My apologies for the delay in getting this one up. It needed a LOT of work (the first second was pretty much rewritten from scratch), so it was hard to get started. It is roughly 1,002 times better now.

Edits posted 11/6/2011.


He pulled on his gloves and began to ready his tools, and she laughed.

"And here I was thinking you'd finally learned some sense."

Stein bit down hard on his lip to hold back a laugh of his own. If he'd had any sense, he would have been in a cell beneath the Academy, sanity driven away by the darkness but at least powerless to hurt anyone. If he'd had sense, he would have given up. But instead he was still foolish, still egotistically jealous of his own soul. In prison, he wouldn't be able to hurt anyone, but he wouldn't be he anymore because the darkness would erase him and he would become overlapping screams of destruction and fear and the need to tear everything apart until it could be broken down no further, but with nothing to destroy or fear or take apart save himself, and if he still had control, any control at all, then surely he didn't need to do that yet, shouldn't have to—

He realized, when a forceps slipped from his hand and clattered into the tray, how badly he was shaking, and he made himself stop that train of thought. No. No. He'd been over it hundreds of times already, so he knew it was desperate and self-serving and more optimistic than he had any right to be. But he had already made up his mind, so all that mattered was that in prison, he couldn't do this.

"How long has it been? You were so good about it, so diligent about not cutting yourself open for a while," Medusa said, coy and smug. Stein watched her slender fingers glide along the edge of his tray. "But in the end, you can't fight it, can you? Poor thing. I keep telling you, Marie would make the perfect—"

"Save it," he snapped, and was surprised when she didn't speak over him. Usually she took an inexhaustible pleasure in provoking that kind of hallucination, the kind that made him too sick and shamed to even answer Marie's concerned chatter.

Instead, this time, she said, "Then come back, Stein. I'll let you inside of me as long as I get a turn with you."

In her voice, he could hear her smiling at what might as well have been a private joke between the two of them: that her double entendre didn't even need to be a double entendre to be attractive. Not for them. Her fingers closed gently around one of his scalpels, and for a moment his mind went blank and he forgot why insanity was worth fighting against. Yes, she was a liar, a monster, mad with the desire to destroy, but how could he condemn her for that when his own desire to tear, to gouge, to ruin, was every bit as strong? Was it wrong for them to prey on each other? Maybe the world would get lucky and they would destroy each other. Or maybe it was better for the world if they turned their lusts outward and culled inaction and weakness and whatever else they could get their hands on—

"Admit it, Doctor Stein. You belong with me."

—But Stein's muscles jerked and suddenly his mind was back on the right track. For a moment, he'd thought she was going to say You belong to me, and with a flare of resentment he remembered the cold superiority with which she used to hold him, her arms an impassive cage. It wasn't the right reason, but it was enough. He reached for the scalpel she was holding, and the hallucination dissolved when he didn't feel her skin.

She gave a theatrical sigh. "If you insist… "

The snake was in his stomach. He had taught himself to sense it, to track its movements by the feeling of her magic—a feeling with which he was intimately familiar. So he knew when it uncoiled itself and began to move, and he knew when it suddenly stopped. Hearing Medusa's soft gasp, he allowed himself the tiniest of smirks.

"That's impossible," she protested, perhaps unaware that Stein could hear her. The snake writhed again, looking for another route of escape, but it found none. He'd left none. Taking a deep breath to prepare himself, he made an incision across his stomach. The pain cleared his head like drawing back a curtain and focused him on what he needed to do.

"That's impossible," Medusa repeated, sounding almost petulant now. "You can't do that alone!"

Soul Sutures—well, not quite. It was a much simpler, much less precise technique based on a similar principle. He'd coated his own stomach with his wavelength. It wasn't a strong barrier—nowhere near what he would have been able to manage with Spirit's or even Marie's help, and he certainly wouldn't have been able to do this on anyone but himself—but it was enough to stop one of Medusa's snakes from roaming through his body at will, as long as he focused. And he needed to focus, not on the pain or the beauty of the blood that was starting to leak out of him, but on his task. On the knowledge of what he needed to do. On the thought of excising Medusa from himself, and not yet on what a victory it would be but on the action itself. He moved to put the scalpel down, but—

"Tell me something, Stein," Medusa demanded. Suddenly she appeared again, her eyes burning and her hand firmly wrapped around his own, trying to direct the blade. He heard someone make a whimper of fear and realized belatedly that the sound had come from his own throat. His hand trembled with the effort of not moving the scalpel according to her will.

"Do you honestly think this will be enough?" she asked. "What do you think will happen to your mind without the structure of my control? It won't get any better. Under all your play-acting and all your effort, you lack the instinct for the order you claim devotion to. You know this. You've always known that the only way to keep yourself from hurting others is to remove yourself from the equation entirely."

Stein's heart was pounding, and he tried to remember how to breathe.

"If Marie came in and found you like this…" Medusa said, lingering on each word, "how long do you think you'd resist before attacking her? You're broken, Stein; you're out of control, and denying that does no good for anyone. You need to give up."

Stein choked on—what? Laughter, a noise of terror, he couldn't tell because his thoughts were all bleeding into each other, fear and bloodlust and shame. He couldn't feel Medusa's touch any longer, but his knuckles were aching with the urge to cut deeper, to dig into his body and take out all his flaws, even if that meant—his hand opened and dropped the scalpel to the floor, and his mouth opened and spit out words from some inaccessible part of him, sane and stupid—

"Desperate, jealous bitch—Don't you have more dignity than to play 'if I can't have you, no one c—' kkh—"

He had to stop because of the pain and because it reminded him that there were other things for him to focus on right now. Panting, he reached for his forceps but couldn't get his fingers to grasp them because he wanted to sink his fingers into the warm flesh of his own gut, and he didn't have the time to fight the urge so he had to just hope it wouldn't kill him. He gritted his teeth and pushed his way in; his vision went red with pain and it took every ounce of concentration in him not to relax his wavelength. Just a minute longer. That was all. After that, either Medusa would be gone or the thing tearing at his mind would have its way at last and he would no longer have to wear himself out fighting it. His breath caught then, in terror and pain and at how nice his blood-soaked fingers felt slipping against each other like this—and he reminded himself again to focus, focus, because—because there it was. He pinched the wiry creature between his fingers and it writhed desperately but he wasn't about to be distracted by struggles as pitiful as that. There was a wet sound as he pulled his hand free. Then he forced the snake into a test tube, corked it in, and breathed a long, tired sigh. He was shuddering and his stomach was throbbing, but his thoughts began to settle again.

It would be wiser to just destroy the snake—he knew that, especially since he could feel laughter rising in his throat like bile—but dammit, he deserved a chance to gloat. With one hand pressed to his wound, he drove the pain from his mind in order to hold the test tube at eye level and give it a light, mocking shake.

"You lose, Medusa," he said, a wicked smile spreading across his face. "Your hold on me is gone."

The snake was coiled at the bottom of the test tube, barely moving. Its arrow head was looking at him through smears of blood, and Stein found himself wondering what expression Medusa wore as she watched him. Bitterness? Grudging acknowledgement? Or the fiery hatred he'd only seen once or twice, furor that he had the gall to oppose her and win?

"It never occurred to you that I had a chance, did it? That I'd have the strength, the mental composure to excise you from myself? You thought it was only a matter of time before I returned to you and let you put my broken mind back together as you saw fit." And he gave a sharp laugh—but he had to cut himself off abruptly because he could feel more laughter trying to boil over after it. There was a fit coming for him; there was no denying this and he was past the point of resisting it, but he could not let Medusa see. Catching his breath in a way he hoped wasn't too obvious, he smirked at the snake. "I'll never go back to you," he said, not gloating this time but simply telling the truth. He'd somehow made it through the worst. There was nothing in the world, now, that could drag him back to her.

"Good-bye, Medusa." He wrapped his hand around the test tube and hit it with a Soul Menace that was certainly overkill—but with Medusa, one could never be too careful. And then he shuddered as madness rolled over him, and he laughed, laughed from the bottom of his heart, euphoria filling every last cell of his body, until Marie burst in and held his shoulders tightly and pulled him back and pointed out that he'd cut his stomach open and should really stitch it back up, and even then with her sitting there he kept laughing because finally, at long last, he'd won.

x

Far away, Medusa stared into her now-empty crystal ball and gave a weak chuckle—maybe out of admiration, or disbelief, or maybe to camouflage what would have sounded like a sob otherwise—and she hoped that the stupid bastard bled to death before he pulled himself together again.

x

When Marie's wavelength finally cleared his mind, the first thing Stein said to her was, "Get away from me." His voice was cold and toneless and Marie wasn't sure what he was thinking, so she released her vice-grip on his shoulders and took a few cautious steps backwards. For a long moment, Stein did nothing; then he gave a sigh and reached a shaking hand towards the bottle of iodine on his nightstand, and he began cleaning himself.

"I don't remember giving you permission to come in."

"Permission? Exactly who is the guard and who is the prisoner here?" Marie asked lightly, a bit awkwardly. And then, her tone more serious, "I did my best, you know. I hesitated, and I did come in ready to defend myself, but I couldn't just sit back and do nothing. You sounded…"

"Insane?" he prompted.

Marie nodded reluctantly.

"Just because I didn't hurt you this time doesn't mean it wasn't stupid."

"I know."

"Don't do it again."

But he didn't chase her out, so she stayed, hovering nearby and watching him put himself back together. Gaping, self-inflicted stomach wound aside, he looked better than she'd expected. Not emaciated. Not scraggly and about to fall apart. Not, for the moment at least, too insane.

"Are you okay now?" she ventured as he tugged the last of the stitches tight and peeled off the rubber gloves.

In response, he gave a lean grin and indicated a spot on his bedspread. Among all the blood, there were shards of glass and a burnt-looking spot.

"What is that?"

His grin stretched further. "Until a few minutes ago, it was a snake."

Her mouth falling open, she looked at the burnt spot, and back at him, and—"You're kidding," which wasn't what she meant; she meant shock and disbelief and faint irritation at herself for having no idea. "It… she… was inside of you?"

He nodded.

"This whole time?"

Nodded again.

Before she knew it, she'd raised her hand as if to slap him. "Why didn't you—"

"Please don't hit me right now. I just lost a lot of blood."

She could see that his eyes were bleary, so she lowered her hand again and didn't comment that it was his own fault he'd lost that blood. Besides, what was there to blame when he'd lost it in the process of getting the witch out of him? And that meant that every time he'd vivisected himself since getting home… She wouldn't have stopped him, if she'd known. She could have helped him, could have sent her electricity through him and killed the snake—

"Why didn't you say anything?"

"She would have used it to hurt you, too."

"…Killed me, you mean."

"Eventually." His mouth stretched into a pained smile. "But it would be slow."

Marie shivered at the thought, and Stein continued shakily, "I don't think you're in danger now. I think she has other priorities or she would have come to get me long ago. But… please… avoid being alone unnecessarily."

"All right. Still…" she said quietly. "I wish you'd said something."

Stein shuddered and shook his head. "I couldn't. I know what she's capable of, Marie, what she likes to—"

But he must have realized, as she approached, that it had been an idle thought rather than a practical one, because he fell silent and let her sit down next to him. He did pull away, though, when she tried to embrace his shoulders.

"Stein…"

"Not yet," he mumbled.

Her heart ached for him. "Stop suffering alone," she pleaded.

"Sorry. Force of habit, I guess."

"It's a bad one. You should fix it."

"Mm." He was noncommittal, patient with her attentions if not altogether appreciative. She sat there with him, and in a few minutes he relaxed and leaned carefully against her; and she didn't mind the blood on her pajamas and smearing into her skin because it meant he was learning to trust himself again.