"The more steps we take forward, the longer we see the path is ahead."
(Shou Tucker)
He had learned to identify the sweet-sick scent of rot by the taste in the air, intense and thick as though coagulating from being confined in the closed walls of his lab. There was only a door and it was ever-locked, never allowing light or fresh air, seeming to cook the decay.
There are twenty thousand diseases that can ravage the human body, so much that can go wrong, and he watches as the failures of his cheap attempt come to light in his musty, putrid, disgusting lab. As Stein peers into the transmutation circle, at the bundle of material he has made, he catalogues every inch that is oozing, liquefaction turning tissue to pus, sluicing his floor in creamy yellow. It is better than the caseation, only seen due to the collapse of the fascial plane, leaking acid from the peritoneum that mixes with what could be considering perfectly fine tissue, dissolving it on contact. The hypoxic ischemia has ravaged the slab in the circle, rendered it a useless, limbless mass.
When he squints, he notes the saponification, where he had mixed the hydrogen and sodium incorrectly, turning lipids to soap. The collagen drips away in thick, organic sludge, gelatinous and pink.
A failure. Always a failure. Doomed from the first banging of his heart on his sternum. It is clear it is a body made from pocket change, made by a scientist wracked by grief so strong, he cannot go through the five grotesque stages to arrive at acceptance. He does not bargain, he does not deny. He has Marie's soul and he makes her body after body that falls apart and is undeserving of her.
He makes.
Bio-alchemy, he had been warned, would swallow him, take him down the gullet and house him in the belly of a beast he was unprepared for. But he knew beasts, had made chimeras and bio-bombs, had recreated limbs, had studied how to turn the iron of blood into the iron of the muzzle of a gun.
Perhaps he should have been muzzled. Perhaps he should have paid more attention to the muzzle of the monsters he made.
Sewing Life Alchemist. Frankenstein. What a joke. He could bring nothing back to life, not to true life, as evident by the bleeding mass before him, ravaged by osteonecrosis, turned gummatous and rotting.
Sid had been a parlor trick in comparison. He never had to find the enzymes of Sid's DNA helix. He never had to hunch over the hunks of what was left of Sid, looking for the pattern of DNA in whatever piece he could scrape the rot from.
The human body had one hundred trillion cells, three hundred million of which died every minute, were replaced. One hundred trillion cells with six feet of DNA in each. Six hundred trillion feet of DNA. One hundred billion miles. And he had to wind through the spiral, climb that genetic staircase until he got to the top, learn it, remake it, throw the doors of bio-alchemy, of life, open.
He could only create what he understood, and he read book after book, anatomy lessons already deeply etched into his brain. Brains not too unlike those splashed on the transmutation circle, though those were a sad shade of gray.
Sixty thousand miles of blood vessels, one hundred billion neurons, thirty thousand miles of nerves. All reworked and remade and made again in his mind, in the infinite circle. No wonder he had went wrong, somewhere. It didn't even look right, let alone function.
The form in front of him is not fit to be called a body, more of the inside was outside, and it had all fallen to ruin, practically coming apart, cartilage running like porridge.
What was a body, in the end, but a sack of water with chemicals thrown in? It was the organization that mattered and he had been chaotic from the start. He watched as it, the sack, the not-body ruptured, cleaned the alchemic symbols off his floors with the runoff.
There were so many different kinds of necrosis, twenty thousand diseases. How many had he accidentally forged? How many had he evoked, mutated in the genome?
He memorizes the scent of rot, sticky and too-sweet, clinging to him like a lover's touch.
"You plead for it to stop. You promise to behave. You are on your knees before it, and it laughs."
~Marya Hornbacher
She had come back to him in a coffin, though all that was left was enough to fit in an urn. They could only be certain it was her from the DNA testing, the samples, the hair.
He didn't vomit, he remembers that much. He had seen war, he had seen bodies flayed open, animals sent out into war fields with his own bio-bombs pumping through their veins, obliterating everything in their path.
He did not mourn, instead, looking over the facts: she was dead, his wife. Marie. His Marie.
His Marie was dead.
And yet, he still woke every day expecting her to be next to him. Or expecting for a phone call from her.
"The mission's going okay."
"I'm fine."
"The food's terrible."
"I miss you."
It did not come.
And slowly, as sure as a drip of saline into an IV, he understood that all that was left of her was that ruinous chunk in a coffin. Not enough, never enough.
He sobs but it comes out as barely a sob at all, barely sound. His throat is closing up, trachea failing him. He is in despair the likes of which could flay him down to the bones, to the enamel of his teeth that he bares as though he is feral. The world dissolves into a disarray where all unravels. Enough is not real. Nothing is real. It all spirals away from him as he falls, is ever falling.
Until, one day, he is not.
One day, enough came. The answer. Knocking on his door as surely as the icy hand of Death itself. Her soul in a crystal casket, warm and familiar. His only gift for serving the DWMA for so many years, for being their resident mad scientist, for giving them their edge.
No, he realizes. Not a gift. A bargain. A playing chip. Give a dog a bone and watch him gnaw. But he does not care. There, in that glass house, is Marie, his Marie, the Pulverizer, able to snap her hands and send lightning charring the floor in a skid mark of fury, electricity sparking from her very soul.
And, holding it, the soldiers looking uncomfortable to his delicate state, he can understand what he must do.
He knew.
There was not much he truly knew, anymore. But the answers yawned in him, as sure and imprinted as a cauterized wound. As scar tissue.
"What is man but a wholesome beast?"
~Fernando Pessoa
He had turned his lab into a tomb of bodies just as he had made his room, their room, a museum, untouched and sacred. There was so little left in the home that was sacred. But the space where she currently rests without rest is kept as clean as her soul.
Her soul.
He had trapped her. Turned his lab, their home, into her prison, his prison. Nothing but her soul left to remind him of what he was doing, what the end goal was. And yet, with just her soul kept in the room and her half-eviscerated body scraped clean for DNA he could study, he felt haunted.
She was a ghost of the lab and he was, as always, chasing after her, fingers half opened to grasp the back of her shirt or her hands, to twine them together again. He was a desperate man, a husband who had lost her, a husband who refused to let her rest.
He could resonate with her. Maybe it would be enough, to hear her, to speak with her.
But never to have her. Not again.
Marie.
He was depraved, a man swallowing sins and accepting them, forging a path that was once closed to him, closed to his oaths, Hippocratic and Alchemist, both.
Attempt seven, the body in front of him was not her own, could never be her own. It was barely a body. The frustration framed him, made him anew, from the ashes of who he once was. The wedding ring round his finger was the only groundwork, solidity in the midst of a corpse half liquefied in its putrefaction.
It was not Marie. Not his Marie. And it was not fit for her, either. This body he was making from practically pocket change.
What was a body? A soup of chemicals, a bag with water and extras thrown in? Why couldn't he make it, make her a vessel to pour back into?
Her voice wailed in the halls of his mind: she was the giggle in his ear, the warm hands on his shoulders, the gentle mezzo telling him to go to bed, the care.
A body was nothing more than a few dollars worth of material, but he knows his Marie is not that gristle, not the unwound form before him. Not her body, not the one he yearns for, dreams of, chases after.
He refused sleep, food, reason. He hadn't shaved since she left, hadn't thought of anything but the sight of her corpse and the image of bio-alchemist textbooks, some of which he wrote, some he only read. He had no reason to think of anything else. She was the only one who cared enough of his well-being to steer him to bed, to set a blanket around him, to cloak him from himself and the world that twisted him into who he was. It should have been him who died, he knew. He knew deep in the very marrow of his bones that it should have been him. Marie was too good for Death. It was why Stein had her soul, and no one else. She was too good for him, too, but at least he could try to bring her back.
Marie's soul, warm, tender, caring creature, was thrumming in the lab.
And she reminded him to pull his hands from the cavity of the dead body that was not any body he cared for. She was the echo looping through his body, the driving force behind his research.
He was doing the unforgivable. He was snapping each promise like a translucent bone he had not composed correctly.
When he looked at his hands, they were caked in blood and entrails to the elbow and he almost reeled back. Was this his hand? Ever since he was a boy he had toed the taboo, human transmutation, bodies morphing into other bodies, the one closed door. He had listened, felt the noose around his neck keep him from answers that could break him. He had avoided the locks.
He was breaking down each gate, now.
He didn't know if he was a good man. He didn't know if he was a mad man. Marie was the only one who ever told him he could be both, good and mad, but he knew he was a twisted DNA helix of a man sewed together, all scar tissue and raw meat and angry hands made for flaying. He was a sham of a doctor, a shame of a man.
He had always known how to take a body apart. How easy it was to dismember, to reduce to slabs of flesh.
It was creation that required finesse.
It was creation he was attempting.
"It feels like I am breathing today only because a few years back I had no idea which nerve to cut."
~Sanhita Baruah
He was not doing it for the DWMA, though he knew somewhere that they would want his research. Had always wanted his research. He had always been under the collar of laws, of rules, of regulations; he was not in want of it again. Yet, when he was a boy, it was the only place to go.
The Sewing Life Alchemist. Frankenstein.
They thought he had brought ants back from the dead during his exam. He had, with a detached sort of coldness, burned them until the scent of charred exoskeleton singed his sinuses and when he drew the circle, absentmindedly, with a laziness that bordered on uncaring, he had glanced up to see the expressions of the people watching.
Freak show, they screamed, silently. He was a small, pale, gray-scale boy barely twelve and under four feet in height burning ants on the floor. How humorous. How stupid.
Yet, when the ants, reduced to sad clumps, certainly dead, gave off a twitch, they had all leaned forward with a gleam in their eyes.
All a trick. An illusion. A piece of his own soul fragmented inside of the still-dead ants.
They were not alive, not really. Merely puppets on a string, the string of his own soul. The silvery strands had forced the legs to work, and though, at first, the council was furious at being betrayed, they passed him anyway.
Because he had become the ants, his soul, in shards, imbedded into the DNA.
Bio-alchemy was dangerous, they'd warned him. He was just a child. It would grasp him in claws tight enough to crunch his ribs and he would never be free.
Then, he dismissed them. They had left him alone, this loner child who was found playing with the corpses in the morgues, seeing how he could manipulate organs to his will. If he could be in an ant, why could he not be in a lung? A liver? He was everywhere and nowhere, his soul a connection to the entire world.
And yet, so disconnected. For when his partner, his forced chaperone, Spirit, had awoken in the middle of the night to Stein's hand between his ribs, the world shattered. Everywhere and nowhere. Nowhere and everywhere. He was better in a lab, locked from the world.
That was fine. He'd determined that the world was shit, anyway; they could have the world.
He knew, that night, human tissue was different. Life was different. If the dead were empty suits of armor he could pour himself into, the living were a steady wall of water denying him access.
The cold body of the newly failed corpse lies in front of him, number twenty-eight, as he feels for the heart and it turns to tatters in his grasp. Better that way, he knows.
It was too small for Marie. Much too small.
"You have been weighed, you have been measured, and you have been found wanting."
Her voice is a warm caress, a fine, hot mist against his skin. Marie grins up at him and his arms feel like wood, strong and powerful as he hovers over the soft of her. She is beautiful, his Marie.
He does not know why he doesn't tell her.
But she kisses him anyway, accepts him inside of her with a readiness and a wanting sigh. She tangles her fingers in his hair and they breathe together, all warm mouth and a shuddering body that trembles in the best way.
She glows. She has always glowed, in his mind. Marie is backed by a golden sun, she is the light itself. The bringer of everything that eradicates darkness in his bleak lab. And her nails leave lines on his skin as they meld into one being, she and he into we, twined fingers, twined bodies; he swears their heartbeats match, line up, heat pooling at the base of his hips and in his chest. Marie is slick and welcoming, she is hotter than a bolt of lightning that ignites him from spine to belly and he should be ashamed of how desperately he chases after his own need.
But with each movement into her it feels as though he is getting that much closer to a lord he does not believe in. She calls his name as her nails bite into his flesh, using him as the only anchor, as he alone brings her to a bliss she so wants.
He doesn't let her bring her hand between them, fingers playing over her slickness. He only gathers her wrists above her head, brings their fingers together, looks into her singular eye, yearning for the moment when she would throw her head back, break contact, buck against him savagely as she came.
She was a mess. She was a siren beckoning him to tip over his own edge. She was a noisy disaster, a hurricane of a woman, and so goddamn beautiful he didn't know what to do with himself. He would watch her come, her face pinched in ecstasy, her voice pitched up into a higher octave as she told him she loved him.
It was always the "I love you!" that undid him, broke down each thread of him until he felt like he was spiraling both out of his skin and inside of it. And he would open his mouth when he kissed her, desperate to kiss her, desperate to be one with her, wailing into the inky blackness of her gaping mouth.
Into the night.
Into the night, the lab is cold. It is frigid and he has fallen asleep in front of his research, again, which he notes as he is forced awake by the clatter of books falling. He must have moved in his slumber. (Oh, how he wants the novocain of sleep, the balm of dreams with her.) It is better than sleeping in front of a corpse. He had grown so accustomed to waking to her, to seeing a body and jolting in pleasure, knowing it is his Marie, that when he wakes to the ruinous bodies, it always breaks him anew.
Yet, it is never Marie. His or otherwise.
Marie was eviscerated and all that is left is a soul he steals from Death himself, hides inside of his lab down in her room, their room, where he never sleeps anymore. There is too much old love imbedded in his mattress, love made, love forged, love kept.
He once thought he didn't understand it, thinking one could create something, make something, they didn't comprehend. Love was once an invisible spire his fingers phased through.
Now he knows that love is Marie's ghost, her soul, calling to him.
Love is a body he is making from scratch, one her soul would have to adapt to, one that had to be close enough to her genetic makeup to house her.
She had made the lab a home. She knew home. He knew her. He could make her.
In the darkness, he could feel ashamed. He called for her hands and her mouth, he called for her. He wanted her so deeply. She had found her way beneath his skin, beneath his sternum. He once considered opening himself to hold her heart next to his.
Now her heart was gone. She was gone. But she would be back.
It was okay, he assured himself, in the blackness of his lab.
It is okay.
It was.
Is.
Will be.
In the dead of night, for it was always dead, his palms find himself and he closes his eyes and envisions her face, a spark of life in his dreary world. It takes no time, or perhaps he has lost a concept of it. It could be four pm. Could be four am. He keeps the windows closed and the door locked and all light blocked away. She is the only goodness he allows himself. And he should be embarrassed by his timing, but when he spills, hot and white over his flushed skin, he can hear her "I love you!"
He refuses to open his eyes. He sees her face smiling down on him.
"Safety and reason seemed to have left the world. Loneliness was a reality."
~Stephen King
It has all liquefied. The lifeless eyes, two, not one as he is accustomed to, look like a doll's empty stare. She looks like a doll. The face is half stitched together, fragile cells knitting into a visage that melts beneath his hands.
He has to remake her. Make her anew.
He does not know if he is allowed. (He knows he is not.) He does not know what he is doing, but the dead do not give permission, and he has nothing but parts of the woman he once called wife. Parts of Marie that he had to scrape the rot off of, the scent nothing like vanilla and sunshine.
The goop in front of him is hollow bones, delicate as a glass house, organs turned inside out.
She is soup, mush. He feels nothing when he tries to lift her and finds that she falls apart beneath his palms.
Destruction he knows on instinct alone; he is a destroyer. He destroyed her, is destroying her anew. Her face is not her face. It is some strange, sick caricature he tried to make and pass off as a cheap alternative.
He doesn't even have to burn her.
She drains down the sink, instead, nothing but free flowing blood, a creature that is not a creature. It was never a body her soul, precious and thrumming and alive, could have remained in.
He goes back to his operating table. Sterilizes it.
The thought of having his hands on parts of her corpse again makes a shiver run up his spine.
He is not strong enough to pretend that he will not try again.
"When you look long into an abyss, the abyss looks into you."
~Nietzsche
It is hopeless and he knows. He is a man running after a shard of a dream. He has never transmuted a soul into something else. He has heard rumors of those who live in bodies no longer theirs, bodies that are armor, bodies that are animal, bodies that will never be their own, but a body nonetheless. He could bring her soul into anything non-living. He could make her feel no pain.
But no pleasure, either. Nerves were tricky things.
He was selfish. He was a man holed up in his lab and desperate and yearning and wishing for her as she always was. Stein didn't remember who he was before her.
But that is a lie. It is simply that he does not want to remember, does not want to recall that he was a haunt of a man, stepping neither lightly nor heavily, an in-between visitor of everything and everyone. He could find his soul in anything, in anyone. He had the uncanny ability to empathize without feeling a shred of connection. How strange, it all was, to be interlaced with life when he was just a wraith, a man walking through the between of the world.
Job to job. Scientist, doctor, pharmacist, alchemist, soldier.
Husband.
Marriage was work, to some, but it had only ever been a joy, to him. Marie was a tropical storm of a woman, she was powerful and dangerous and tender. He memorized each curve of her body, her smile, her hips, the swell of her breasts, her eye closed in sleep or happiness or trust or ecstasy.
He wanted her back. Each curve. Each piece. Intact, whole, alive. His Marie.
So he remembered her as he drew the circle, for that was a curve, too. He remembered her as he wrote out each insignia, memorized the feeling of the chalk. He had tried blood, before, but it had never worked. Chalk was stable. Chalk was easy. Back to basics. What was a body?
What was a body?
Why was her body so different? Or, rather, why was he making it different.
Sulfur, mercury, water, calcium, carbon, oxygen, phosphorus, nitrogen. Trace compounds. Dig the earth with bare hands and come back with creation. Start anew.
And yet, every time he failed. A body was a body but the numbers were always wrong. Marie could not live in a wrong body, in a body that festered and crawled. He had to make her perfectly. Not enough of this, too much of that. Remember her down to the spiral, each sequence of protein. Keratin in skin, sulfur in keratin, knit her together on a molecular level, stitch the cells together.
How could he shape her? Make her?
Marie. Marie. Marie.
The circle was sloppy, he knew.
Every creature that came from it, dead, as it would always be dead, just a coffin waiting for Marie's soul, was some mangled version of human.
Try again. Try from the ground up. Dig deeper and find her.
As his palms came to the ground, his fingers curled, wanting to dig in, wanting to feel the flow of the earth beneath his skin, the life that it brought.
But, of course, he was in his lab. Cement did not yield to him.
He watched the being in the circle mold and make shape, organs twisted inside out. The DNA spiral in his mind was alive but it was moving too fast, he couldn't make her code fast enough. He did not know it well enough. He knew her but not genetically, could never know genetically. He had looked at enough tissue samples beneath a microscope to go cross-eyed yet he couldn't know her down to the very components.
When the body finished itself, it was broken as it was always broken.
He looked with blank, baleful eyes as the meat revealed itself. Slowly, as though afraid that he would be fused with the coagulation of body he had brought to being, he moved into the circle, his footsteps silent as he treaded inside to get a better look.
Closer.
He was closer than last time. If he lifted it, surely it would only partially fall to bits and ribbons. The organs were twisted inside out, but somewhat recognizable. Though some of the intestines more resembled soup, he could see the cords and loops of them, pink and inhuman, and the bones were half filled with marrow, the rest of it dripping out.
He did not know what he had made, just that it was not fit to be a body.
This time, he thinks he's thankful that there is no face.
He goes to get his hose. He thinks he'll get a dog. He had grown too tired to be sad. Sorrow meant defeat and he was going to try again as he would always try again.
The thing in the circle is not human.
But, truthfully, he does not know what to classify it as at all.
"I run blindly through the madhouse … And I cannot even pray … For I have no God."
~Grant Morrison
The first time he works with life, it is a mouse and he melts it down when he tries to change the color of the fur. Find the genome, locate it in the spiral, alter it. Nothing taken, nothing given. Equal exchange. Only reformulate, remake, recombine.
It does not work. The bones dissolve, the fur falling away from the flesh, dead skin, useless follicles. Life snuffed out so easily.
He is reminded of that as he sits at his workstation. He has to find her, her DNA helix, the spiral of her flesh, her beautiful face. He is no artist sculpting her from ivory but he thinks perhaps he should be. Better an homage, better a new person made of marble.
Instead, he is sick. His skin is near transparent from the lack of sunlight, his eyes ever-squinting from behind glasses that he swears have imprinted themselves upon his face. And yet, everything he does is for her. His Marie.
Her grin is at the forefront, all straight teeth and clean, glinting white. The soft, shining memory of her body arching against his is like a treat on a stick in front of him, and in his dreams, he is always running, one hand outstretched.
He decides to start small. Work in fragments. Make a limb, then a torso. Make her. Find her. Find her sequence in the DNA. The flesh is dead, will always be dead, but it must be perfect.
No corpse will do.
He sits at his workstation and knits his brows together, desperately sweating and aching and tired. He begs for sleep, for rest, but though sleep brings her, as it will always bring her, when he awakens, everything is worse than before. Sharper focus, harder lines, and he is hit anew with the fact that he is mangling his wife, ready to herald her into a foreign body he hopes she can call her own.
The materials in front of him are measured perfectly. Formulas, ratios: he knows these things by memory, has always known from a textbook. Textbooks were always easy. It was practice that was hard.
His hands come to the ground again, trying to find stability, trying to will the material in front of him to mold into flesh, veins, into something resembling joints and ligaments. Hands were tricky, so many small bones.
His brows furrow when he feels the power course through him: life calls out to him and he calls back with a shrieking wail that is barely heard over the thunder of his tick tick boom heartbeat.
But this is not life. He is not stupid. He is trying to bring her back from the dead, from the world that he is not allowed to step into, but he has her soul, cradled and protected and waiting. It does not call to him, does not give consent nor rejection, but he has gone forward anyway. He is not making life. He is making death again. He is making a vessel. He is making a body.
The spiral in his mind is unwinding, looping faster and faster, acting like the ribbon coming free from an old cassette. He forces himself to focus. Theory is simple. Think. Theory is simple, yes.
Knitting DNA together from scratch is hard. It leaves sweat running down the curve of his spine, a slumped over S that Marie had always scolded would turn heavy if he didn't sit up. Now, he was hunched over so far he is almost bending into himself. Think, he commands himself, and the power of his soul filters down his arms in something that feels like an electrical current, the spark. He is using her memory. He has always loved her hands, and he closes his eyes as he envisions it. Slender fingers barely ever painted, nails chewed down to the quick. Remember the cuticle, the nail matrix, the metacarpals, the knuckles. Remember how the lines of her palms look.
He had spent so long caressing her hands, kissing the backs of them, feeling himself spill to her touch. He knows now it was right.
He is building her from the very beginning, building an adult body from nothing more than cheap chemicals the chemist does not ask about. Everyone knows better than to talk to him after Marie died. She was all that made him feel human.
What was a body? He was a body. A body he was heaving his mind around in. Only the soul mattered, deep down. Only the soul where everything was imprinted, but he was too scared to touch her own. It was glowing and golden and gorgeous and too much like her for him to mutilate. Her body had returned looking like a carcass and he had no problems with being a butcher so long as he could force the fact that it was Marie out of his head.
Now, now he is no butcher. Now he is a maker. A creator.
He is playing God in his basement, which he finds so fitting because she has always brought him there. She was only ever the one who took him, holding his hand, to the edge of the abyss and told him to jump.
She jumped. She fell into the abyss, into the void, the blackness so welcoming, and he followed her down the rabbit hole, always. She was no Alice, though her sunny hair spoke otherwise, but he would follow.
His mind was stretching to every corner, each memory of her a paper doll he could feel being shredded as he stretched himself thin and barren. The gates would take him if he wasn't careful. Life would call for life. He would have to give a pound of flesh to get a pound of flesh and yet he refused it.
He was taking nothing. He was giving nothing. It was simple as baking, simple as science. Take the ingredients and make cake.
Stein forced his mind to stutter, screeching tires and loud honking as he disrupted the process, rewinding back as much as he could to slowly sew the materials into some coherency. The helix stuttered, reversed, and then, as though he had simply threaded the dropped stitch up, it reworked itself, coming back in the correct direction.
It was backbreaking work, and the world spun, his vision hazy. He had to clench his eyes as the light made everything swimmy.
And when he opened them, it was more than he could have expected.
The color was what really struck him, so sunkissed as though it were really Marie's hand. It was her hand that reached through the darkness toward him in his dreams, in his memories, palm turned up to accept him.
It ended, abruptly and grotesquely at the wrist, and before his very eyes, he saw the completion of her hand, so perfectly made.
He was terrified to touch it. It was so like Marie, evoking every memory that made him feel a sob clench inside of him, threatening to bubble out like a geyser held under immense pressure.
But when his fingers skimmed her knuckles, the skin was smooth and clean. The blood pumped out immediately, for the veins had nowhere to go, but that was fine. It was that he had made her. Made her right there in front of him. She was in reach, somewhere. Somewhere she was waiting for a body made of parts just like that one. He could do it.
Piece by piece.
It did not fall to gruesome chunks in his grasp, the bones jellying, the muscle turned to goop. Instead, the solidity was terrifying, the first touch of something human he had felt ever since she died and they brought her back in a box with an "I'm sorry" that reeked of a false nicety reserved only for the delicate.
Was he delicate, now?
Had he fallen to such lengths, a man growing slender as a skeleton in his closet as he tried to wriggle down the pin-sized hole of finding his treasure, again?
He held her new, man-made hand in his for what felt like eternity.
When he realized it was her left, he eyed her ring finger, remembering the diamond and gold band they had brought back with her corpse.
He thinks it's time he return it.
"Your roots have so entwined together that it is inconceivable that you should ever part."
~Louis de Bernières
Sometimes, he comes into the room that was once theirs and remembers what she looked like sprawled out on the bed. Not sexually. Simply just there, napping or taking off her stockings or stretching. His Marie. And he would sigh as though she were frivolous, or as though in relief, or in happiness at seeing her. Or perhaps he would walk in while she was brushing her hair, or putting on lipstick, looking at herself in the mirror. She never needed makeup to be beautiful, but he would remember the exact shade of the kiss-mark she'd leave on his cheek, patting his face sweetly and smiling.
He sighed again, his entire soul aching for her. Marie.
How deeply he wanted to walk into the room and know she was there, ready to grin at him from over her shoulder as she partially turned, telling him "What? No 'honey, I'm home'?"
Now, when he walks in, it is just her soul. It is all of her and yet none of her. Almost intangible.
He wants to hold her, it, the soul, her soul, but he worries that he will alter her in some way. He cannot resonate with her, let her know what he is doing, what he has done. The truth is that he could ask her permission and yet he does not want to. Is he still a good man, to her? Corpse after corpse he brings into the lab, corpse after corpse he makes. He might as well run a morgue, etch out bodies turned to slabs of meat. Is it human if he makes it? What is a body? What is a body? What is a person?
He wants to stop thinking but the only person who ever ground his mind to a halt was her. And she is dead, so very, terribly dead, an act he is trying to reverse with a desperation that gnaws him down to the bones. And so, he walks into the room that was once theirs and is now some in-between land of his and hers. They are not 'we', have not been 'we' for a long time in that room.
Something inside of him bubbles, wants to cry, weep for her as he did not want to weep. Tears meant that he had given up, it meant he had failed.
No, he knows he has failed. He keeps the parts he had managed to make human, or at least human looking in jars filled to the brim with formaldehyde, he gazes upon them to remind himself. Studies them to amend them. Parts that could have been Marie but were not.
She deserves the best.
Perhaps if he brought the hand, she would imprint herself upon it, feel what he was trying to do. Or, perhaps he is foolish. He is a madman. He has to be a madman to attempt what he is attempting.
Nygus once told him he couldn't understand love. He had said it, as well, and so had many others, but Nygus, she had particular reasons.
What man who could love would bring his friend back as a corpse, a mere body brought together in bits that he shoved a soul into? Only Sid's yearning for life kept that body from breaking down, and yet, he was very much so dead. The digestive system was faulty, sometimes he leaked stomach acid. The blood had coagulated thickly, and no oxygen got through, rendering the hemoglobin dead, the blood cells unable to be repaired.
He did not want that for Marie, and maybe that is how he knew that, now, he understood.
What man who could love would subject someone to such a fate?
That was why he was making new parts, parts from scratch, parts from hydrogen and carbon and phosphorus. Parts that he could mold together. At night, when he refused to sleep, he wondered, racking his mind. What is a body?
Marie's was light. Pure, unfiltered light that brought joy to his life, brought beauty to his days and a smile upon his face. How short a time he got with her, with sunlight warm on his cheeks, on his arms. She knew how to hold him, knew how to say his name in his ear like a prayer.
He had learned how to pray from her, but only when he was with her. And never to God.
"Oh, Marie."
His Star of David, an old relic of a life as a boy, was still hanging from a chain in his mother's house, he's sure of it. And yet, he knows no messiah.
No man who knew God would play God.
No man who could love would shove a soul into a rotting body.
So he comes to see Marie's soul, offers neither flowers nor beautiful gifts, things he should have gotten her when she was still alive. He is not in grief because he does not bargain. There is no 'If she comes back, I will…', there is only when.
It must be 'when'. If it is not when then it will be never. He cannot handle 'if'. If is a code of DNA and genomes and proteins that do not line up and render a body made of loosely held together tissue samples. He cannot allow that anymore.
Sometimes, sometimes he visits her soul in the dead of night and wants to confess. His hands are stained, fingernails practically crimson in his mind. And it flashes before him, heart thudding like a war drum. He is not sorry but he wants to be if it means being a better man. Are better men sorry?
Is he a bad man? A mad man? A worse man? A bad madman or a madman who is bad? He wants Marie back to give him answers to all his questions. As a scientist, he has always had questions. Why had he never asked her when she was still alive? When he could hold her afterward and inhale in the scent of her hair?
He wanders aimlessly in the corridors of his mind, arms outstretched for her, looking and looking and wanting and always left wanting.
He had been found wanting and so he is being punished.
Sometimes, in the very dead of night, when he does not confess, when he does not tell her what he has done, when he does barely anything at all, he cups her soul in his ruinous hands, for she let him hold her before, even wanted him to hold her.
He cups her soul in his ruinous hands and brings it to his chest, where his own soul yawns desperately for her to return, for resonance, for the deep compassion and gentleness of her.
He does not allow himself to dwell on resonance.
Sometimes, in the darkest part of him, he wonders if he should simply open his mouth as though to scream and swallow her down.
Maybe she would stay.
"You learned to run from what you feel, and that's why you have nightmares."
~Megan Chance
He is making a human from scratch and, somewhere inside of him, he knows he will fail. It is always something inside of him with every experiment. This is not a body that was premade, a body he could slice into and see if it works.
This was fragmentation. Patchwork. He was sewing life back together and he would have to sew her soul back into her body and the thought of that grits him.
Sid had screamed until his throat was raw and Stein only noted that the voice box was undamaged. The things he could do with living tissue had earned him his title. He was a weaver at the loom of life, making and remaking, creating, opening and closing torsos.
He knows things are going south when the hand starts to decay. It cannot live without fresh blood, and so is dying. And his hopes die with it. He has tried to make a body, has tried to make it whole and intact.
The ribs stick out of the mangled breastbone, nothing fuses the way it should. Femurs are cracked, anklebones the size of tennis balls. He is a failure. One cannot simply create.
He is not an artist.
Maybe he should consider himself one.
He realizes that everything he has done has been slowly. He is working too slowly. He is a rat on a wheel and he is against a clock. Death has his icy grip on everything, on him, on anything save for Marie's soul. That was his one reward, all he had needed. He would die for it. Take it all, take his title, the lab, the research, but let him keep Marie's soul.
He understands now it was his downfall. Perhaps, if he was a better man, he would be able to live with the fact that she could radiate in the home, her home, the lab she made home. With her there he was at peace.
He thought he could be at peace.
Instead, she is as tangible as a Gray Lady, and he almost wishes for hallucinations. The lack of sleep starts to get to him. He knows when he ends up falling to slumber in front of a circle, abandoning the transmutation that turned to muck, the transmutation he allowed to slip.
He dreamed of her.
He is always dreaming of her.
But this time, it is of her voice shrieking from an inhuman slab of meat, something he has made, something he is ashamed of. How had he not known shame when he made her this? Why had he put her beautiful, pure soul into a being so tainted and ugly? And she is furious at him, calling for his blood.
Better dead, she tells him. Better to have rotted in a crystal casket, the cage he has placed her soul into, the holder Death himself has given him. Better dead and 6 feet under, company with the crickets and the maggots and the decay.
When her hand that is not a hand reaches out, he stumbles backward from the circle, caught on his backside and terrified. His blood pounds cold in his body.
Yet, she catches up. She brings herself, one arm dragging her meat-self toward him, leaving a trail of organs that should be in but were left out against the floor, ripping delicate tissue open without a care. She is a soul in a body doomed for death.
When she touches him, it is with just a skeleton that jerks from the arm socket. As it falls into his lap, the ligaments failing her, her joints already decaying, he sobs. The light catches her wedding ring and he feels himself fall down down down in his mind.
And then, he is thrown awake with such a start that he can hardly help his yelp. The world spirals around him, he is ready to faint. When was the last time he ate? Was his body so desperate for sleep it was bringing him to the point where he had no choice but to collapse?
Nothing processed in his head for a moment until he made out the circle in front of him, throwing himself backward in horror. What was he doing? What had he done? Was the nightmare not a nightmare, then? He looks down at his lap, looking for bones, for the gleam of gold that was her wedding ring, yet there is nothing there. As he stares into the circle, into the dark, into an abyss he is terrified to understand, he realizes that the thing in front of him is only partially transformed, and certainly dead. Marie's soul is safe in her glass prison and he is left with a pile of materials that didn't get to fuse correctly. On the very corners, where he had started his concentration before it failed him, he notes that all that he managed to make was a coagulation of what looked like some early stage of tumor.
He breathes in heavily, takes in one gulp of air.
Two.
"Time and I have quarreled. All hours are midnight now."
~Susanna Clark
He goes through too many plans to be healthy. But he knows nothing he has done is healthy, even as he wanders between wakefulness and an abyss, an in-between to existence. Everything is either dream or fact and dream becomes fact as fact bleeds into dream. He sleeps in milliseconds, miniscule shards of time he manages to clutch onto. His body is desperate for sleep, for sustenance. He is gaunt and hollowed, his entire life force being thrown into his work. The blueprints are scrawled on napkins, on his walls, on his very arms, scratched in. He does not remember the last time he showered, ate. But he remembers every thread of code, that ancient language, every letter of biology books as he twists chemistry and anatomy for his own gain.
Frankenstein was his nickname, the name he has adopted for himself, given from the military, collared like a noose around his throat and he knows it fits like it was made for him.
Too fitting. In nightmares and when he is at his lowest, he sneers at himself, pathetic, only human, doomed to fail. Perhaps he would make her as he has made monsters before, chimeras of human arms and hooves, torsos of bears and heads of oxen. He was a butcher already, wasn't he?
But it is more waking horror than plan when he envisions making her body from bits, pieces he will stitch together until she is a quiltwork of a woman. Bind her soul to this scarred body with his own two hands, with his own electricity.
The coinflip is the dream that he will make the body whole and unmarred, exactly as it was before. Before she came to him dead and half obliterated. But he shudders at the thought of another body that is made wrong. Translucent bones that he could not code properly, a body that fell apart at seams he had accidentally left open, hemoglobin coming away from plasma, enamel where there should be muscle, cords of intestines turned into jelly, caseation wracking the entire frame.
He has gone wrong in so many places, in so many ways. Miles and miles of DNA he has to go through, the electricity of his soul a bolt of lightning in a tiny basement. And he ruins her anew, turns what should be her temple into a hide, a skin, a flask he can drip her into. He intended on the same that she had always been and yet he mangles her. Mangles her parts.
The face was the worst of it. He was grafting it so delicately. It took hours to muster up the courage, work out the numbers. How much oxygen, how much nitrogen? How many trace compounds? He spent too long double checking, triple checking. Checking over and over by hand and by his ancient computer. He knew numbers, knew bodies. He knew what they should be, what they were made from.
And yet, he had molded her face so wrong. There was something strange and unnatural in the visage. It was ugly, a graft of mottled flesh. He had lost focus, shown that he was no artist, and the tissue refused to fuse together. And yet, there was just enough of her there that made him want to keep it, unable to destroy the ruined material.
What was he doing? What had he done?
A petri-dish was no place to bring her back. Why was he fabricating her half in a test tube and half in a circle? Would she ever approve?
He thinks, knows, even if she did not, he would rather she be alive and livid than dead. A corpse cannot warm his bones, cannot give closure. A corpse is not Marie, his Marie, the woman he had watched walk down the aisle, the woman he imagined a child, children with.
They were talking about it, he remembers. They were trying. She had gone through such intensive training when she was in the military, nicknamed the Pulverizer, able to spark lighting from her very skin, it had made it difficult. She was scared she would never be able to but even Victor Frankenstein could make life with lightning. She had that. Sparks in her very soul.
He would never be able to remake that. What was the formula for the magic she had in her veins? There was none. There was just carbon and potassium, chlorine and sodium and iron and iodine. If he couldn't even make a body, how could he ever hope to make a soul?
He couldn't. That was why he had her own in their room that would hopefully be their room again. But not if he kept failing, not if his hands were clumsy and his mind unable to work through the loops of code he had to make.
Maybe he was coming at it from the wrong direction. He would not put her in a corpse, but why not attempt to rework the tissue? Dig into the genome and work from a premade foundation. A being is the sum of its parts. Why was he starting from scratch when he could begin with parts already guaranteed by nature? They had already housed a soul, stood the test of time and the wear of humanity and day to day life.
Yes, that was what he would have to do. He felt trapped in his own desperation, but he was clambering down down down. He had to find a body. As close to her own as possible, though he could always customize it. He could make the exact flare of her hips, the exact gold-brown of her eye, her tender expression. A full mouth, a kind hand, a slight skeleton. He could shrink the height, he could rework the tissue.
But dead is harder to work with than alive. The rat of his earlier years, his first experimentations, had melted so easily.
Yet, when he tried to rework it, bring it back, it returned as shards of bone and blood. It was congealed, a disgusting mass of a limbless frame put together in the wrong way, as though he were a child with a hammer trying to make a desk. Failing. It was already dead. Too dead. Long dead when he attempted again, already ravaged by rigor mortis and decay.
It would have to be fresh then.
Perhaps, he realizes with a start, he could start with the living tissue. Life is so easy to snuff out, he realizes. Find the body, for it is just a body, and break it down to the bare pieces, strip it raw, flay it open to the code, rework it.
Let the soul do as it may.
The only one that mattered was holed up in a safe haven in their room.
"Be careful, you are not in Wonderland… You who have suffered, find where love hides. Give, share, lose—lest we die, unbloomed."
~Kill Your Darlings
With the woman in front of him, he feels as though he has finally found his center. The gentle rise and fall of her chest is easy, he knows how the lungs work, material that is properly put together. There is no failed body, here, only a human being that is perfectly made, perfectly constructed.
Inside of him, he screams for a pause. This is murder, he yells. This is unforgivable.
He does not care.
The circle is in place, already made. How long had he yelled inside his mind to step away, step back and think. Would Marie want this? Would she ever accept?
And yet he never asked. Instead, he grasped her by the crystal edges as he woodenly walked to the lab. He refused to let Marie see the basement, before, what it had become. She belongs above ground, where the couches are bright but dusty from misuse, where nothing dead has touched the walls.
It is too late to go back. It is too late. He is at the top of the staircase and the only way down is to jump. He has already found her, already grasped her, already brought her to his morgue.
It is too late.
The body he has found for Marie contours and contracts, capillaries shifting as he alters the random woman's very genetic makeup, twisting it in his hands, in his mind. The ink on her skin is the incision lines and he is flaying her open without a scalpel, seeing the insides, pink and alive.
He does not realize that he is using the woman's soul to alter things, to take away, to help the process. He does not realize how fast a human life snuffs out. He is too busy watching the way the nervous system must shift, change to suit what he knows, how the insides crunch inward, bone shards turning into the fatty tissue that pads his Marie's hips and thighs.
The soul from the random woman, however, is inconsequential. He does not care for her, had only been charmless and clumsy enough to approach for the sake of kidnapping. It was righteous murder, he assured. She was helping him bring a better woman, his Marie, back into the world. And he had this random woman's soul turned philosopher's stone aiding him along the way. Before, he was alone. Before, he was working off the grit and determination of his own hopes and failures.
Now, now he is watching as the marrow takes shape, as the blood loops through the heart that pumps so steadily. Marie's soul is next to him in her glass house and he holds his breath, all his concentration threading through the body.
And when that woman's soul entirely dies, gone without any trace, he has to loop his own soul in, desperate to make his Marie's body perfect. As perfect as can be, his Marie, back from the dead in a body that she lost to a war that was not her own.
He can feel his life draining from him, he is chopping his lifespan by the millisecond, but in a flash of light, it is all over, and the new body, shining and white and brilliant, is set down in the middle of the circle with all her blood inside of her.
For a moment, the shuddering idea of somehow having done something wrong is running through him in a painful current. The neurons disconnected somewhere, perhaps, the cells stacked in a wrong sequence, sinewy connective tissue reduced to strands of silk, aortas made small, arteries blocked off, lymph nodes swollen.
But he does not have the time to worry, does not have the time to imagine that something has faltered. He cannot kill another woman, cannot stain his hands once more. He is tired of butchery, he is tired of raw meat he threads together. He is sick of the taste of blood in the air.
And she is perfect. In front of him is the clean, bare image of his wife, looking as though she were just sleeping. The only incorrect factor is that there are two eyes instead of one, as she had lost one in her original military training. But he knew, knew without doubt, if those eyes opened, they would be the perfect golden brown. The hair looped in loose waves, bright as sunlight, her cheeks smooth, her lips curved into a smile. The waist was miniscule, as Marie had always had a small waist, always been a small woman, the wrists slender, the neck clean of any marks.
She is Marie, his Marie. And, as though in agreement, Marie's soul, next to him, seems to warm as though recognizing home. The scraped together tissue he had managed to grab from Marie's once-corpse was now all gone. This was the final choice. He had done the unforgivable. He had killed someone. A life for a life though he was not in the position to make the choice.
He had made it, anyway. He had made the body, the decision, the success. Made it, not from scratch, but from mix. But if you took the mix apart, it still came to flour and cocoa powder, still came to the base. A hand more skillful than his had simply sifted it all together.
Now was his chance. Frankenstein indeed, he thinks. It is time to live up to the name given to him when he is just a child, when he wears a gold chain around his throat with a star as though for protection, when he brought the fibers of his soul into ants to make them twitch and dance to his will.
So he loops his soul through the body once more, the body that is dying, and he feels himself inside of her in ways he had never felt, before. He is everywhere, exploring the nerves, the lungs. The body seems to gasp as he shares his soul in two different vessels, and his head is pounding. There is copper in his mouth, and he thinks he has bitten his tongue.
Everything spins. Anatomy runs through his head, he swears he hears a gate clanging open.
And then, he splits his soul further, latching onto Marie's as he knocks her crystal home over, frees her from her prison. He hears her wail in confusion. Their first resonance since she came back to the lab and it is this. he had shut her out, but he did it for good reason.
"Frank!?"
The darkness, the stretching almost splits him in fragments. He worries that he will simply scatter into the air, a skittering whimper of a man snuffed out there. Perhaps his soul would thread with Marie, his body falling, practically paper itself.
But no, no, he has come too far, done too much. The electricity of his soul mixes with the electricity of her own, and as they resonate, she shares the burdens as she has always shared the burdens. Her soul is strong as a hammer, powerful and resilient, and she grounds him as he knee-crawls to the body he is forcing to stay alive.
With a desperation that borders on the brutal, he grasps her soul in his destructive hands as he has for many nights. He runs his electric soul through her, through the body he has made her, and with a cry, he opens his mouth and feels like the thunder has boomed, lightning splitting the room and illuminating everything.
As he slams her soul against the empty vessel's chest, he retracts his own influence from it until it becomes nothing more than an empty doll.
And in the split second that the heart stops, when his electricity reaches her skin, he defibrillates her. He is a furious cry from the heavens, a streak of heat that breaks open life and rebuilds it. Is he a good man? A mad man? Is he a man at all in those moments?
He is playing god and he thinks the skin fits him too well, fits him like it fit Shelley's characters as they played out on a stage. Fits him like his nickname, like Frankenstein. But Marie is no monster. Marie is smooth, unmarred skin, a beautiful face stretched blankly in a split second of lifelessness until the soul seems to catch and his defibrillation works, his electricity bringing each nerve to the surface, alive and convulsing.
All those failures, the bloated bodies drunk off of too much hydrogen, too much oxygen, the bodies with bones calcified to spurs, the heterotrophic ossification ravaging the entire frame, bodies with necrosis, thrombosis, bodies without hearts and without aortas, bodies that ruptures on contact, bodies with skin that slunk away and teeth that rotted from gums and tendons that stretched like rubber with muscles that leaked in a goopy mass.
All that disease, the attempts that spat on God, come to this. A moment of life, birth in his basement.
Marie, his Marie, back from the dead.
As Marie takes her first breath, gasping and crying out, her heart starting up as her soul fused with the tissue, attaching and clinging, pouring itself into each perfectly crafted, painstakingly achieved cell, her lips crack open. He wants to kiss them, he realizes. He wants to touch her, but as he moves toward the body, his hand still on his sternum, he realizes that he is, instead, falling forward.
He feels overheated.
He wonders if he is liquefying, turning into the rat of his first experiments before Marie's two, beautiful eyes, the color so spot on he almost wails in relief. But he is melting, he is sure of it, turning into something other than Stein.
A life for a life, he remembers. It is only fair. This is what he had agreed to when he first drew a circle, when he first promised himself under an oath he broke every rule of. No human transmutation. No using souls.
Bio-alchemy is dangerous, it wrecks havoc on you. He remembers the voice of his teacher, telling him to tread carefully. He remembers his hand in Spirit's torso, how he was caught like a child stealing cookies. All the sins weigh heavily on him.
He had gotten so few years with Marie, but he knows even those are lucky. Even those short gasps of time are gifts, precious shreds he was undeserving of. And now, it is time for his payment.
He has been found wanting. He has always wanted.
Equivalent exchange. The Hippocratic Oath he has broken. The Alchemist's Oath he has broken. Every promise snapped like a bone that either ossified or was drained of marrow. Now was the time to deposit in full.
The last thing he remembers is her hands, clumsy and shaking, coming to his face, where he is scruffy and unappealing, but her touch is not one of contempt. It is gentle. It is loving. He feels how loving it is, feels that those hands that were once someone else's are now truly her own. He has given her a body she can live in, a body she can work in, a body she can see when she looks into the mirror and feel as though it belongs to her.
And he thinks, as she calls his name in a voice he somehow managed to craft right even to the crack when she says "Frank!", between the a and the n, even if that is the end of him and he will never wake again, he is happy.
"Birds sing after a storm; why shouldn't people feel as free to delight in whatever sunlight remains to them?"
~Rose Kennedy
He floats in a blackness that swallows him whole and stutters. Perhaps it is hell. Perhaps it is simply a film reel, half fabricated, half fact. The ribbon of time slows to nothing and he is just churning through this new reality. His new reality.
Sometimes, there are moment of lucidity, pinpricks of waking that make his eyelids feel heavy and his body aching. He does not want to return to that.
But the images are worse.
The crown jewel in the torture is her as it is always her. She has forever been his greatest treasure and most soft spot. Were one to press against him, looking for the painful, tender areas where he would yield, it would always be here. Everyone has a weak point, an Achilles heel. It is why the Military refused romantic relationships. They were soldiers, tools. They were not allowed love.
He had been fine with it until she came into his life, bounding in cheerfully, practically skipping. Training, he remembered. He had underestimated her and she'd thrown his legs out from under him, this miniscule woman who slammed him to the ground with the sharpest glint in her eyes. Eye.
And yet, she had helped him up, transforming instantly into a mask of adorable grins, cheerful disposition.
Marie did not act. She was a useless actress, always overdoing it. It was her genuine nature that called to him. And, oh, how deeply he needed to be loved, as well. To feel so loved that he was sick of it. He wanted to understand it, wanted to know what it was like to be spoiled by someone else's adoration.
And Marie, in return, wanted to love someone. Wanted to love him.
Group missions turned to dual missions, turned to missions where they snuck glances at each other. Turned to missions where he kissed her, hard, all teeth clacking and soft lips being bitten and a groan as he brought his hand up her skirt. Turned into his own office with a massive desk as he did research for bio-chemical alchemy, worked out bombs that could be injected into bloodstreams, transmuted into animals, an office he laid her down in after they closed every blind. Turned into the two of them whispering to each other under the cover of night or locked doors.
Turned into higher ups flicking their gazes away. They were good at their jobs, Marie was brass knuckles and a punch like a hammer, she was a soft woman who turned iron hard on a battlefield. And he was a man with questionable morals who made them their biological warfare without blinking an eye. They meshed well, tissue fusing together the right way.
It all turned into a wedding ring and a devotion he could never truly understand but felt all the same.
And then, it had turned, as he always feared it would, for the worst. For her in pieces in a casket that the cadets brought to his door, since he had taken a day off from making beasts that could dismember and destroy. He had taken a moment away from books to clean the lab, to empty out a room that could potentially be a nursery. She had already started considering putting in resignation papers, and he was assuming the same. The local academy needed teachers, and even if they didn't, they could move. They had done enough for the military. He would trade in his watch, his title, for the new name of "Dad" and lazy afternoons grading papers with a hand on Marie's belly.
But her belly was practically carved out in her coffin, and he felt his own body turn into a tomb when he saw her. He thinks, were he not a surgeon, had he not regrown whole limbs from barely any cells at all, he would be going into shock.
Yet, he only took what was left of her, told them to leave him. They had managed to trap her soul, put it in a glass prison, her reward for being such a good soldier.
He wanted to tear them to pieces, return to his old stereotypes, of breaking people apart just to bring them back together again. He had choked on bile and his own fury.
And then the failures began, one after the other. Until one success, one final sin that weighed down on him, panned out into a shape that was human, a shape that was Marie, snapped the spiral, gritted everything to a halt.
He had given it all for her. He would give it again. He deserved whatever he would get as a result.
So, there he was, in the aftermath, the gray sludge of what he had done. And the broken film tape of his mind played the same nightmare he had always envisioned, the same horrifying conclusion.
Her body, the body he made, the body he so painstakingly broke for, was at the ledge of their roof, the wind whipping her hair about, and she is bare and glowing as she always is. She turns to him, and he sees that tender expression turned pitying, and he almost screams but he cannot.
"Goodbye, Stein," but it comes out mangled. A garbled, broken speech. The voice box wasn't right, the vocal chords not working correctly. And as she steps off from the roof, he can finally run again, his legs loosening after having locked up, his entire self ready to hurdle down after her.
And yet, all he sees is her already on the floor, broken and mangled, soft organs spilling out, body already turning into liquid and chunks.
Blood and bone shards. Bone shards and blood.
Always, the tape rewinds, sometimes it stutters. Sometimes, he feels himself take the same step fifty times in a moment, reliving. Sometimes, it moves so fast he blinks and she is already gone.
"Goodbye, Stein."
"Stein."
"Stein."
She glows brighter each time, and his body is so heavy, begging him to sit down, begging him to give in to rest.
When she is ready to step away off his roof once more, he only hears "Stein," through the static of his mind. He is so tired, so very tired, just a worn down helix himself, and as she tips over the edge, her hand extends to him and he remembers the first success with making her body and he runs forward as he always runs forward, but this time, she is falling slower than before, and he moves as though through water as she tries to fight gravity that has turned to nothing all of a sudden.
The instant he grabs her hand, he is tumbling after her, and in the moment, he thinks it is for the best, that this has always been for the best. Her arm comes around him, the first human touch he has had in months, or perhaps years, or maybe days, for time is a stretching piece of gum chewed and dissolved, but he leans into the warmth of her body.
He says nothing, only feels her caress over him as they stumble, as she brings him to the edge. He does not know what being awake is, anymore. Perhaps he was always dreaming, or always awake. His nightmares have never waited for his eyes to close, before.
But now, oh, now he feels the whip of the wind. There is no playback, no rewind. He has fallen to the abyss, fallen with her.
He is following Alice, following his Marie down the rabbit hole, to wakefulness.
Gladly.
Well, if you've read this far, I want to thank you for finishing this behemoth! Part Bride of Frankenstein, part Fullmetal Alchemist, part Pygmalion, this AU came into being when I realized that Shou Tucker and Franken Stein have the same VA, and that Tucker's nickname in FMA is the "Sewing Life Alchemist".
It's fitting, don't you think?