"I'm only honest when it rains. If I time it right the thunder breaks when I open my mouth. I wanna tell you but I don't know how"
1.
"Tell my mother, tell my father: I've done the best I can."
His parents adored him. Certainly, they found him strange, but he was a charming child when he behaved. Quiet. And smart as hell. Precocious, they call it, when one is very young. It's "smartass" only when they get older. And Stein was brilliant from a very young age.
Still, something must have told them he was going to be difficult. That he was different. It, of course, started when he went to school. Evidently, cutting off your classmate's pigtail down to the roots was looked down upon.
He hadn't understood. It didn't matter that he could do multiplication when everyone else struggled with simple addition. It didn't matter that he could probably learn seven alphabets at once. When his classmate, a little girl with dark brown curls, felt the weight leave her head and burst into screeching, wailing tears, Franken just couldn't get it.
"Darling, it doesn't feel good for her," his mother had explained, smoothing down Stein's silver locks. The young boy had jerked away. It was only hair.
When he pulled the tails off of squirrels, he hadn't understood his father's horror. The creature would live without it rather easily. It was an unnecessary accessory. In fact: Stein hypothesized that the animal would be faster and would survive for a longer period of time without the appendage.
Even explaining this, his father's horrified stare didn't waver.
He broke things just to see if they could come back together. His bed. The china. Multiple pairs of glasses. He was interested in the action of coming together. Destruction was easy, he had found. It was creation he truly struggled with.
His parents were worried. They lavished him with gifts and praised him highly when he did anything right. The therapist was a justified expense for them. Their child was intelligent: among one of the smartest students most of his teachers had seen. His potential was immense.
But he was bored of everything. He didn't like others.
His mother, specifically, had gotten into the infuriating habit of telling him she loved him at every moment. It was only once that he snapped at it.
"I don't get it!" he had said, frustrated.
His mother had simply blinked. Her soft white-blonde hair fell into her face when she moved to touch his shoulder and he evaded her.
"Darling-" she had started, to which he simply replied with an annoyed "No!".
Sadly, she told him "I love you, darling," and tried to wait out for his reluctant acceptance of her affection. He never said "Love you, too," to her. To anyone.
He didn't give in, either. He stayed in front of her with his fists balled and his green eyes blazing into their predecessors and waited until she cried and tried to clutch him.
He hated tears.
Destruction, hatred: those things he understood, as though instinctually.
2.
"You're looking at me like another broken glass getting closer to the edge without emotional attachment."
Shibusen had contacted his parents directly and offered for him to live in Death City in a room at the school. They were concerned, of course, but they must have realized somewhere inside of themselves that Stein was a losing case and that he wasn't responding in the way other children should. He was small, and young, and absolutely isolated from everyone else by choice.
Likely, they hoped that he would break out of his shell at that school.
And he liked Shibusen. They allowed him to check out multiple books at the library. His professors saw how talented he was and how much potential there could be and pushed him as hard as they could.
He wasn't paired up with Spirit by choice.
He had actually been trying to work out a way that he could be a meister without a weapon. He was on the cusp of it, hypothesizing that he might be able to utilize his own soul, when he got the news.
He just had to be paired with the boy who could prove his foil. Spirit was the slacker of every class he was in. The boy would come in 5 minutes late and slither over to whichever attractive girl was closest. And for some reason, they loved it. Spirit never went through the time where he found girls gross: he liked them since he could remember. He liked their hair and their eyes and how thick their eyelashes were.
And girls loved Spirit, too.
But Stein? Stein didn't love Spirit. Stein didn't even like Spirit, for Death's sake. But Shinigami-sama himself paired them together, and Stein couldn't go back on that. He was younger than the scythe and shorter, which he resented. But he was smarter and more determined.
Stein realized about a year in that Spirit was something of his babysitter. The older boy kept him out of trouble, made sure to shift Stein's violence in the direction of Kishin eggs. Spirit directed Stein to Sid and Mira and Marie, and with Marie, Azusa, and after a while, Kami as well. Spirit pushed Stein to the dances, to join clubs.
Stein hated it. And it certainly didn't help things that the two had such a large height difference in the start. Stein didn't like for anyone to have an advantage over him.
Spirit seemed to shoot up in height even when Stein was still miniscule in comparison. It was infuriating that his partner was so much larger than him. It wasn't that Stein wasn't strong since the boy trained in hand to hand combat every day, but Spirit loomed. They were opposites. It also wasn't fun when Stein wasn't the most intimidating looking meister around: small, dressed in all white and a blank stare.
And he was pale as anything. He didn't like going outside, which Spirit often made fun off. However, after a mission went particularly sour, Stein spent 6 days inside of his room, locked in and refusing to leave. Spirit slipped protein bars under the door and hoped that his partner hadn't died from dehydration.
Four days in, Spirit had knocked on his door. "Hey, man, you okay?" the boy asked, leaning his shoulder against the wall. When Stein didn't answer, the redhead knocked again. "Are you gonna go to class?"
He took the silence as a negative.
Spirit must have been chewing his lip or wringing his hands because his voice came out nervous. "Look, I get why you're upset and all, but, dude, you gotta come outta there."
Nothing.
Spirit sighed.
Stein remembered the moment for months. He remembered it longer than that, even after he hit his own growth spurt, and his bones ached with the speed of puberty. It was the only reason he dragged Spirit home when the boy got drunk after another mission went belly-up. His redheaded partner was hiccupping up a storm after having swiped some cheap whiskey from some convenience store. Stein was thankful that he was strong, and decided to pay off whatever debt he felt he had by dragging the scythe home where he could unceremoniously dump him on the couch and wash his hands of the entire ordeal.
Upon doing so, his partner hiccupped again and grasped at his Meister's sleeve. "Stein-," a hiccup, "My man. My brother."
Stein shook him off.
"Aww, don' be that way, Stein," the older boy slurred. "I-," another undignified belch, "I love ya'," he rasped out, falling back against the cushions of the couch and laughing.
And Stein said nothing as he left, back to his room, rolling his eyes.
3.
"You should have known the price of evil. And it hurts to know that you belong here. Oh, it's your fucking nightmare."
Stein thought Medusa was pretty. He supposed he liked blondes. He had found Kami pretty as well and was strangely pleased that her daughter took after her as opposed to Spirit. That could also be because he didn't really like Spirit, but the point still stood.
In any case, the woman was beautiful and there wasn't much to counteract that. She was slender but ample, with amber eyes and a cute pink flush when she got flustered.
Stein wasn't a people person by any stretch, but he did want to get closer to her. He could acknowledge that. He liked that she was a scientist, a doctor, like him. That she was tender and sweet as a nurse. He had his suspicions about her being a witch, but he genuinely didn't want to believe them.
That was why, facing her, he felt something sick in his stomach, especially after she drilled a hole in it. A witch. He didn't think it would be so bitter.
When he called her a liar, there was something stinging in his voice. And when she told him, so plainly, that she meant everything when they were dancing: that one stung, too. Stein wasn't confused, but he was upset at himself. Spirit was the one who indulged in lust: not him. Stein was a curious man by nature, but he hadn't ever been a man who chased after someone else.
He knew the human body. He'd had sex before. One person wasn't different from another. And it was just a kiss, damnit, but he had wanted it. Wanted her.
It was like she was closer to the skin. Not yet under it, but closer. He was thinking about could have beens and maybes when he should have been focusing on defeating her.
Even after he did, slicing her in two, he couldn't help the pang.
"I love you, you know," she said, and he knew it was a lie.
He realized then that they were the same person and, before, he had liked her because he thought she was different from him. The sadistic, cruel faced woman in front of him wasn't who he had wanted to kiss. She was too much like him with that face.
"You couldn't possibly understand a thing like love," he informed, easily. Because he didn't.
He knew anything they felt for one another was baseless, rootless. She was a liar from the start and he had wanted a woman who didn't really exist: Medusa the Nurse wasn't Medusa the Witch.
He couldn't pretend it didn't ache, though.
4.
"Be my friend: hold me, wrap me up, unfold me. I am small and needy. Warm me up
and breathe me."
Marie didn't do well with words. The woman was soft and sweet but she was a hammer by nature: she knew destruction first in her very soul. And she worked in macro movements, in large scales. So she worked with actions.
He couldn't remember how she had carried him out of the vortex in Alaska, but he knew that she did. When she brought the couch in, she mentioned that he must have back problems from sleeping on his desk in his chair. She let it slip that she wanted to get him a laptop.
She cooked for him even when he didn't want to eat. And if he didn't want to go to the living room, she would bring in two plates to wherever he was and set one to the side while she ate in the room with him. Most of the time, if only out of obligation, he would sigh and eat the food, indulging her.
Marie chided him about smoking but if she stumbled across the shop he bought them from, always on accident because her sense of direction was nonexistent, she would pick up a pack or pay for another order for him. Stein was ever smoking, so he always had need for his cigarettes, and every time she did so, it made him far more personable for the rest of the day. He was surprised that the shopkeeper knew her by name.
Marie left blankets on his shoulders when he didn't fall asleep on a bed, which was often. And he knew she must have woken up sometime in the middle of the night to do so, since he usually didn't fall asleep until late anyway.
Marie went with him even though he could have been a murderer. Probably was the murderer. Had every shred of evidence to prove that he was. Yet she had clung to him, as though he were her only buoy, and sobbed into his chest despite the overwhelming evidence that he could have been the person at fault for every horror she was experiencing at the moment.
But Marie was ready to forgive him even before he could think of saying "Sorry". He wondered, sometimes, what she would do if he really was the one who killed BJ: if he was the murderer all along, instead of Justin. How would she have felt? Would she still have put her hand on his back and pushed him onward, told him to shower, brushed his hair out of his face? Would she have sobbed into his chest, still, packed extra cigarettes for him in her pockets? He didn't want to think about shaking her faith. The thought process always ended with him feeling thankful that he hadn't betrayed her trust, even when he didn't ask for it.
Hers was the name in his mouth when things went sour, when they went well. He didn't remember when he got into the habit, but even when he saw her again, all those years after high school, even standing next to Azusa, it was "Marie" that lined through his vocal chords, shook them.
Hers was the name in his mouth when he slipped inside of her and it felt like he was meant to be there. He slotted into her like they were a Greek myth, created to be connected.
And he just didn't get it. He knew sex. Sex was human, it was primal, it was formulaic: but it was different with Marie, somehow. And that just didn't make sense. It was the same with everyone, wasn't it? The same parts, the same motions?
But it wasn't, and Marie held him, arms around his neck as he moved into her and she whispered in his ear meaningless, stupid, perfect things. And she tossed her head side to side and exposed her throat so willingly as though he weren't a madman and looked him in the eyes when she told him he was amazing, that what he was doing was perfect. Because Marie curved her palms over his cheek and the back of his neck and just filtered her wavelength into him until he felt like he was at peace, finally.
Because when she shattered around him, drenched and shaking and unable to help what she was saying, she was chanting "Franken," and "Please!" and "Yes," in between whimpers.
He had splayed his hand against her lower back to bring them even closer, but she was already under his skin. She was glowing, radiating underneath him.
"Oh, I love you, I love you! Don't stop."
All he said was "Yes," to it all. Yes to Marie where there had only been no to everyone else.
Afterward, she was bare next to him with her hand on his chest and her cheek against his arm. His free hand had brought a cigarette to his mouth and he was exhaling the smoke away from her, a consideration he didn't grant anyone else.
She had put on his glasses, giggling as she reached up to play with his hair, which was getting shaggy. Her delicate wrist brushed against the stubble on his jaw before she pushed her face closer to his neck to nuzzle at him.
And he let the cigarette dangle in his mouth, careful to keep it tilted away from her, so he could shift to his side and bring his hand to the curve of her ribs, counting each bump. Behind that cage, he could envision her heart beating.
Okay: so I'm a sap, I'm sorry.