It is very warm in ChupaCabra's. Spirit remembers the room being pleasantly cool when he first entered, but after the first few bottles of sake the temperature seemed to rise by degrees accordingly, and between his laughter and the continuing flow of alcohol he would be taking his jacket off if he ever divested himself of his official clothing. He doesn't, not outside of his apartment, not ever. It's the only thing he has left. The back of his mind twinges with painful self-awareness at the thought, but the front is awash in a top layer of amusement so it's easy to look away from the hurt in the back, and the ChupaCabra girls are very good at distraction.
"How are things with Maka?" asks the new girl - Blair, Spirit's blurry thoughts offer - and he violently revises his estimation. There isn't time to withdraw from the depression, though; he sees it coming only a second before it hits, and then his cheer has evaporated as if it were never there.
Spirit slumps forward. "She ignored me." He's not seeing the neon lights of the club anymore, nor is he hearing the low murmur of chatter and laughter, just Maka's biting tone - too much like her mother's for comfort - and the distaste in her eyes.
"Oh, poor thing."
"It doesn't matter what I do, she just gets angry," Spirit offers in response to the question that wasn't asked. He knows he does this, rambles on once he is sufficiently drunk, but being aware of it and actually managing his speech are very different and he's on a downward slide now that he doesn't know how to recover from.
Blair is talking again, voice high and happy and bubbly, but Spirit only hears occasional words, "Maka," "divorce," "cheer," and all the girl's enthusiasm can't bleed into him in spite of her impressively undaunted attempts.
"What do I have to be cheerful about?" he asks. It is mostly a rhetorical question; the booze-soaked depression has the comfort of familiarity to it now, and he doesn't particularly want to be rescued from this downward spiral. "Custody goes to the mother. My wife - no no, my ex-wife - won't let me contribute anything, no alimony, no medical expenses. What can I ever be to Maka now? I'm a father without any fatherly duties." He's staring at his hands now; the glass table reflects back his face, damp with tears and lined with stress and frustration and failure. He doesn't know what Kami ever saw in him, can't come up with any reason for Maka to care about him or respect him either.
"Doesn't mean you're not her dad," Blair points out, very reasonably and very entirely opposite to what Spirit wants. "Being a parent is about more than money, isn't it? You should fight for her!"
She is full of energy, ready to push him out the door into an aggressive attack on the world and all his problems. Spirit doesn't really have an explanation to offer her, doesn't have a reason for his lack of action other than the inertia that has stalled his life ever since Kami left, ever since Maka stopped talking to him. He is frozen, weighed down by the mistakes in his past and the knowledge of his own worthlessness. It is hard enough to get out of bed and get dressed in the mornings knowing what is waiting for him during the day; it's the last thing he has going for him right now and it still takes all his strength just to appear pulled together. He doesn't have any energy left over for anything more.
"But spending money is a way of expressing love too, right? It's just so frustrating not being able to do anything for her!" It's a terrible excuse, hardly deserving of the name, but he can't explain the weight of living to the warm girl next to him and he can't quite face it himself and he needs some way to shut her down before she makes this worse, to make her understand the misery of his situation so she will sympathize instead of attempt to fix.
"Well then think of it this way," she goes on with indefatigable energy. "With all that extra money you'll be able to indulge in your bad habits more than usual. Plus maybe we can even find you a new wife. Let's get going!"
"I can't do that," Spirit declares. It's the most true thing he's said all night, but it's easier to deflect attention to the second half of her suggestion than to find the words to explain the empty headaches the morning after his "bad habits," the way that even the temporary physical pleasure of drink and laughter is becoming more and more fragile, the fact that even now his trips here more often end in tears than otherwise. "I've never even thought about remarrying. This is the worst day I've had since I was assigned Stein as a partner."
That has been happening more frequently too. Spirit went years and years without thinking about Stein while conscious, avoiding his name and avoiding the attached memories, but now that Kami is gone his defenses are crumbling around him and alcohol tears them down to nothing. "You were partners with Doctor Stein? Didn't he just come back from Germany?"
Spirit doesn't really hear the question. His mind is offering up scenes from a horror movie, things he never saw himself but that Kami painted all-too-vividly in those first weeks after Stein left. "It was an absolute hell, the time I spent as his partner." He can't see Stein's eyes in the dark-lit pseudo-memories, just reflected glasses and a vicious smile full of self-centered amusement and the promise of pain. "That guy…" Even now, years of habit make it hard to say his name. "He did…" No words for this, not really. Spirit borrows Kami's instead; they come more easily to mind, are easier to echo in the tone of furious defensiveness she used to describe it while he was recovering. "Experiments on my body. He used me as a lab rat while I was sleeping!" It is odd to hear the words in his voice instead of Kami's, low and angry, spitting each word so he can hear her over the unrepressed sobs in his throat, but the flickering images in his head - glasses, too many teeth, white coat and wide shoulders and shadowed features - are just the same, locked down into permanence from months of illustrating Kami's descriptions. "And this went on for five years!"
"Wow, for five years? I can't believe you didn't notice anything." That's a different voice, a different girl settling on his other side. It doesn't really matter. Spirit is not really seeing his surroundings anymore, not really feeling the heat of the air or the flaring heat of bodies next to him, just the shiver of panic seeping into his bones and the racing beat of his heart swamped with pointless adrenaline.
"Oh wow. You must have been really stupid back then!" Blair chirps, patting his back. Spirit doesn't argue the point. It's true, after all, though perhaps not for the reason she thinks.
"The only strange thing I noticed was that new scars would appear on my body every day." He is running his fingers over them as he speaking, unable to stop the years-old nervous habit, remembering the prickling pain of the skin pulling tight against stitches that single day with Kami looking at him like he's broken, like he's been shattered into something new and terrible. "If my ex-wife -" That comes easier this time, doesn't even catch on his tongue. "- hadn't figured out what was going on he might still be doing things to me!" The specter of Stein looms in his memory, taller than he ever was, dark and terrible and impossible to escape, a figure from his nightmares. The possibility of never finding out is horrible too, because Blair is right. How could he have missed the evidence, the lines of pain cutting across his skin? It shouldn't have taken someone else for him to find them, he should have noticed the very first time, and even now Spirit's not sure when that was, can only remember the last set of cuts and the burst of electric pain and unfamiliar emotional context as Stein shoved him away.
He tries to not think about this, tries to not think about Stein in general, because the nightmares are bad but they aren't as bad as the dreams that feel like memories, the ones that offer up betrayal in green eyes and a tremble against Stein's mouth, and how can that Stein and the other be one and the same, it doesn't make sense but the guilt is hitting Spirit now, as it always does when he remembers that agony in an all-too-human face and the weight of someone else's desire and hurt and need crushing the air from his lungs.
He shakes his head, forces his eyes to focus on the actual table in front of him. "I can't stand to think about it even now!" he declares, trying to change the subject even though he doesn't have any idea what else to offer in its place.
Blair is as fixated as a cat on prey, though, and her cheerful shell is as impervious to hints as to tears. "But you were Stein's weapon partner for five whole years, weren't you? Doesn't that mean your soul must have been compatible with his?"
This is only slightly better; there is less inexplicable guilt here, more betrayal but Spirit is used to betrayal, used to people leaving him behind. This is easier to face. His tears fade, settling into his throat as low-range resignation. "You don't understand. It doesn't matter." None of it matters, none of it did matter, all the years that Spirit thought he was important, all the time that he thought Stein needed him, the sacrifice he made of his comfort and his future and his body all for a lie. "If he has any interest in a weapon he can easily master it." Stein has wielded dozens of weapons, as if just to prove that he could, and even though Spirit tried to not hear he couldn't avoid the constant gossip at the Academy. Seven different weapon types, two weapons at once, three weapons at once (though the physical mechanics of that last were never really explained), and by the time he was raised to two-star status no one but Lord Death ever even remembered that he had been Spirit's partner, that Spirit had tried to hold him together because he thought there was no one else who could. Stein was this legendary thing and Spirit was just a falling star, Death Scythe the womanizer whose daughter hates him, whose wife left him, can't even stay sober long enough to finish a fight. Spirit wishes he didn't care so much, wishes that he could decide whether he is more upset that Stein betrayed the trust of their partnership or the importance Spirit thought he had. He should have expected it, really; it's not Stein's fault that Spirit is foolish, that Spirit is oblivious and stupid and misinterprets everything, that Spirit is just another idiot.
All the fight is gone from him now. There's no real point in fighting the truth anymore. The girls won't care enough to remember this conversation, and no one Spirit cares about will ever hear this admission. "He's much stronger and smarter than my wife, sorry, ex-wife." Even that doesn't really hurt, not on top of the other pain, "The one who made me into a Death Scythe." Spirit lifts his head away from his reflection, and the three separate images - the shadowed mad scientist, the hurt boy crackling with electric want, the legendary meister - resolve into half-judgment, half-compliment. "Stein's mad but he's a genius."
It's not enough, but no one's listening anyway.
