Spirit stays home from class for three days. Stein doesn't ask for an explanation, and his partner doesn't offer one; he is just present when he's usually not, a mild and pleasant distraction while Stein is maneuvering through the apartment during his usual day. And then one morning Stein's attention is pulled away from his reading by the sound of Spirit's movements, earlier than the weapon ever gets up on his own, and the soft click of the front door indicates the return to their normal routine.
A normal routine for Spirit, anyway. Stein's habits lack the regularity to be called a routine, and he has been forming a plan over the few days of unusual company; daytime solitude and the confidence of preparation now give him the opportunity to put it in motion. He waits until the flood of punctually compliant students will have diminished to a trickle of irresponsible late-risers, and then he sets aside his books and his notes and makes his way to the DWMA.
He has been to the infirmary before, usually after particularly difficult assignments that leave he or Spirit or both in need of a few stitches or other treatment, so it is easy to find his way there now. It is nearly empty when he enters; only one of the handful of beds is occupied, as he expected, and the school nurse is labelling bottles at the desk near the door. The nurse looks up as Stein comes in and his eyes flicker with recognition.
"Hey there Stein," he offers, setting down his pen. "I haven't seen you recently. How are you and Spirit doing?"
"We're fine," Stein responds. He doesn't particularly enjoy small talk, but it's easy enough to keep up one end while thinking about something totally unrelated. "The last few assignments were fine for us. Actually, I wanted to see how Marie is doing."
The name is awkward on his tongue. He has practiced saying the weapon's name, repeating the unfamiliar syllables over and over until they fall with the ease of long use, but sounding broken-in is very different than feeling so in his head. His discomfort is limited to his own thoughts, though, because the nurse blinks at him and smiles.
"I didn't know you two knew each other," and since this is Stein's goal he doesn't correct the other man. "She's been quiet for the last few days. Hasn't had visitors yet; the other students are busy and," here his voice drops to a whisper Stein can barely hear, "it's always hard to know what to say in this sort of situation." The nurse's volume jumps back to a normal level as he continues. "It's good of you to take time off class to come and see her. I think she'll be happy to see you."
"Thanks," Stein says with forced casualness. The other man turns back to his labelling and Stein moves past a half-drawn white curtain into the main space of the infirmary. There are just a handful of beds, each one made up with clinically white sheets and military precision, none occupied except for the one farthest from the door and closest to the window. The injured weapon is turned sideways with her back to Stein, so he is almost level with the row of beds before she hears his footsteps and turns.
"Oh." She pushes herself up so she's sitting normally, tries to tuck her mass of golden hair behind her ears - its own weight promptly pulls it back around her face - and tugs her shirt straight. "Hi. You're Spirit's partner, right? Franken?"
"Stein." He corrects. Stein sits on the adjourning bed so he can face her, reaches up to adjust his glasses needlessly so he can blink into Soul Perception. "How's it going?"
The girl's forehead creases. Her mouth opens, shuts, opens again while the tension in her forehead increases. Stein takes her hesitation to observe her soul wavelength.
The meister has used Soul Perception on all sorts of things. He tried on animals once or twice but never saw more than the flicker of uncontrolled instinct. Trained meisters are relatively impressive, as such things go; weapons are interesting too, usually stronger than meisters but critically weak in some way that their partner compensates for. This weapon's wavelength is so subdued that she looks almost like a normal human; Stein can't read much of her emotional state at all, beyond the grief that is collapsing her wavelength. He failed to count on this; it will make his investigation more difficult, but he is unwilling to admit defeat yet. Still, there's not much point in watching a wavelength that won't tell him anything, so he clears his vision and settles for gathering what little he can from the facial expression underneath the barely-healed bruises hiding her face.
"I'm fine," is what she finally says in response to his query, which is such a blatant lie that even he can see through it.
Stein tips his head to the side, composes his features in what he hopes looks something like sympathy. "It will be better if you talk about it, you know."
Her lips tighten and she looks away from him, out towards the glare of the window. "You know what happened. You were there."
"I know the events," he corrects. "But your experience was significantly different than mine. Have you talked about it with anyone at all yet?"
The perfect silence and unbroken stillness from his listener is enough information for him to continue.
"You should." He is trying to make his voice softer; it definitely drops in volume but he's not sure it's conveying what he wants, and it's a relief she's not looking at his face because he has no idea what sort of expression he should have in this situation. "It will help. I promise."
There is no way he can keep this promise and no real reason she should trust him, but the weapon's shoulders shift and she glances at him before she responds. "You're the first visitor I've had." Her voice is cracked with repressed tears and Stein knows he has her, that she'll tell him anything he asks now. "No one can stand to look at me or to talk to me, it's -" She cuts herself off, turns her head away so her hair is curtaining her face. It is long minutes before she speaks again in a voice tight with barely-imposed control.
"I didn't know that I could feel this alone." Stein can't see her face; with her hair blocking his vision she could be perfectly healthy, except for the dark line of an eyepatch cutting through the gold. "Having a partner - meeting Roger was like meeting part of myself. He was me and I was him and I didn't - I had never felt so right." Her voice cracks and she takes a long, shaky breath before going on.
"I don't know what it's like for you. Maybe everyone feels that way with their partners. It is - it was -" Her self-imposed correction is brutal. "- was wonderful."
"And now?" Stein pushes, because he knows all this, knows what it is like to have a partner, and that is not what he is here for.
"Now I -" The weapon lifts her head so her face is turned up towards the sunlight of the window, so the dark reds and purples of broken veins are highlighted by the day. She shakes her head and when she speaks again the tension in her voice is gone and there is only the heaviness of resignation. "I think I'm going to be broken forever. It's not just that Roger is -" Her voice gives out as her visible eye overflows with tears, but she swallows hard and goes on anyway. "It's not just that I'm alone, it's like I'm incomplete. And I don't think I can get that missing piece back again." There is the slightest laugh, more of a half-exhale than anything else, and it doesn't touch her face at all. "Besides, I'm not much good as a weapon without anyone to wield me."
"What if you had another partner?" Stein asks. It seems like the logical solution to the problem, but the girl turns her gaze on him as all the muscles in her jaw tighten and he can tell that something has gone wrong.
"I don't want another partner." She is almost spitting the words, they are coming so fast and so hard. "I want my meister. How would you like to swap out weapons?"
Stein came here to collect information. He wants to know what it is like to be a weapon, what it is like to lose a meister, what it would be like for Spirit if he were injured or killed. His curiosity has all been clinical and distant; he never considered the possibility of losing his partner. For a brief moment his mind offers up what could have been, what still might be at some point, and when he looks at the weapon in front of him he can see the reality of his hypothetical reaction all over her face and he understands exactly what she is feeling. It reminds him of Resonance, the way that the boundaries between himself and Spirit blur, and it is terrifying. He pulls back mentally from the thought and physically from Marie, jerking backwards so he can feel like he is himself again.
Her face relaxes and she is back into the wide-eyed softness of earlier. "Exactly," she says, as if his reaction made any sense at all. "It's awful. I need a meister to become a death weapon but I don't want anyone but Roger."
Her voice trails down to a whisper on the last syllables, and she brings her hands up to cover her face while her shoulders shake with emotion that is now thankfully distant again. Stein knows that this is the right time to offer the physical contact that is so overwhelming for him and so comforting for others, but he can't stand the thought of reopening the connection that he has only just managed to sever, so instead he clasps his hands in his lap and watches Marie's reaction with all the removal he can call up.
By the time the girl's trembling sobs fade into exhausted silence, Stein has reasserted control over his emotions and is ready to offer another sally on Marie's experiences.
"How are you doing physically?" He feels like the change of subject is awkward and obviously forced, but the weapon looks up with a tired smile and answers.
"Not good, obviously." She raises a hand towards her face before letting it fall back into her lap. "They've got me dosed up on all sorts of painkillers but everything I can feel hurts. It must look pretty terrible too." Her eyes relax into softness as she goes on. "You're the only person who's seen me since I got patched up and didn't look like he was going to be sick. Even the nurse is appalled. I'm glad there's no mirrors I can see from here, that's all."
"It's not that bad," Stein lies. "The bruises will fade eventually. And you can still see."
Marie's face falls. "Just the one eye, though. Goodbye depth perception, I guess."
Stein shrugs in affected nonchalance. "They did a good job of patching you up. I thought it would be a lot worse."
He still can't get enough emotion into his words - he can hear the lack but isn't sure how to remedy it - but the girl is smiling at him, the curve of her mouth reaching up to her uncovered eye, so the words alone must be doing the trick.
"Actually." He pauses just long enough to give the impression that he is nervous, looks away from the weapon's face in deliberate imitation of Spirit's everpresent shyness. "I know this is kind of weird, but -" Inhale, hold for a moment, exhale gustily. Look up at the weapon with the best approximation of self-consciousness he can muster. "Can I - see it?"
The girl looks at him for a moment with her expression blank of understanding or reaction. He can actually see the comprehension splash over her face, sparkling in her uncovered eye and triggering an unconscious smile before it vanishes.
"Sure." She is much less upset by his request that he had expected. If anything, the memory of her brief smile is still lingering at the corner of her mouth when she reaches up to untie the bow at the back of her head. "It's probably pretty bad, but since I haven't seen it yet I don't know how gruesome it is. Try not to scream."
This last is said with a smile, but there is tension around her eyes that indicates something more than teasing. She only hesitates for a moment before she pulls the patch away and turns her head so he can see the injury.
Her face is patterned red and blue with the bruising damage she took during her last fight, but the oval of her face that was covered by the patch is much worse than Stein expected it could be, almost black and swollen with misplaced blood that hasn't yet been handled by the body. There is a row of stitches running straight down from her eyebrow to the top of her broken cheekbone, the perfectly straight cut and neat sutures contrasting dramatically with the haphazard mess of everything around them. The broken skin itself is angry red and looks so raw that Stein half-expects it to still be bleeding, but the edges of the injury are held carefully together by the thread. When he blinks, he imagines he can see the time-lapse recovery of Marie's skin and bone, her cheekbone knitting itself back into a single whole, the red blood under her skin reabsorbing as it fades through blue and purple and green and yellow back to health, the torn skin of her face reaching out to the other side until it has reconnected with itself. He knows exactly how she will look when she has healed, with only the raised edge of a scar to testify to the amazing resilience of her body. He wonders if her mind will prove to have the same elasticity. He suspects so, although his psychology textbooks stress the importance of treating patients as individuals. It will be an interesting observation.
Marie is watching his face, eyes wide and face tight. He has leaned in towards her, he realizes, trying to get a better view without touching her, and she hasn't angled back, so he is much closer to her face now than he was. It takes an effort to pull back and look away into the blinding light of the sunshine.
"They did a good job," he offers. "You'll be fine." He lets his general confidence in his own opinions saturate the words, and Marie smiles in response.
"Thanks." She looks away while she ties the eyepatch back over the worst of her injury. "You really are totally unfazed, aren't you?" She doesn't wait for a response before continuing. "That helps. A lot." She glances back over at him for a moment before looking down at her hands. Stein recognizes the expression from Spirit, although he can't tell if she's blushing like his weapon does behind the disguise of her bruises.
"I'm glad you came," she tells her hands.
That requires some sort of response. "Thanks for talking to me." He gets the sense, again, that he should be doing something, offering a hug or touching the weapon's shoulder, but he stays where he is. "Do you mind if I come back?" He knows she won't, but the asking is part of the process so he offers it anyway.
Her face glows with pleasure. "No, not at all. It'd be great to have someone to talk to."
"Okay." He tries on a smile as he stands and shoves his hands into his pockets in what he hopes looks like awkwardness instead of the distaste it is. "I'll see you soon."
The weapon watches him go. He can feel the tension of being observed lingering in his shoulderblades until he has made his way to the doorway, offered a token nod to the nurse, and the door clicks shut behind him. In the middle of the day as it is the hallway around him is empty. Stein leans against the wall and lets his eyes shut, waiting until his mind calms to its normal low buzz before he makes his way down the hall to wait outside Spirit's classroom for the remaining hours before his partner emerges.