She breaks like dawn.
She is warm and pink and golden with her hair in high pigtails to match her partner, and she's grinning, practically bouncing next to her Meister. Kami isn't the most sociable of people, but she's nice enough, and they make a good team. Marie was lucky in finding her, considering that she'd soul rejected all the Meisters at orientation, until Kami stepped forward to successfully pick her up.
(Some wouldn't even try, and that was probably the worst of it. "Unwieldy", was what they said, "too much trouble", and she felt heavy when they did. Her mother's voice would ring out, that she was a Mjolnir, only those with worth could ever pick her up. But everyone was worth something, weren't they? Perhaps it wasn't them that was the problem.)
Kami was a good partner, strong. She made Marie feel like she was all steel wire and lightning. They'd just finished their mission and had defeated another kishin egg, walking in silence to go meet with Lord Death again. She'd been staring at the path, trying to memorise it for later when she spotted the boy through the trees, all alone. Her Meister was tall, so much taller than her, which Marie was both awed and annoyed by, and so she had to peek around Kami in order to properly see him.
Curious.
When his eyes met hers, she only blinked, grinning a little wider and waving behind Kami's back. And the boy, he looked like a strange one. What was in front of him was obscured by the forest and rocks and dirt, but he looked uninterested to whatever it was. Or, maybe, he was just uninterested in general: she'd seen him before, walking to his higher level classes with that redheaded flirt who wouldn't leave Kami alone. Personally, Marie didn't understand why her partner was so opposed to his affections: everyone could spot her blush even from four miles away.
Regardless, the pale kid seemed to almost. . .stare through her, with those eyes she'd never gotten close enough to pinpoint the colour of. And it didn't help that he peered at people through his long bangs. If she were closer to him, she'd see the barest furrow of his greaying brows, but she wasn't. She was walking with her capable Meister, walking to Lord Death to report about their most recent Kishin Egg collection. She nearly tripped over something, too occupied with looking at him, and Kami made a joke about how clumsy she was and that they had to hurry up.
So Marie gave him an apologetic look before she faced forward, keeping up with Kami's long, muscled legs.
She breaks like a rule.
It hurts. Of course it hurts. Because this was Kami and Marie thought they were friends, and, she supposes, Kami thought they were friends, too. Her now former meister just looked so sad when she said 'He needs me', and Marie was too much of a hopeless romantic to hold a grudge against a woman who wanted to be with her boyfriend in his time of need.
That didn't change the ache. That didn't change the fact that she was now a Meisterless weapon and she didn't know how to wield herself, and she didn't think she'd ever know how to. She was a hammer, a Mjolnir. All her techniques required a partner, and she was a girl who strived in group work. How was she going to become a Death Scythe on her own?
She didn't know what was going to happen. Spirit had to move out of his previous arrangement because his old partner was still there, but he couldn't move into Kami's.
Not while Marie was still there.
The problem is solved in one fell swoop.
Lord Death's reasoning is sound. Stein, the boy's name, it seemed, couldn't be trusted on his own. He wasn't one who looked for connection, but he needed it. At least, that's what her principal told her. Lord Death was clear when he informed her that Stein didn't need a weapon. She would never be a true necessity because the boy learned to use his own soul to fight, but that she would be needed in other ways. In care. In friendship. She didn't have to say yes, Lord Death stressed that.
But she did. She accepted even if the counterargument was that he was a menace. That he broke his partner, cracked him open at night and dug around his insides, experimented on him. What was to say he wouldn't do the same to her?
But she thinks that everyone deserves a chance. That he never seemed cruel in her eyes before, all those times she'd spotted glimpses of him. Lord Death told her that Stein would be able to wield her, that he could wield anyone, so she wouldn't have to worry about Soul Rejection, and she thinks that a boy who could wield anyone has to be good, somewhere.
She didn't trust him, then. She couldn't. She didn't know him, but when she met him after he agreed to be her Meister, she looked into his eyes for the first time up close and sees that they are olive. She smiles and he doesn't but it feels comfortable.
He doesn't seem unstable. Not around her. He just strikes her as. . .lonely.
It is never spoken aloud that she is supposed to keep her door locked at night. Neither of them ever say that she isn't to step foot into his room or that they are partners by convenience alone, that neither of them would have this as their first choice.
He is clinical. Their relationship works at first because it is professional and they are partners by order. Not acquaintances. Not friends. But their resonance rate is high and they are compatible. When he holds her, she feels like a streak of lightning and heat and she cannot help but open herself to him, her soul cracking to his, welcoming and willing. She does not have to with the boy who can wield any weapon, but she finds that after she does, he fits within her soul like the twined fingers of held hands.
They are too good a team. It is hard to remain distant after that, even a little bit.
So she takes her door off the hinges and looks him in the eyes when she tells him she trusts him. He paints arrows on the floors after all the times she'd mistakenly walked into his room and it takes him hours of his precious time, and he grumbles, but he does not stop until she has a path to every corner of their home. She studies with him in their living room; he bandages her wounds with a touch no one would ever believe was caring; she supports him against her when they stumble home after a battle, tired and successful; he makes her tea when she gets sick and she does the same.
They take care of each other. That was the deal between them.
She comes to realize that she's grown too attached. He was nothing like what they said he would be and if she hears the word "freak" whispered around them again, she will get another detention for punching students through the wall. She thinks she would call them friends, as everyone does, but the title pangs.
She wants to shutter his sadness away in her chest as her second heartbeat.
When others look at her, look at them, the unspoken is so thick in the air she can taste it.
Getting close to Franken Stein was frowned upon, especially after what happened with Spirit. It was a poor idea.
But she only clenches her fist when all her hand wants is to be wrapped in his.
She breaks
She wakes in the hospital room with the IV line snagged and her Meister sleeping next to her, though, not in her bed. He is straddling a desk chair, looking as he always did when she'd go to wake him in the morning after he spent too long on his experiments, the night before.
For a short moment, she does not remember and does not feel. Then, as sharp and sudden as a puncture wound, the ache radiates throughout all of her. Her head feels gooey, her body tired and sore, and she makes a soft noise in the back of her throat, but she finds that it comes out barely as a sound at all: not even enough to wake Stein.
Then she remembers.
Or, at least, some of it.
She remembers the witch, remembers the fight, remembers Stein's charged wavelength, his hand coming out to electrocute the witch while he used Marie to block the attack she was slamming down into them. She remembers the agony, the screech she let out when the witch's spell hit, remembers being thrown from his hands and onto the floor and the brickwork.
She remembers him screaming her name, his attack missing as he had to dodge and she was his weapon, damnit, she had to get up, had to find it in her. She'd been nothing but a streak of lightning, slamming her fist into the ground until everything shook. Stein stumbled in front of her as she made the very earth quake, the air charged with the static she was giving off.
But her weapon form failed her: her blood refused to transform. When she ran forward, throwing her arm out, she was relying on nothing but pure strength, her body fleshy and tender.
It was the second collision she couldn't recall: there was the connection of her flesh against the flesh of the witch, the feeling of a sternum shattering under her palm, and then only blackness. If she thinks hard enough through the pain of her headache, she can almost recall a hand reaching to hold her jaw and a warm, wet feeling trailing down her cheek.
When she brings her palms back to her face, her fingertips catch the bandage.
Oh.
She swallows heavily. She knows it, deep inside of her. The tears stream down her face but the bandages over her left eye remained dry and scratchy, the blood having already clotted. There is only wetness on her right, and she goes to wipe away the watery mess. Her left eye stings with a phantom pain and she can only breathe heavily through her nose, looking down at herself and cataloguing what of her is left, what of her is bruised, what she still is. Alive.
Still alive.
Still alive and successful because her Meister is next to her, not yet disturbed by her choked down sniffles. She has done her job as a weapon, done it well, done it like her teachers always praised her for. She always knew that the line of work she was choosing was going to be dangerous. Missing limbs, appendages, eyes: these were sacrifices she'd agreed to at the age of twelve. She was sixteen, with her seventeen year old Meister asleep beside her, unknowing that she knew she was unable to ever see out of her left eye again.
It wasn't either of their faults. She knows that. But it hurts. It stings. It is a deep ache inside of her, this piece of her that will never be a piece of her anymore.
It was expected of her. For the good of her Lord. For the good of the World. For the good of her partner. For the good of the children that greet her when she walks by, who tell her 'Thank you!'.
She cries for what feels like hours, mourning. She is allowed to mourn. She refuses to take that away from herself, that right. The nurses are silent as a tombstone when they step in to check on her.
DWMA shouldn't be in a regular hospital. She supposes the worst of it is over, then. She must be recovering.
He does not wake to her sobbing. She does not sob. Her shoulders heave, chest lurching, body shaking, but she does not sob. And every time those nurses come in, she turns her face so the left side greets them, so they cannot know.
She doesn't want to deal with them. She thinks she can't.
It is only when she twists, reaching for her sheets to clean her face that she lets out a pained gasp, her side protesting furiously, and her hand whips back and smacks, hard and loud, against the bedside table.
Lord, her Meister lurches from his chair immediately, his eyes wild, hair long over his face, before he notices that there is no attacker. There is only Marie, and he simply remains still, silent, before he slowly gets up, his fingers reaching for her IV line to adjust it so that it was no longer snagged. And with an excuse to look elsewhere, she noticed how he refused to glance at her face.
He'd opened up corpses before, animal and otherwise, but meeting her gaze was something he couldn't seem to muster the courage for. There is an angry spark inside of her at that. A misplaced fury.
But she knows that isn't why he couldn't look at her. His hands were shaking, the muscles of his arms taut.
Death, he always hated seeing her upset, seeing her hurt. He didn't look like he'd even left her hospital room for weeks. The anger smoothed over, the static in the air calming.
"Franken. . ."
Even at her calling, he keeps his head down, making it seem as though he were busy looking over the work of a doctor's hand, a medic's hand that was not his own. Her brows furrow but the dull ache from the left side of her face makes her stop.
"Franken," she says again, and he must feel her unstable soul falter more because his hands still and settle on the sheets.
It takes him a moment before his eyes meet her and she flinches at how hollow he looks.
But she must appear equally as drained.
From her peripheral, limited, she can see cards and flowers, teddy-bears, which is such stark antithesis to the lab, to home.
She wants to go home.
She doesn't want to be there, doesn't want to have lost her eye, doesn't want to be in a hospital room, and against her will, the tears start coming down her face once more. With a hesitation that she knew down in the very fibers of her soul, he reaches out, so tentatively, to soothe over her hair, his calloused fingertips brushing her ear.
She knows he believed that he didn't know how to touch anything that wasn't already dead. She knows he is barely whispering his palm over her, so unused to comforting anyone. But it helps, which is why he does it.
His affection wasn't foreign, not entirely, but it felt stilted. His soul reaching for her own, though, that was smooth and practiced. In their resonance, she can feel what he will not say, and his wavelength tilts, morphing, until the resonance is stronger on his side and he envelops her soul, curling around it as though protection. With that, his hand roves down until his fingers hitch over her bandages, and she nods, barely a motion at all, to let him know that he can grasp them, and they fall away after the fact. When she peeks down to where they pooled beside her, she notes the ugly splotches of rust, dried blood caked so deep in the cloth, nothing would ever be able to wash it out.
Stein stares at her face for a few long moment before he stands and for a measly moment, she reaches for him, irrationally afraid that he was going to turn his back and never return. But he only flares his soul and it warms her, toes to scalp, everything inside of her meshing and even. She lets her arms settle back on the bed while he gathers up some materials, and when he comes back to her, he hovers over the bed instead of sits on it.
A washcloth, smooth, that he must have ran under water, because when he dabs at her face, at her eye that is not an eye anymore, avoiding the actual wound, it feels wet.
"Stein?"
There is no answer, only that gentle tending-to that no one but she would ever believe he was capable of. But she wants to know what happened more than anything else. She wants to know. She opens her mouth to demand his attention once more, but he must have felt satisfied with his cleaning, because he dropped the cloth off to the side and brought his fingers to her face, soul warming in apology.
The pain is dull, throbbing, instantaneous. She gasps when he pulls her eyelid open: his thumb on her cheekbone, index finger beneath her brow.
She squishes her other eye closed, her right, and she is absolutely sightless. It burns. But he stares at her, coaxing their souls and adjusting his wavelength so he can remain in resonance with the jittery jumpiness of her own, and when she finally opens her eye once more, the back of his free hand wipes the tear away with a tenderness that was near-overwhelming.
"It's gone?" she whispers, and he nods, expression unreadable. She takes in a deep breath through her nose. "The witch?"
It couldn't have been for nothing. She thinks that would destroy her, if it was. She thinks it would be the end of everything: Stein looked to be unharmed, his movements still as fluid as before, nothing indicating pain or discomfort. She did her job then, it seemed, but she wanted to be sure.
At her question, the miniscule creases of concern on his face smooth over, just the tiniest bit. He reaches to the side, where she cannot see anymore, which pangs so painfully, and she hears a faint clinking to the side as he reaches for the table.
The soul he holds up to her good eye is mottled and purple and massive. The prize. She has collected her 99 souls prior: this was it. Since she was a pre-teen, that soul was why she did what she did, and she dropped her mouth open.
"Did you. . .?" she asked, unable to finish. But when she looked at him, he shook his head in the negative.
Then she. . .?
Her meister. Death, the spark of pride on his face would be noticeable to anyone. And it swelled beneath her sternum: her feelings flayed open, raw and charged. The tears welled up again, sliding down her face.
"Franken. . ."
He kept locked on her, not breaking their gaze or connection, even as she shuddered. When he held the soul out closer to her, it looked every bit the offering it was, a sacrifice that would make her one of the few Death Scythe's in existence.
But her stomach churned, she felt sick, her throat tight. After 99 souls, one would think she'd be used to the texture, but it always made her feel ill. And Stein looked at her, his head tilted curiously before he leaned forward, staring into what must have been her empty socket.
She knows what he is thinking before he is even thinking it, and it scares her, but his curious nature was thrumming and alive against her soul.
The nod is even tinier than the last, but it is a nod, nonetheless.
Slowly, with the precision and tact of someone suited for something other than righteous murder, he leaned over her, opening her eyelids even more.
If it were to be anyone, at least it was him: she trusted him with her everything.
And when he brought the soul to what must have been her empty socket, to where her eye once was and never would be again, to where she gaped, it was strange, but not unpleasant, the way the soul slid. Stein's face when he looked at her, watching the transaction as though enthralled, made something in her clench. She thinks she's never felt more stripped than then, when she brought the soul inside of herself and he coaxed her wavelength to flare open.
When she consumed it, electricity yawned in her body, brought each nerve alive and on edge. It wasn't pain, not really. It was. . .indescribable. She sucked in a breath, hissing, immediately reacting to how the witch's soul was changing the very fabric of her being. It felt like her skin wasn't her own, and she realized, when Stein's free hand came to her shoulder, that she was squirming. She met his gaze and didn't break it, locked, watching the strain on his face develop with the effort it took to keep them matched.
Her wavelength churned gold, her whole body glowing with her healing ability, and the colour came onto her Meister, creeping up his arms from where he held her until it slid beneath his shirt.
Perhaps there would be pain, were there not so much morphine in her, were she not in possession of a soothing wavelength. Perhaps there would be pain if she had to go through the change alone.
But she was shaking, so hard she wondered if her bones would knock together, shuddering in Stein's grasp. He let go of her face, but his hand stayed on her shoulder, thumb awkwardly rubbing on what skin she had exposed through the hospital gown. He absentmindedly wiped the sweat from his forehead away with the back of his wrist, an awed expression on his face. Marie saw the fresh blood on his fingers, her own, she thinks.
She. . .she does not feel strong, does not feel like her teachers told her she would. Instead, Marie feels nauseous and boneless. Her stomach doesn't want to come inside out, like every other time she consumed souls, but there is no peace. She is still sad. She still aches with her loss, and though Stein is there, who knew how to comfort a grand-total of no one, but was making the effort for her, it couldn't change the fact that she felt shattered. Sensing it, he curls over her as though to eclipse her from the rest of the world, from the cruelty it brought, and swipes away at the wetness on her face, but she doesn't know if what he is wiping away is a teardrop or her blood.
She is sixteen.
She is a Death Scythe.
Her heart is a hammer in her chest.
She breaks like a word
She misses everything. In Oceania, there is no Deathbucks and no Kami to talk about boys with and no Azusa to buy her maps as gag gifts. Marie gets lost at the airport, unable to locate the woman who would be her new Meister standing with a cardboard sign that misspells her name "Molner" in bold, black, magic marker. She wanders for two hours until she gives up and finds her way to a bathroom where she promptly uses the mirror to ask Lord Death what to do.
Her new apartment is clean and beautiful, she gets an office and more paperwork than she knows what to do with. What she is meant to call home is the bland colour of an eggshell and she finds that she wants gray back so badly, silver and chrome with quick flits of plush throw-blankets and flowers. When she brings in the daisies, they stand on her windowsill and she finds that without the haphazard gloom of a home she'd had to leave behind, they look too stark and plain.
She feels lonely. Her Meister, Merindah, is all business: a transaction of friendship and nothing more and Marie tries to come in closer to her soul, but though they are compatible, there is a hole somewhere inside of her that Merindah is unwilling to prod at.
Marie needs someone there for her, and she finds herself waiting for fingers between her own, only to be disappointed.
Boyfriend one in Oceania is taller than she is, which is neither difficult nor rare. He is sharp-eyed and white-toothed and he laughs at her jokes, of which there are many. He tells her she has beautiful hair, when she keeps it up, he tells her white is a nice colour on her, he makes her feel worthy.
The bill for throwing him through the restaurant wall eats six month's worth of her paychecks, after he tells her that her thighs are too big and he's been seeing someone else. The hospital bills, though, are excused under Death's command after a teary conference. She is seventeen and she misses home, and she misses him, and she calls twelve times in one night only to get his dial tone, still set to "we can't come to the phone".
Boyfriend two tells her she cries too much, too often, too hard, too wetly and openly. She stops letting tears flow free around him and starts sending Azusa emails, because their time difference is a massive gap in her so wide, she feels isolated from anything other than space. The replies are slow, but calculated. Azusa knows her better than she knows herself, sometimes. Reaching her when she is still in Death City and Marie is in Australia, it is an impossible task. She asks how everyone is but Azusa always seems to gloss over the details.
Boyfriend two lasts five weeks. He mentions that he doesn't like to be tied down. He mentions that she would be gorgeous if she just lost a few pounds. She goes on mission after mission to be away from him, takes in Kishin souls and watches them pad her thighs. With him, it is only a single text-message that reads "I'm done" and she deletes each voice-mail he leaves asking her to take him back.
The third shows some sort of promise: he touches her like she is precious, cradles her face as though he is sculpting her skin. He keeps the lights off when she bares herself to him, he finds it hard to smile. His weapon form is smooth, precise: a stiletto dagger that his Meister uses to stab down and down until their enemy is nothing but a gash. She has only one good eye but she sees the way they work together. She smiles when she tells him goodbye and slaps her cheeks to stifle the crying.
Her first girlfriend doesn't last long: she is sweet and gentle, but she can feel how hesitant Marie is. Her palms don't feel like her own, her skin not fitting to her muscles like they should. When they kiss, it is a brush of lips and then a sweetness she could only have imagined in a movie. Of her, Marie can remember Belinda, a kiss on her knuckles, an "it's okay".
The others aren't worth mentioning. They are crass, sometimes, and kind, other times. One takes her to the movies every week, the other, not even once. One made her never want to wear a short skirt again and another showed her how to cook... well, properly enough. No one stays for very long: she is always too needy for affection, as they say, or waiting for something to happen. She will not change herself, does not compromise on her idea of what happy endings mean to her; she cannot find it in her ribcage to reconstruct that which she does not find broken.
She has lost count of the failed relationships she goes through, the people who do not want friendships afterward, until she meets Joe, who is both nothing she is used to and yet, everything. He feels familiar in no way but the one that counts: she can talk to him. He indulges her silliness, her clumsy hands: he does not push about the eyepatch she is unwilling to flip up and reveal the depressed eyelid beneath to anyone but the one who made her a Death Scythe.
Joe is her third Meister in Oceania, coming after the two who refuse to dig into her soul, the two who can resonate with her but cannot know her. Joe makes her feel like a bolt of pure energy.
He makes her feel like before, when she was powerful, when she was known, when someone bothered to know her. He doesn't use her to block but when he swings her down to the ground, down into the face of a Kishin Egg, into buildings, she is so full of voltage, she feels dangerous: a real live-wire.
It feels frazzled, sometimes. Sometimes, they are nothing but teeth on edge and static, things she does not want. She wants for them to eat breakfast together in the mornings, for them to share coffee, something he is so passionate about, over the crappy, scratched up table she bought at a yard sale.
But he makes her feel human.
He reminds her of belonging.
He reminds her of before.
She breaks like a vow.
She is in Oceania for too long when she finds out. She's been away from Kami, away from Death City, for years when the news comes in the form of a creased letter, crisp, with sloppy handwriting. It comes in "I'm leaving". It comes in "It's too fresh". It comes in "I have to get away". The news comes from Kami, from halfway around the world back in Death City where Marie thought things were sacred. Where she left behind so much that she once loved, and some that she still does.
She could hardly believe it. Spirit was stupid sometimes, yes, but he loved Kami. He adored her. She was his partner, his friend, his wife, the mother of his child, what brought him stability. He'd openly wept at their wedding, an affair in which Marie was only one of many bridesmaids, only ever a bridesmaid. Marie had only been 14 at the time, three years younger than Kami, four younger than Spirit. She was only 14 and she heard them say "Till death" and she'd watched them kiss, watched Spirit grin so happily, watched him set a hand on Kami's already bloated belly. She'd believed them.
So what they were young? They'd married right after graduating but Spirit was a Death Scythe, Marie would become one in only a few more years. And their wedding was something from a book: she'd gushed about it to Stein, who'd been banned, for days. Even after moving to Oceania, she got pictures from Kami. Their daughter was the most genuine treasure Marie ever saw.
So leaving.
Leaving.
She wanted to punch Spirit's entire face in, but she was so shocked. The note was terse, saying that the divorce was finalized. Saying that it hurt. That Kami knew some of those other woman and how could she look them in the eye, now?
Marie's fingers crinkled the paper: her ringless, calloused fingers.
All these years she'd been with Joe and no marriage.
She'd believed them. She had stars in her eyes about happy endings and retiring like Kami did to raise a sweet little girl. She'd envied so deeply, been happy for them even more so.
It was a bitter pill.
She breaks like a heart.
Not much time after Kami's happy ending falls through, somewhere in New Zealand, that's where Joe cuts it off with her. He isn't her Meister. He hadn't been her Meister since their fourth or so mission, after he ruined his ankle fighting the Shark Witch, and he'd been moved to a less active department. It didn't matter much. She preferred it that way, if she were being honest, because she hated fighting. The feeling of being smashed into something... well, it was exhilarating, of course, but it hurt. It sent shudders of violence sweeping in her very marrow, it tore at her soul. And her Meister, of course, had to share that with her.
No, better she was with a man who fixed instead of flayed. A man who repaired ruins.
But he could still ruin, couldn't he? Could still destroy, leaving her standing in the restaurant after he told her that he couldn't do it anymore. Couldn't be with her anymore. And when she asked him why, he said that he just couldn't: that she should find someone else. That he wanted to end things on good terms with her.
Good terms.
Yeah. Of course. That's why he didn't call and didn't send letters afterward. That was why she wept on the phone with Azusa, the other woman uncomfortably delicate in her replies. That's why he never bothered to check in. That was why she spent all her free time from her duties on her couch, staring at her television with a box of tissues in her lap.
Were those good terms? She doesn't know. He wouldn't be the first person she'd treasured the company of who left her without a true goodbye.
She hates New Zealand.
She hates restaurants and Sixteen Candles and every movie that ends in a happily ever after.
She doesn't hate Joe.
But when she's off on another mission and her new Meister, a dark haired woman with calculating eyes and strong arms, slams her weapon form into the ground during a fight, she demolishes everything into a crater of dust and rubble.
And it feels good.
