the clock. Maka should be home any minute now, he thinks hopelessly, mostly because he had that exact thought 3 hours ago and he was wrong then, so who really knows when she’s going to be back? His neck is absolutely burning from being in this position, and his left arm has taken on a new feeling that’s hovering somewhere between the realm of “stabbing pain” and “complete paralysis.” He’s been sitting on the floor of their kitchen for so long that he’s starting to find shapes in the weird stains on their tile like some kind of fucked up Rorschach test. The one shaped like his mother’s disappointment in him might be blood from Maka’s cut from their last mission. He’s also discovered they have ants.

This all started out with good intentions. Kind of. Okay, no, it started off with Maka leaving him 300 passive aggressive sticky notes (she was the fucking queen of those) saying that if he didn’t start cleaning up their apartment she was going to dump him in the street like the lazy weapon he was and someone else could cook and clean after him. Which is not the Top Ten Most Romantic Ways for the love of your life to tell you to do chores, if you ask Soul. So yeah, maybe he waited until the day before Maka came back from her trip to see her mom to finally start cleaning. And yeah, sure, maybe he was getting kind of aggressive about how he was putting the dishes in the dishwasher. So what?

He’d never admit to Maka that he doesn’t know anything about their new dishwasher, but now he really doesn’t have a choice. When he was maniacally stacking dirty dishes before Maka’s plane landed, he managed to drop one of Maka’s metal chopsticks in between the racks and into the bottom of the dishwasher. He had considered just leaving it down there and hoping for the best, but with the literal signs all over his kitchen calling him LAZY WEAPON, he decided to do the right thing and retrieve it instead of leaving it down there to potentially destroy their new appliance.

Big mistake.

His arm is stuck and it fucking hurts.

He didn’t know the space in between the bottom rack and the water-propeller-thingy was so small, okay? His hand went in just fine! But once he got in up to his shoulder he knew he was fucked. He had the chopstick in hand, but his arm was bent in a position that left no room for wiggling out. And force did not seem like the best option when they just sunk $600 into this stupid fucking appliance. If Soul broke it, he’d never hear the end of it, for sure.

So Soul’s only option? Waiting for Maka to come save him. Pathetic.

He didn’t even have his phone on him when he trapped himself, so he’s been sitting on the kitchen floor for the past three hours (has it been hours? Days? Time has no meaning anymore) wondering if this is how he’s going to die. It’s hard to think of a more undignified way to go at the moment, but he’s sure it could be worse, right? At least his hand isn’t in the toilet.

A tickling on his ankle has him flinching aggressively. An ant has attempted to crawl up his pantleg. Soul pinches it between his fingers on his right hand and flicks it across the kitchen, only to belatedly realize it would have been better to just kill it. Now it has time to come back and tell all its ant friends that the kitchen is open for business and essentially unguarded. What can one boy do when 20% of his body is wedged inside of an over-priced dishwasher?

He tries again to morph his arm into a weapon, like maybe trying it now might be more successful than the 8 other times he’s attempted this solution. But Soul’s arm is bent at an angle that would absolutely destroy the dishwasher if he morphed it into a blade. Maka’s favorite “I closed my book to be here” mug is directly above his hand on the top rack and would for sure be shattered if he transformed. That would even worse than destroying the dishwasher, probably. His arm returns to miserable skin and bone.

“Alexa, play ‘The Funeral’ by Band of Horses’.”

“Here’s a sample of ‘The Funeral’ by Band of Horses. To play the full version, please purchase Amazon Unlimited Music by—”

“Alexa, stop.”

Soul’s pretty sure he’s dying.

The floor-stain shaped like the pain in his left arm has a gathering of ants around it. Maybe it’s spilled soda? Or maybe they’re all congregating to discuss how they plan on eating Soul’s body after he inevitably perishes? He tries to save himself and tamp on them with his foot, but shifting his body just sends shooting pain up his arm. He stills and grits his teeth. He’ll just have to wait for Death to take him.

Minutes later, hours later, years later, he hears the clicking of the lock to their front door, and Maka walks in with two large duffel bags in hand and her cell phone wedged between her shoulder and ear.

“Yeah, Mama, I made it home safely, I’m just gonna—Soul?”

He looks up at her with sad, sad eyes.

Maka gingerly sets down her bags. “Mama, I’m gonna have to call you back. Okay. Yeah. Bye.”

“Help,” he whines pathetically. No traces of coolness to be found in a situation like this.

She kneels next to where he lays, slouched on the tile. “What happened here?”

“I found out why I never do chores.”

She makes a face at him. “If you did chores more often, maybe you’d hurt yourself less. Practice makes perfect, you know.” She looks at his stuck arm with a morbid kind of wonder. “Wow, you’re really stuck in there. How long have you been sitting like this?”

“You were supposed to be here hours ago” is Soul’s only response, because fuck if he knows how long it’s been.

She runs her fingers through his messy hair. “Sorry, sorry, my layover got delayed and things got all hectic. I guess this explains why you weren’t answering your phone, too. Does it hurt?”

“Fuck yes. Can you get me out? Please?”

She gives him a little kiss on the cheek. “Yeah, let’s see here.” She moves him over a tad so she can see better (“sorry, sorry!” she shrieks as he groans) and discovers that not only is he mega-stuck, but there doesn’t seem to be a sensible way to bend his arm to free him.

“Okay then, we’ll just do this,” she says, and in one Superman-like motion she’s grabbing the bottom rack of dishes and straight-up ripping it off the track so Soul can pull his arm free. He about cries in relief, then from pain when finally puts his arm into a position that lets the blood flow back into it. His shoulder is so fucking stiff.

Maka sets the mangled rack onto their kitchen floor, apparently not giving a damn when the dishes still inside it clank together in a dangerously-close-to-shattering cacophony. She sits down beside him, digs her fingers into the crook of his neck, and starts massaging.

“I can’t believe you broke the dishwasher to get me out,” Soul says, rolling his eyes back a little because her hands feel so fucking good on his sore neck and shoulder.

“Well, I wasn’t just going to leave you stuck in there,” Maka says. “Plus, it’s under warrantee, so we can just get the people from the department store to come back and fix it in a few days.”

“WHAT?” Soul roars so loud that Maka jumps a little bit. “Are you saying that I just 127 Hours-ed myself for NOTHING because I could have just BROKEN IT TO BEGIN WITH??”

“Hey, don’t yell at me, Soul, just because you don’t listen when the people who install our appliances tell us about what we’re paying for!”

“I was stuck there for hours because I thought you’d be mad if I broke it!”

“When on earth did I imply during our five-year partnership that I liked a dishwasher more than I liked you in one piece?”

When she puts it like that, he does sound a little stupid. Or maybe she sounds a little sweet. Or maybe being trapped inside a dishwasher for half a day is just distorting his view of reality. He needs to get up off the floor, like now.

He stands up, popping his spine in like nine different places and offers her his hand to help her up too. When he reaches down, the metal chopstick that has been trapped in his raccoon-like grip finally slips between his fingers.

It falls on the floor and bounces before rolling away, and Maka scoots to go retrieve it.

“Is this what you were trying to grab when you got stuck?” she asks. “These don’t even go in the dishwasher, Soul. You handwash them.”

Soul swears his vision whites out for a moment. He can’t even dignify that statement with a response because he’ll probably live to regret whatever comes out of his mouth next. Besides, all’s well that ends well, right? He got the chopstick, he didn’t technically break the dishwasher, and his meister is home and happy. So it was all worth it in the end, right?

Maka finally slaps her hand on the runaway chopstick, shouting a dorky little “a-ha!” Her hand lands near a floor-spot that looks like a wonky heart.

Soul sighs. He’d probably do it again, for her, if it came down to it.  He squats down beside her and plants a kiss on her unsuspecting cheek.

“Missed you while you were gone,” he tells her, because it’s worth saying.

She smiles warmly at him and leans in to give him a proper kiss. She doesn’t make it all the way there, because suddenly she’s jumping a foot in the air with a yelp, coming close to headbutting him in the nose. Maka looks down at where her hand rests on the floor, where a small black insect is skittering across her knuckle. Soul watches in horror as her eyes zero in on 10 of its closest friends a few feet away on the floor.

There’s the briefest moment of silence as she ponders what she’s looking at. The calm before the storm. Then:

“Are those ANTS?”

She whips around to face him, but Soul’s already gone. He can still hear her shouting from down the hall. “Soul, I told you to MOP while I was gone!!”

His shoulder twinges painfully as he slams the door shut to his room. He thinks he’ll just live with the sticky notes for this one.