It was dark in Death City, no lights illuminating the streets in the early morning hours. Even the grinning moon had sunk behind the mountains to the west, its pale light gone from the sky, leaving only the stars to shed a faint glow over the city. No one was about on the streets, and barely a sound was heard echoing through the alleyways. So it was that no one saw the man staggering over the bridge that was the main entrance to the city itself.

He might have been tall; it was hard to tell as he was hunched over slightly. He was definitely thin, the ragged remnants of his clothing hanging off him as though they had been meant for a larger man than he. His feet were bare, what shoes he might have had long gone and leaving cuts and dust in their stead. He walked with his head bowed, shoulder-length hair pitching his already-shadowed face into darkness. The sound of his footsteps, bare skin against the pavement, broke the silence of the deserted streets as he wandered, seemingly aimless, through the city.

Occasionally he would stumble into a wall and hesitate for a moment, wavering on his feet. With a sound that could have been half laugh, half sob, he pushed himself off again, continuing his tottering way through the streets. The odd laughter came again, each time he pushed himself away from a wall or a lamp-post to continue his wanderings, almost as if there was a fountain within him that bubbled up intermittently, a geyser of something he was unable to describe that would not let itself be contained.

It burst forth a final time as he found a long set of stairs leading up towards the large building at the top of the city's hill. With each step up, the sound came again, and again. The man seemed oblivious to the slightly bloody footprints he'd begun leaving somewhere in the city's alleyways, to the intermittent tears that trickled down his face, even to the weariness that was finally creeping over his limbs. He simply kept climbing, laughing to himself all the while, until his world went completely dark.

It would not be until the next morning that anyone would see the man lying prone halfway up the steps leading to Shibusen.

In his room at the Patchwork Laboratory, Stein was not having the most peaceful night of his life. Troubled by unseen thoughts, his sleep was restless and strained, with every so often the faint, hopefully-imagined creeping sounds of madness whispering at the edges of his awareness. Occasionally, too, there would be flashes of nightmares, visions of his former partner disappearing, or walking away without a sound, leaving him alone.

He jerked awake after one particularly disturbing scene and stared up at the ceiling for a moment. Pale sunlight was streaming in through a window; morning had come. Sitting up, the scientist ran a hand through his silver hair as though to brush away the night's troubled sleep. Another day with no change...it was wearing on him, though he let no one see. Only in the privacy of his lab would Stein even consider showing a hint of weakness.

He was gone. Had disappeared, months ago. The one person Stein even marginally considered himself close to. Why he had disappeared, or how, no one knew; all anyone could say was that he had last been seen leaving his favorite cabaret late one night, and had apparently never made it home. His disappearance, so sudden, had done absolutely nothing for the morale of those fighting against Arachnophobia and the resurrected kishin Ashura, and everything that could be done to find him had been done to no avail.

Stein got up and dressed, then sat down in his desk chair and pulled out a cigarette. Lighting it, he took a long drag before letting out a sigh and staring at the quickly-dissipating smoke cloud with dull eyes. He didn't want to give up, didn't want to just leave the one friend he had in the world to whatever fate had befallen him, but it was looking as though he had no choice. There hadn't been even the barest hint of a sign that they were anywhere close to on the right track.

And then he felt it.

Just the barest hint at first, a fleeting familiar sensation, a wavelength he knew almost as well as his own. It was different, somehow, altered, but it was there. Stein was on his feet and almost running out of the lab in an instant, grabbing his coat almost as an afterthought.

He was back.

Maka's night passed with little event. A dreamless sleep made it far easier than some nights had been; since the disappearance of the biggest pain in her life she'd had more than a few uneasy dreams, some bordering on nightmares. It bothered her more than a little but she said nothing about it. There was no way she was going to admit she was having nightmares over something like this, after all.

Waking up, she rose and stretched a little before taking her hair out of its night-time buns and putting it into its usual pigtails. The familiar routine eased what little anxiety she admitted she had, but her thoughts cycled right back as she headed to the kitchen. Of all the times to disappear, why had he picked now? He was always making her life harder than it had to be, and now he was doing the same thing to everyone at Shibusen...everyone in Death City, even. Hmph.

Still...just vanishing like that was hardly like him, she knew. Maka broke a few eggs into a frying pan, getting breakfast started. He had always been there, a constant presence in her life, and as much as she didn't want to admit it she kind of missed his irritating insistence on trying to get closer to her. It was oddly soothing, in its own weird way, especially now that he was gone. Sure, she often went days without speaking to him, or a couple weeks without even seeing him, but months...that was different.

She added some ham and mushrooms into the forming omelet, the movements so practiced they didn't need thought. Where had he gone? And why had he left? Why couldn't even the best efforts of Dr. Stein and Sid-sensei and the others at Shibusen even turn up a hint of where he was? Maka stared down at the cooking breakfast, allowing her worry to show through just a little. Soul and Blair would still be asleep for a few minutes, which meant she didn't have to hide just how concerned she was over his total absence.

Adding some cheese, Maka flipped the omelet over to let it finish cooking, still mulling over all her unanswered questions. Had anyone told her mother? She certainly hadn't, in her denial of any personal concern in the matter...should she, though? Would Mama want to know something like this? With the only form of communication between them being letters and postcards, though, who knew how long it would be before word actually reached her.

Maka pulled a plate down from the cupboard and slid the omelet onto it, setting it on the table, then turned to grab another few eggs from the fridge. How long would Shibusen continue the search? There had been no progress of any kind for months; all they'd managed to find were places where he wasn't. Would Shinigami-sama call off the search soon? Maka's hand tightened on the eggs for a moment. Calling off the search meant giving up, leaving him who knew where, and that bothered her more than she was willing to admit even to herself. She wanted to find him, to give him a piece of her mind for disappearing on them right when they needed everyone they had.

And then a flicker, faint but growing, nudged her awareness. She froze. That was...then he was...but it had changed, the wavelength was different somehow. Dropping the frying pan Maka raced for the door, dashing past a sleepy-looking Soul who'd poked his head out of his room at the crash.

"Maka...? What's going on?"

"He's back...!"

Stein reached the hospital to find a small crowd outside, all staring through the doors and windows. The mere fact that his senses had led him to the hospital in the first place was cause enough to make the normally stoic scientist concerned. As he began making his way through the crowd, a voice behind him caught his attention.

"Doctor!"

He glanced over his shoulder to see Maka running up, followed by her partner Soul.

"He's here, isn't he?" Maka asked, looking up at him with earnest green eyes; Stein wondered occasionally if she had any idea how often those eyes made her look like her father.

"Yes," Stein said, looking back at the hospital. The crowd was beginning to disperse, most of its members realizing they weren't going to get anything like a good look at what they wanted. Good. He started inside, Maka and Soul following. Finding the proper room was easy enough, as there was a small crowd inside as well. Stein pushed through them, breaking free of the crowd as his senses told him he'd reached his goal. Disregarding the poor nurses trying to keep the crowds out, Stein just walked through the door. And stopped dead on the other side.

He was there, all right. Unconscious and pale enough to rival Stein's pallor, lying on a bed with a pair of nurses and a doctor all tending to him. Stein's eyes slid over the form he at once knew so well and yet now barely recognized, his scientist mind noting everything in clinical, detached detail. The grey-green shirt and black slacks that had been cut open to give the doctors access had barely needed the treatment. The clothes lay on the bed now, little more than rags that would have barely covered their wearer's body. That body was thinner than Stein had ever seen it, each rib clearly defined against the skin, limbs little more than bone themselves. Crisscrossing the skin all over were dozens of wounds, some months old, some barely healed, and one or two torn open and still seeping blood. Without exception, they had all apparently been made by a sharp blade. Even his feet were injured, cut, bruised and all but caked with dried blood. How long had he been walking without shoes? An IV had already been started, dripping nutrients and hydration directly into his bloodstream, but it was obviously going to take a lot more than that to bring him back from the brink he was teetering on.

Stein looked away for a moment, the better to keep his stoic mask. Seeing his oldest, only, friend in that condition was...hard. There were feelings the scientist couldn't readily explain rising up within him. A sort of odd fear, sadness...and anger, directed towards those who had put his old partner in that condition. Stein's left hand clenched into a fist, the motion unconscious. He would find out exactly who it was, and they would regret having lifted a finger against his partner. Pale jade eyes became hard as the stone they resembled as he looked back at the unconscious man. This would not go un-avenged.

"Holy shit..." Soul's voice reminded the scientist that he wasn't exactly alone here.

"He's alive..." Maka said, her tone indicating she was saying it mostly to make herself feel better.

"He is," Stein agreed, his own voice distant. "If you two want to wait outside, I'm going to have a word with the doctor."

"What? But-" Maka began to protest, but Soul grabbed her arm.

"There's not much we can do here anyway," the young man pointed out. "And he didn't say leave, just wait outside. C'mon."

"...Kay..." Maka took one last look at the bed's occupant, then followed her partner out to the waiting room.

Stein turned back to the bed and the medical personnel around it. Quietly he approached the attending physician, his voice courteous but still with an air of command to it. "Doctor, could I speak with you a moment, in private?"

The doctor glanced up and hesitated, meeting Stein's eyes, then nodded. "...Of...of course."

Moving off to one side, Stein looked down at the doctor; most people were at least an inch or two shorter than he was, which made it rather easy for him to persuade them to see things his way. Usually he didn't actually mean to be intimidating, but he couldn't really deny that it did help. "You've taken care of the preliminary examination, I know," he began, his voice still cool and calm, "but I think I should take it from here."

The doctor blinked up at him. Stein vaguely recognized the man now they were actually talking; a decent physician, which was something, but also a man who tended to go by the book. "That's...I'm not sure that goes along with hospital protocol," he began, but fell silent as he met Stein's eyes again.

"I know more about that man medically offhand than you or your coworkers would be able to discover in a week," Stein replied, stating the simple facts of the situation, "in addition to knowing the finer details about his optimal physical state and how best to return him to it."

The doctor said nothing for a moment, glancing between Stein and the bed, then sighed. "You certainly have the credentials, if nothing else," he said, the words half-mumble. Occasionally, being intimidating really did help. "All right, I'll see to the paperwork. He's your patient."

"Thank you." Without another word, Stein turned and walked over to the bed, looking down at its occupant. Against the man's pale skin his red hair stood out even more than usual, even if the color was darker than usual. Wet...they must have cleaned him off. "Where was he found?" he asked one of the nurses who'd moved to replace the IV drip with a fresh one.

"One of the Shibusen students found him on the school steps," she replied, finishing her job briskly and moving on.

On the steps of Shibusen...Stein moved to grab the man's chart from where it lay to one side, flipping through it as a way to distract his mind from the odd emotions that continued to rise within. More anger, though directed inward this time, an odd pain to join the strange fear...not things Stein fully understood even on good days. The chart, however, was cold data, facts that he could focus on to bring the more detached, clinical side of his mind to the fore. He should focus on what he needed to know, and not the fact that it could have been him who discovered the man lying in that bed, that he could have made the discovery earlier if he'd just taken a walk during one of his periods of insomnia last night...tightening his grip on the clipboard, Stein reached up to turn his screw a few times. Focus.

"Can we come in now?" A quiet voice asked after several minutes. Stein glanced over to see Maka poking her head through the door looking at once hopeful and worried.

"Certainly." Nothing was likely to change within the next few hours, he knew, so there was no point in denying Maka the chance to sit with the patient.

She nodded and almost hesitantly made her way to the bedside. "...will he be all right?" she asked after a moment.

Stein looked at her for a moment, then down at the man in question. "Eventually, I'm sure," he said, putting brightness into his voice that he didn't really feel. Maka probably wouldn't pick up on it; he had gotten skilled at mimicking certain emotions over the years. The only one these days who could really tell...was the one in the bed. "It'll just take time, that's all."

"Right..." Maka didn't look up. It was almost a pity the man would have no idea of her worry when he woke up, Stein thought.

Soul walked up beside her, hands in his pockets, saying nothing. Stein studied the pair of them. When he'd first met them, he'd taken their measure. Maka was a serious girl who put her all into whatever she did, while Soul had a tendency to be rebellious and more than a bit cynical. The two were almost complete opposites, but they'd only become a stronger pair as time had worn on. They knew each other's moods well by now, as evidenced by Soul's silent support for his meister. Theirs was a pairing that didn't need words or gestures sometimes. Stein glanced back down at the bed and its occupant. Very like another pair he could recall, once upon a time.

"You should go on to class," he said after perhaps fifteen minutes. "I'll let you know if anything changes."

For a moment it looked as though Maka was going to argue, but she just nodded in silence. Soul put his hand on her shoulder for a moment, then turned for the door. Maka followed him in silence, taking one last look back before closing the door behind them. Stein turned back to the bed. Really, right now, there was very little for him to do. The opened injuries had been cleaned and bandaged, the patient was getting nutrients and liquids from the IV, and his body was forcing him to get some rest which meant there was no need for artificial sedation. The nurses knew their job well, which meant an actual room was likely being prepared for him now and that would get him some real privacy. There wasn't much of a reason for Stein to stay.

But he wanted to. If he left, he had nowhere to go but back to the lab regardless, where he'd likely end up mulling over the sudden reappearance and current state of his old partner. That was something he could do just as easily here, and here at least he'd be close by if something did happen. Absently, he reached for the pack of cigarettes in his coat, but caught sight of the no-smoking sign even as he began to pull them out. Oh yeah, no smoking in hospitals...he'd have to step outside for that. That was irritating.

Still, it would hopefully help to clear his mind, and currently he had nothing else that absolutely needed his attention. Heading back into the hall Stein looked for the closest door out he could find, which turned out to lead into a small courtyard. Lighting the cigarette, he took a long drag and let the smoke out slowly, leaning against the wall and staring up at the sky. The recovery period for someone in the patient's condition was long, and would likely be a hard one; there was no telling at the moment how severe the condition of his muscles were, though since he walked from who-knew-where all the way back to Shibusen they hadn't atrophied to the point of immobilization. That was good. Still, severe starvation could lead to all sorts of things that Stein didn't much want to think about even as the clinical side of his mind listed them off. Organ damage. Increased susceptibility to disease. Heart failure.

He closed his eyes. That was not something he especially wanted on his mind right now. It was bad enough seeing the condition, but at least the man was alive and had some small chance of recovering. Throw in a few complications, though...the odd fear that had been nagging at Stein since seeing his old partner heightened a bit. Those were just the complications from the most obvious problem. If even one of the myriad wounds hadn't been cleaned properly, if an infection had already started growing...what if it hit too fast to stop? With the immune system compromised, antibiotics were the only way to fight something like that, and while surely the doctor Stein had replaced had already thought of that, what if he hadn't? And could the patient's severely malnourished body withstand being pumped full of medicine right now? Weak as he was, would that do more harm than good?

You always did worry too much, you know.

The echo of a voice in Stein's mind was accompanied by the flash of a memory. Blue eyes with a hint of grey, their expression wry and resigned, in a face that had always been full of life, dark red hair falling to frame it in a fashion that was at once haphazard and groomed. That would be what he'd say right now, wouldn't it...if he weren't unconscious in a hospital bed who knew how close to death. Of course Stein was worried in a situation like this...though it was mildly relieving just to have a name to put to the combination of pain and fear he still felt. Why wouldn't he be worried now, of all times? "Idiot," he muttered, speaking aloud to the remembered voice in his mind. "You were always too carefree..."

By the time Stein had finished his cigarette, his worry hadn't abated in the slightest. Stamping it out against the wall, he let the butt fall to the ground as he headed back inside. There was activity around the room he'd left, and he increased his pace to see what was going on. Even as he reached the door, the patient was wheeled out on a bed, one orderly taking care to hold his IV up to continue the drip as another pushed the bed. Ah, so that was it.

"His room is ready, then?" Stein asked. One of the orderlies nodded. Stein walked alongside the bed as it was pushed down the hall towards the elevators, eyes mostly on the patient. Still unconscious with no apparent change in anything. That eased Stein's mind a little about the smoke break he'd taken. He hadn't missed anything. That was good.

Nothing did change until they got on the elevator and it began to rise. The subtle pressure seemed to have an effect on the patient, who stirred slightly. His head rolled, brow furrowing just enough to show, and his breathing sped just a little. Stein tensed unconsciously, watching. A nightmare? The man's face twitched, shifting from the faint nervous, almost pained, expression into an equally faint almost-smile and back again so quickly that Stein wasn't certain he hadn't just imagined it. As they neared their destination floor, however, the patient calmed down, his breathing evening out. As the elevator slowed, then stopped, the pressure's letting up brought another round of light stirring. Stein kept a close eye on him as the bed was wheeled out and down another hall, but the man showed no signs of waking. His body was apparently keeping him asleep.

Stein took a step out of the way as the bed was wheeled into an empty room, to give the orderlies room to work. He should probably just go home. Instructions to call him immediately if anything changed could easily be left, after all, he didn't have to stay there. It wasn't as though his staying was doing the patient any good. It wasn't doing the man any harm, either, though. Besides, if he stayed, then he would be on hand immediately if something changed, and Stein didn't want to waste the time it would take him even running flat out to get from his lab to the hospital in the event of an emergency call.

With a quiet sigh Stein settled into the room's only chair, leaning back and watching the man in the bed. Whether he stayed or left, he'd continue thinking about the situation, that much was true and unavoidable. He wouldn't be able to concentrate on anything he might try to do at the lab. And if he stayed here, he'd be close at hand in case of emergency. That settled it, then.

The rest of the day passed without event. A nurse looked in on the patient every so often only to be told both by the machines and Stein that nothing had changed. Maka and Soul stopped by again that evening, which gave him some quiet company for half an hour before the pair headed home; it really was a pity that the patient would never know how much Maka was worried about him. Stein paced restlessly, staving off his smoking habit as much as possible between cigarette breaks. Even though there was a balcony just down the hall available for him to use as a smoking lounge, he disliked the thought of leaving the room for more time than was absolutely necessary.

As the moon rose, Stein settled back into the chair. He was oddly tired, for a day that had involved no real activity whatsoever. Part of that could have been due to the fact that he hadn't slept well at all recently, though. He leaned back against the chair, head resting against the wall behind him and eyes trained on the unconscious figure in the bed. Such a conflict of feelings, being glad he was back and yet...sad at the same time. Sad? Was that right? Stein shrugged mentally, listening to the only sound in the room. He'd grown accustomed to it over the course of the day; the rhythmic beeping was soothing in its own way, a constant presence in the room.

Stein let his head rest against the wall behind him, eyes still on the bed. It really was a nice sound. Gradually, his eyes slid closed. The rhythm became more noticeable then, his hearing heightening as his sight was taken away. The barest hint of a smile crossed Stein's face. Perhaps tonight, at least, he could sleep a little better. Tonight, at least, I can hear your heartbeat.