World So Cold by 12 Stones
Spirit isn't sure when he started becoming used to the violence. It came over him slowly, the ebbing away of his initial repulsion, until one day a spray of Kishin blood caught him across the face as he transformed back and his only reaction was to spit the taste out of his mouth. When he came home and caught sight of himself in the bathroom mirror, his face was a gruesome mask, blood drying darker than his hair across his features, and it wasn't the sight itself that doubled him over with sudden nausea, but the calmness in the blue eyes looking back at him. For a moment, he looked more like his meister than he did like himself.
Stein finds him curled on the floor of the bathroom, face half-clean with tears and haphazard washing and hands pressed tight against his eyes. The meister sits next to him but doesn't reach out to initiate contact; he never does, not unless Spirit asks for it, and just at the moment the weapon doesn't want the comfort of touch anyway.
"I can't do this," he mumbles into his self-imposed darkness. "I can't keep doing this. It's tearing me apart, Stein, I wasn't meant for this."
"You were." The words are not comforting. There is nothing but absolute certainty in them, and reassurance is not what the weapon is looking for. He starts shaking his head as he speaks again.
"I wasn't. I can't keep doing this. Destruction isn't for me, Stein, just - it's nothing I've ever wanted."
"You're good at it." Spirit feels like he has been pinned down and carefully laid open by the honesty in those words. He knows they're true. He doesn't need the meister's explanation but it comes anyway. "You're very good. You will be the best weapon the academy has ever produced."
"But I don't want to be!" Spirit pulls his hands away and pushes himself upright so he can invade Stein's personal space, as if physical intimidation has ever had any effect at all on the younger boy. "You want to be, you want me to be, I know that, I do, and I want to be a good partner to you but I can't keep doing this and stay me."
There are volumes of subtext to his words: the memory of Stein's dark smile at the conclusion of a fight, the heat in the meister's eyes when he kills, the fact that the younger boy goes almost dormant between assignments, as if the only time he is really alive is when he's imposing destructive control over the lives of others. There's a second layer under that as well, the part that keeps Spirit here with his partner even when he knows perfectly well that "madness" is the gentlest of explanations for the younger's boy's mental state. It's part responsibility and part foolish affection and mostly an impossible attachment that Spirit couldn't break if he wanted to, but it all means that he can't leave, he can't stop his own emotional collapse, unless Stein gives him permission to go.
And he won't. Spirit sees it in his eyes, in the distance in Stein's face, in the already-made decision that finally pushes the meister to bridge the distance and rest his hand heavy on Spirit's shoulder, as if the rarity of physical contact will or could make up for the continuing, promised trauma of the future. The meister's skin is as cool as his eyes, as cool as his voice. "Stay."
It doesn't sound like a command, but it is as much an order as Spirit has ever heard. He is all out of fight - he never had much to begin with, just the last desperate struggle of a dying thing. He shuts his eyes again because he can't bear to see the cold beauty of his meister's face when he starts crying again, and his tears feel like fire on his cheeks.
