She lay unmoving on the table, a pool of red surrounding her body. He played in the blood, his fingers trailing across her pale flesh, drawing circles and other shapes on the pale expanse. For a few minutes he created an image of a war on her stomach, small stick figures drawn in her blood attacking other stick figures. Insane giggles escaped from him as he imagined all the beautiful paint that a war of that scale would afford him.
Some small part of him knew it wasn't paint. Most of him didn't care.
He gave her a red mustache, giggling like a child. He dyed her hair red with it, and cut her skin again when his supply of the precious paint ran out. He trailed circles of it around her breasts, and left his finger prints tattooed against her cheeks. Through it all, she didn't move. It didn't bother him, though. It was better to have a docile canvas than one that shrieked and moved, messing up what he was trying to create.
Finally he felt like he had finished everything that he could on her front and grinned as he flipped the female over, giggling excitedly as he saw the pale expanse of her back and legs. It mocked him with its starkness, with the coldness that his canvas had absorbed from the metal operating table just begging for the warmth of the paint that he was using.
He slid his scalpel into her skin and blinked in confusion. There was no rush of paint. He pulled the scalpel away from her, and tried another area of her back, watching as the skin parted but none of the paint he was seeking bubbled forth. In a fit of anger, he thrust the scalpel into her back, and it stayed there, quivering.
Stein took the image in, and a shaking hand reached up to turn the screw in his head. A second later a shaking hand removed the scalpel from the female's back and he rolled her over slowly.
Blonde hair was matted to an all too familiar face. Obvious tear tracks streaked through the older blood on her face, though her face was smooth. Her chest didn't rise.
"M… Ma…" The word seemed to stick in Stein's throat, some emotion he had suppressed for so long trying desperately to escape the cage of his mind.
"Marie!" The word ripped itself violently from Stein's throat as he stared at the body on his table. Hesitant fingers touched her skin.
It was cold.
Marie's eye was glazed over when he looked underneath her eyelid. Her soul … her soul was gone.
The scalpel clattered from his nerveless fingers as complete realization rushed over him, and Stein hit his knees, staring at the blood that covered his hands and clothing; the blood that was coating the operating table, the floor. The blood that should be circulating through Marie's body right now, not coagulating on the cold concrete and steel.
He found that he no longer wanted to fight the madness. What purpose did he have now with Marie gone?
They found him three days later. Professor Stein was sitting at his kitchen table when Spirit and Sid walked in, Marie propped up in a chair across from him. She was dressed in her normal clothing, though blood covered every visible body part.
He didn't resist when they took him, just promised that he'd be back and with her again soon.
A/N: So, I am terrible when it comes to being inspired by other author's works, and sometimes I don't even notice until after I've written mine out. Thanks, Break Hakkai Stein. You posted "Killing Marie" today. I read it, enjoyed it, and apparently it spawned this at 6am in the morning :)
I don't own Soul Eater.