It is several days before Spirit is released from the infirmary to their new home. Stein does visit him at the academy for several hours a day, but he is constantly dreading Kami's reappearance, and Marie's presence is becoming an unavoidable distraction. Her continued stay means that Stein can't get Spirit alone, although what exactly he would do he's not sure. She also apparently volunteered that he has been visiting her, and now when Spirit looks at him his eyes are sad and he bites his lip when he forgets to keep track of his mouth. Stein doesn't know what Marie said to cause this or if it was her fault at all, but he can't stand to see Spirit's expression and not be able to do something about it.
Stein can't wait for his partner to come back, and even when he spends most of the daylight at the academy the nurse inevitably shows him the door well before he has anything else to do with himself. Their new home, an industrial laboratory at the edge of the city, is cavernous, too large for two inhabitants and agoraphobic for one, and the space feels hollow and cold without Spirit in it. All of the weapon's things were moved along with Stein's, but since the older boy hasn't been back to unpack them yet most of his room is covered in boxes that feel like dust and make it impossible for Stein to forget Kami's threat.
First he tries waiting it out. The emptiness of the house doesn't frighten him, and the loneliness is tolerable if not something he has experienced before, but in the quiet his mind keeps replaying memories he doesn't want to repeat. Unpacking everything he owns takes some time but not as much as it should. Without anything to fill the time, the nights alone become a burden to be defeated, but Stein doesn't have any sort of offense and doesn't know how he would go about finding one.
Sleep is the obvious answer, but his bed is unfamiliar with disuse when he tries to rest, and the drowsiness of relaxation opens up those same lurking memories as soon as he closes his eyes. It isn't until he wanders the house that the obvious problem - Spirit's absence - presents itself.
Even with the unpleasant connotations of moving boxes, Spirit's room feels warmer, like the boxes themselves carry a little of the weapon's self forward into this room he has never been in. Stein opens up all the boxes, pulls out most of their contents in an attempt to track down the source of that self, but in his hands the objects and clothes become just things, as if by touching them he is overwriting any of Spirit that might have clung to them before.
The real difference is the bed. Spirit packed up his other possessions, but the bed was moved more or less exactly as it had been, and although the space around it is now far larger than it was the mattress is still just the same. The weapon's more predictable sleep cycle has pressed a permanent indentation into the far edge of the bed; when Stein lines himself up with it he can tell that Spirit is a couple inches shorter than he, that he has narrower hips but broader shoulders, and that Spirit tucks his head against the bottom edge of the pillow rather than the center. The pillowcase smells like Spirit's hair. The bed feels almost alive, like there is some ghost of the weapon clinging to the mattress and blankets. Stein doesn't realize he's fallen asleep and is dreaming until he wakes to painful daylight coming in through the narrow window.
After that he spends his time either in the infirmary with his weapon or sleeping away the intervening hours in the other boy's bed. Things are easier then, quieter in the space of his own brain; he can trample down the tangle of guilt and fear when he has Spirit right in front of him, and with the lingering residue of Spirit around him he can drop into the oblivion of sleep as an escape.
By the time Spirit is released, Stein is sure he will never need sleep again and is thoroughly tired of the infirmary visiting hours. Even the masochistic pain of watching Spirit limp out to their new home doesn't eclipse the satisfaction of having the older boy present in the space, filling up the rooms with his breath and his warmth and all the hundreds of tiny proofs of his existence. Stein wants Spirit to spread out, to wander through the too-large space and linger in each location, as if it were possible to fill a house with the evidence of inhabitants through force of will rather than the slow accumulation of time. But Spirit is not yet up to moving either easily or quickly, and when they arrive at the entrance to the laboratory he heads straight for his new bedroom without bothering to familiarize himself with the rest of the house. He pauses at the doorway to take in the utter destruction of the space, leaning heavily on the frame because Stein can't bear the contact that would follow an offer of physical support from him.
"Did you -" Spirit starts, and for the first time in his life Stein's mouth becomes infected with nerves and he starts to speak before the weapon can finish the question.
"I was trying to unpack." He slows down his speech deliberately, uncurls the words into flatness in his mouth before setting them loose. "I thought I'd do some of the work for you before you got back, save you some of the effort. It turns out I don't actually know where any of your things go." The lies sound obvious to him, absurdly out of character for him and stiff with fear of discovery, but Spirit just laughs in the new shallow way he does to avoid hurting his cracked ribs.
"I don't know why you would. I appreciate the thought though." He reaches towards Stein with his free hand. The meister can feel his back stiffen in anticipation of the contact, but the touch stops short of his coat and Spirit pulls his hand back. "Sorry."
Stein wants to tell him that he doesn't need to apologize, that there is nothing that the meister wants more right now than the excuse of connection initiated by his injured partner, but if he were able to say what he wanted he wouldn't be where he is now. Instead he stays where he is, hands in his pockets and body still achingly tense with thwarted desire, while Spirit totters to the bed and carefully sets himself down.
"It's good to be back," the older boy offers as he lowers himself sideways to the mattress. He turns his head downward into the pillow for a moment, inhales hard against the fabric, tips his head back up and smiles. "Everything smells like home."
The happiness on Spirit's face and the distance between their bodies is too much. Stein backs out of the room, turns and almost runs down the hallway until he is out of the weapon's range of view.
When he comes back an hour later, Spirit is curled into the same loose curve Stein has been fitting himself into for a week, hugging his pillow to his face and breathing into it with a truly beatific expression for someone whose face is still bruised blue and purple. Stein eases the door shut behind him, lowers himself to the floor, and pulls his knees up in front of him so he can hug them to his chest.
This is not the way it was supposed to be. Stein understands that Spirit needs rest and that the travel from the academy was hard on him, but the rest of the space is as lonely and empty as it was before the weapon arrived, and now that he has reclaimed his own bed there is nowhere for Stein to wrap himself in the remnants of his partner's presence. Moving out of the infirmary and away from the attendant audience was supposed to make things better, supposed to allow for the closeness that Stein has been aching for, but Spirit has brought all the sadness in his eyes home with him and Stein has no idea how to step over the awkwardness. His skin feels cold and his body is tingling with itchy adrenaline, and he wants to do something but can't think of what it should be. All he knows is that the distance between Spirit and himself is becoming unbearable, that having the weapon so close now makes it impossible to miss what has changed in the last weeks, and that he is forgetting how to think on his own.
Spirit's sleeping warmth was enough for comfort when he first came into the room, but the chill in Stein's bones is leeching all the heat out of the hands are starting to shake, and he will never be able to carry out his plans if he can't regain control over his own body. Stein pushes himself to his feet and steps towards Spirit with carefully silent deliberation as he retrieves the needle of anesthetic from his pocket.
There is a moment of hesitation like a pause just before jumping off a cliff. There will be no coming back from this. This is premeditated and thoroughly deliberate and Stein is as sure as he ever is about others' feelings that Spirit will never forgive him for this. He almosts leaves. He almost says Spirit's name. He almost doesn't hear Kami's words - "He has other options" - shiver through his memory.
He turns Spirit's flushed arm wrist-up with icy fingers and slides the needle carefully into the deep veins at the weapon's elbow.
The hardest part is moving Spirit once the anesthetic takes effect. It only takes a few minutes; Stein waits until the older boy's body goes heavy with the limpness of true unconsciousness before he tries to pick him up. He is able to lift the weapon, but only just barely; the dead weight of another body is much harder to handle than he expected, and the radiant heat of Spirit's skin keeps pulling Stein's mind away from the task at hand. Once Stein gets Spirit down the hallway to the room he has prepared, he has to deal with getting the weapon's shirt off as well, but that is relatively easy to manage, although the prospect of maneuvering it back on is not appealing.
Then there's just Spirit unconscious in front of him. There is a rising tide of nausea in Stein's stomach; this is totally different than the first time, when everything was fast and hot and there wasn't enough time to process what he was doing until it was done. This is slow and cold and planned and calculated, and he knows with absolute certainty that this is not normal, that this is a betrayal of Spirit's trust on a totally new level. But he's too far gone now, he's fully commited at this point, and Kami's words are ringing in his ears and his desire to own Spirit and to be Spirit is flooding into his veins and he couldn't stop now if he wanted to.
The white light overhead is less forgiving than the starlight but better suited to Stein's mood tonight, and when the scalpel breaks Spirit's bruised skin the red shows up properly crimson instead of nearly black. Stein drags his fingers through it to paint a scarlet stripe across Spirit's flushed skin. This isn't what he intended but with the color in front of him he can't keep his hands clear. When he moves to continue the stain on his fingertips transfers to the scalpel in his hands and sticks there too, like Spirit's mortality is spreading out to infect the environment and the objects in Stein's hands and Stein himself. The meister closes his eyes, and even in the taunting darkness behind his lids Kami's voice has gone silent.
He pushes harder on the next pass.