for DollyPop, who's SteinMarie fics have inspired and accidentally aligned with this one as i wrote and read
raspberryfanfics presents: an angsty fic with major feminist tone she uses to cope for her lack of male attention
Her first meister became her best friend from the moment they met.
Marie remembers it pretty clearly. After all, the two of them were so alike that it was the only time she truly believed in soulmates.
They both possessed great strength and ambition.
They both were kind and protective over their friends.
They both shared feminist ideals and fought for independency.
And they were both wronged by lovers who could not love properly, the very type of heartbreak they would swear not to endure.
But then again, similar souls were never able to balance out, and they were never really suited for each other in the end, not like he was.
before
Marie Mjolnir had always been kind but had not always been naïve.
She punched boys before she punched monsters and in a way, they were the same. In each, you had to train to achieve what they were born with, they faced you with unwavering arrogance, and when you defeated them, the victory was sweeter than anything you could taste.
The first boy she beat up was in kindergarten. She had not provoked him but he had told another girl that her blonde hair looked like a dry hay stack. Marie had fumed in anger.
Her otherwise kind nature often exceeded her but it was clear that she would go great lengths to keep an innocent person protected from harm.
The most explicit part of that memory were not the punches thrown or the sharp battle cry, but the evident pain shining through the girl's eyes. Marie had blonde hair too, even if her blonde hair was golden like sunshine, not platinum like beach sand. And Marie loved her hair, couldn't imagine not loving her hair.
"You meanie," she had cried out, biting his wrist and pulling his hair. He ran off crying. She was nearly sent off to detention had it not been for her mother's quick ability to talk her out of the situation.
Instead of yelling at her, her mother brought her to the little girl's house. Her name was Psyche. Their mothers explained to them the inequalities that girls like her would begin to face, especially when it came to boys and their inexplicably large egos. The two of them listened with wide-eyed attention, unable to see anything else at the time.
They started to race each other from their houses every day, kata stances after dinner, and studying late at night in hopes of becoming stronger. They excelled in all the ways boys were expected to excel at and proved not only their classmates, but their classmate's parents and teachers wrong.
Yet while the typically masculine traits were wrapped around their finger, it perhaps was even more annoying and intimidating to the boys because the two of them also worked to become extremely beautiful as well. They learned to braid hair and wear pretty dresses and talk themselves out of situations the way her mother had. The two were simply an unstoppable force, knocking out those who dared to perceive them or other girls as less than guys with ferocious elegance. And they were only children.
When they enrolled in the DWMA, however, everything changed.
Marie and her best friend, her new meister not to mention, were not used to losing.
Yet perhaps it wasn't the part that they lost that upset them, but the fact that when they lost, no matter how much more they trained, they could not catch up. Even so, they tried and tried, always trailing after the weapon meister duo who always did better on every test whether that was physical or intellectual. Franken Stein and Spirit Albarn were simply amazing and the two could only give up.
And maybe what upset them more was the sheer arrogance that accompanied the two, the sense of superiority that they should not have been allowed to possess. With every mistake Marie and Psyche made, the boys would look down upon them and not just because of a lesser grade, but because of all the years combined of internalized sexism that Marie understood like the back of her hand. She called them out when needed, but offered them kindness otherwise.
That was what really made them better, however. Marie and Psyche had developed a good relationship with every single person in their academy, lending their notes, sharing their sandwiches, and listening to each of their problems with the same consideration as they would for each other. They had the whole school unintentionally wrapped around their fingers.
As for their relationships with Stein and Spirit, it was rocky.
With Spirit, despite how annoying he was, flirting with all the girls, professing a new love every two seconds, and being the loudest in the class, there was a type of charm they couldn't explain, the way you couldn't explain the wonder of the stars or the mystery of the moon. He became a part of them you couldn't imagine living without, the way a younger brother was.
Yet with Stein, things were different. No one really liked him all that much. No one liked how his hair was silver, not like jewelry, but the metal bars of a cage. How his eyes were hooded with dark bags every morning or how he chewed through toothpick after toothpick in concentration.
While his obscure pranks were entertaining on rare occasions, (less rare than they really cared to admit), it was hardly enough for them to be convinced that he was harmless. But perhaps the worst was when he would arrive at school with his bleachy white jacket and when he left there would be the unmistakable stain of blood from who knows where.
His eyes would light up at the prospect of more science, even more so when there was an animal involved. He cut open books, flowers, stuffed animals, radios...anything he had was often accompanied by a scalpel. They all feared him and his seemingly psychopathic tendencies. But the one who feared him most was Spirit himself, who quaked at just the sight of his meister.
To be honest, for every day he would get worse until Spirit had seemed crazier than Stein himself. His chatter was composed of incomprehensible ramblings and a jittery, unlikeable personality. His charm was slowly burning away like candle wax and his leafy green eyes seemed to turn yellow. They started to wonder what was driving him insane but nothing could come to mind.
And then it happened.
Psyche had stormed into class late, not the first time it had happened but certainly the first time she had done so while dragging Spirit with her. In her eyes was a ferocious type of anger only a wildfire could possess and it had no mercy. Marie watched as she marched with intent, no wavering, up the stairs to none other than Stein.
His face remained stoic, cold against the hot and the whole class wondered if ice would melt or fire would extinguish but even more so, why?
"YOU SADISTIC PSYCHOPATH!" she screamed. "HOW COULD YOU LACK SO MUCH COMPASSION THAT YOU WOULD THROW SPIRIT INTO AN ANESTHETIC STATE JUST TO EXAMINE HIS BODY AND STITCH HIM BACK UP AGAIN AS IF HE'S A CADAVER? WHY WOULD YOU LET YOURSELF DO THAT? DO YOU HAVE EVEN AN OUNCE OF SELF-CONTROL?"
And the class was silent. The teacher stared at the two, eyes beckoning for proof. And when she grabbed Spirit again and lifted his shirt, showing a multitude of fresh scars, they had to look away. They were in places that could have only been done by another person, too perfect to have been caused by something that wasn't a scalpel, too cruel to be done by someone other than Stein.
She punched him that day, harder than Marie had seen her meister punch anyone before. But Psyche wasn't really her meister anymore. She was just her best friend. Because with a traumatized Spirit and an uncompassionate Stein, something had to change.
Even for Marie.
It wasn't a surprise when Stein became her new meister, after all it was a realistic switch. It didn't bother the rest of the class, just the two pairs that had caused such a commotion in the first place. However, she still was not prepared for the change of pace nonetheless.
His soul wavelength was huge, irregular, and she could barely keep up with it even if he could with her. She collapsed during their first round of training, her hair was a mess, sweat sticking to her clothes. While she had endured harder, those battles were ones she chose to endure. She never wanted to be his weapon. She didn't want to give up her life to protect him.
Not to mention, he stared at her in that creepy way again, more than ever. As if he would love to get under her skin and take out her organs one by one and run all the tests in the world.
But she had no other choice but to bear with him.
A week into their partnership, she had decided to bring an extra sandwich for him after seeing how his plain, peanut-butter and jelly on white bread with what she swore were edible stitches. They were moving in together next week, in her opinion, would not strengthen their soul connections, but she may as well try.
She made him a caprese sandwich. She layered arugula, local mozzarella, home-grown tomatoes, pine-nut pesto, and a drizzle of balsamic glaze on her favourite focaccia bread. She carefully placed it in a clear little sandwich lunchbox and gave it to him.
He refused at first; she wasn't surprised.
"It's a common gesture of kindness," she said. "Partners make each other lunch and if you want to be a good one, you should accept such gestures."
She smiled at him then, perhaps with a slightly threatening intent masked by her easy-going nature, and he was convinced. He took a bite out of her sandwich, examined it, then continued to eat until he was finished. She could at least find his manners completely respectable, he barely had any crumbs left.
"Did you like it?" she had after she had finished her own.
"I did," he replied. "What was in it?"
"Focaccia bread, pesto, balsamic glaze, mozzarella, tomatoes," Marie had grinned, feeling accomplished.
The next day, she brought him a pumpkin feta sandwich but she hesitated to take it out quickly because she realized that he didn't have the peanut-butter jelly one, but one that looked like a cheap knockoff of the caprese sandwich she made the day before. She didn't say anything, only ate quietly as she observed him take the first bite.
He immediately set it down.
"What's wrong?" she asked, though she could tell that his focaccia was sliced unevenly just from the bite he took.
"It's not as good as yours, but I used your ingredients," he said in confusion. Marie picked up his sandwich and carefully opened it. She saw a number of mistakes, ones that would burst his ego if she told him, but instead kept it to herself. While it was tempting, she was kind and did not want to upset the slow connection established. "Perhaps I should dissect it,"
"Uh, perhaps you can eat this sandwich and today I will come over and explain it to you. Why try and solve a problem you don't have the equation to, am I right?" Marie said quickly. She didn't know how she managed to offer him her extra sandwich and find an invite to his house, but she was a smart girl after all.
Or perhaps not.
Franken Stein's apartment was absolutely terrible, with metal walls and few windows, she had no idea how she was supposed to build a life there as his roommate. She questioned how Spirit had managed, all this time. She found his kitchen to be a few induction stoves that had probably endured more chemical spills than vegetable ones, his fridge full of preserved biological parts, and his knives to be mostly scalpels.
It sure explained a lot.
He took the focaccia out of the fridge and she cringed.
"It stales faster in the fridge than outside," she blurted out.
Stein didn't seem to be offended. "Yes, that makes sense. I haven't thought about it like that before. The starch molecules must have recrystallized very easily in comparison to a room temperature moist environment."
Marie did not bang her head against the wall (though it was heavily considered). He then set out the other ingredients. The tomatoes seemed fine, so did the canned pesto and arugula.
When he started cutting the focaccia, she stopped him. "You're holding the knife at an angle and pressing too hard on the top of the bread. It will deflate the fluffiness."
When he brought out the tomatoes, she stopped him as well. "The slices are too thin. While your knife skills are impressive, it will lose the texture quicker and you will be eating mostly cheese.
"Your mozzarella isn't fresh enough, it's the type that is great for melting and small budgets, but will be hard in texture in a raw sandwich.
"That's balsamic vinegar, not balsamic glaze and while it's quite delicious in salads, it's just going to make your sandwich acidic and watery.
"If you don't cut off the stems of the arugula then you're pretty much just eating stems alone"
He seemed both interested and deflated, as if something about this cooking intrigued him but he had no idea how hard it would be.
"Cooking takes practice," she explained. "But it isn't like math, where you learn an equation and continue until you get it, it's more like painting. Instead of practicing every brushstroke, you practice your intuition. And then one day, you put the most random combination of ingredients together and something wonderful happens. Of course, there is a fundamental level of science needed to understand cooking, but it's mostly about how you feel."
He stared at her blankly. "Clearly you are more intuition than observation. Care to take me to your poetry classes on the way?"
The comment was ignored.
"Let's go grocery shopping!" she exclaimed. "It will be fun!"
She taught him a lot that day. How to tell good bread by its crunch and lemons by the softness of the peel. She taught him how to pick avocados of different ripeness so that they could plan out when to eat them. She taught him how to plan out each meal before going shopping so they only would buy what they needed.
In the beginning, cooking was the only thing they could truly connect over. Because he had always been intrigued by science and her by art so when they combined them, it was satisfying enough. He easily mastered the caprese sandwich and she moved on to teach him to make grilled cheese and pancakes and vegetable soup. She taught him to decorate cupcakes and present salads and cut strawberry roses.
Perhaps it was some sort of hero complex for her. She loved the way she could help make a stoic reserved person enjoy one of the arts. Of course, it wasn't everything, but it really was a start.
When she moved in, she decorated her room with everything from her room with her old meister. Storybooks on shelves, fashion magazines organized by date, plants with LED lights accompanying them...she soon turned her part of the place into a habitable area where Psyche and Spirit could come over while forgetting Stein's existence.
She soon started moving in other things too.
Marie drew milliliter lines onto teacups and bowls, a unique touch she enjoyed, moved a couch into the living space, and sheer curtains by places she would imagine there to be windows. She placed plant after plant inside until it almost seemed to be a jungle. She even made her old dog move in, which was hard to convince him to let her do so but kindness often allowed room for manipulation.
Yet she could tell that some part of him was deeply unsettled by her presence. Sometimes it seemed like every time he walked into their place he was shocked by a warm nature rather than sterile. He nearly immediately headed straight to his bedroom, the only place she had not bothered to touch, and often spent hours there without even coming to help her cook.
And she too, would sometimes curl up in her bed, surrounded by fluffy pillows and soft linen sheets, but would feel loneliness eating her from the inside, consuming her. Even though Marie was trying to make the most out of it, she longed for her old life.
While a steady peace lingered at their home life, Marie had much bigger problems with Stein in regards to their connection. Though still at the top of their class, the other students were slowly catching up to them and they could barely resonate their souls for longer than ten minutes.
Spirit and her former meister had it easy. Their connection was instant, bound by mutual empathy. Yet with him, she couldn't really handle it. His wavelength was not only uneven, but it was cold. It was startling.
She was too scared to ask him to train outside of school, she didn't want to seem weak around someone she was intimidated by, but she knew she needed it. Marie instead studied all the books she could take out in the library and researched their resonance. Yet there always seemed to be holes in every one.
They had respect for each other but only due to power, not because of who they really were.
It took her a while to express her frustrations to him.
"Stein?" she had called out for him. He was dissecting a bird. He didn't bother to look up. "I need to talk to you."
"Aren't you talking to me right now?"
Marie refrained from screaming, the way she usually refrained from expressing herself to people she felt like were above her. "Yes, but I think we should talk about something serious."
"I'm listening,"
"But you're dissecting a bird…"
"Listening nonetheless…You're very hard to ignore, Marie Mjolnir"
All of the sugar-coated speech she had prepared in her head melted and was burnt to a crisp. She would make him taste the bitterness she felt. "I absolutely despise having you as my meister,"
Stein put his tweezers down slowly. The silence in the room was colder than the room itself. He didn't speak to her. She wondered what he would say, if he would ask for more context, as if he would throw his scalpel at her.
Instead, he slowly turned around in his chair and looked her dead in the eye. She hadn't seen his expression like that before, straight into her gaze with clear honesty. He wasn't offended, wasn't relieved, just looked at her and saw all of those frustrations and saw how she bottled it up.
"That's really a shame," he said slowly, "Because I really enjoy having you as my weapon,"
It was the biggest surprise of the century. Marie felt a part of her body go limp as she struggled for words. While she usually acted with kindness towards insults, few others did, especially not Stein. Whether or not his statement was just honesty or actual compassion, she couldn't tell. All she knew was that the long string of insults and retorts she had prepared could not be let go now.
He stood up then. Stein was extremely tall, towering over her. She had to look up at him and she didn't like it. He walked across the room and picked up a chair, then dragged it beside him.
"Sit," he said nonchalantly.
She did, she tensed, arms crossed in her legs, shoulders together in front of her.
"This is a parrot that belonged to the neighbors next door," he explained. "They don't know how he died, though with the way they argue, I would surely say that he wanted to kill himself in the first place.
"Anyhow," he handed her a box of gloves. "We're gonna find out.
"First, we take out the stomach, we examine its contents. It's usually the easiest cause of death when there is no physical damage." he handed her a gooey red organ and placed it on another plate. "Go on, open it,"
She hesitantly took her scalpel and ran it along the stomach until she found a disgusting smelling substance. "Ew, that is this?"
"Chyme. It looks pretty normal, just dig around and look for anything that is out of the ordinary."
"What about this?" she plucked a small stone that had a small glint to it.
"It looks like a lead pellet. The parrot likely found one and consumed it. We should take samples of its blood and see if that was the real cause of death."
They continued like this for a while, he would teach her how to dissect and while she wasn't completely as mesmerized as he was, there was something inexplicable intriguing about it.
"Why do you love cutting up living things so much?"
He shrugged. "I ask myself that too,"
"Is it because you would like to understand life and death itself?"
Stein never answered the question, not now, not ever. She truly believed that he didn't know what drew him towards it, what part of his brain couldn't handle the intrigue of the blood.
"You're a better weapon than Spirit," he said. He was cutting up the brain now. "At least for me, you are."
"But why?" it still confounded her, like the world's most unsolvable mystery. What would make them compatible, or to him, at least?
He shrugged again, but she could see the hint of a blush rise on his face. "I guess, sometimes you make me forget about dissecting and I just feel like a normal meister."
She grinned, her heart warming like a glowing fire. "I want to do extra practice, so we can get stronger. I want to be a death scythe one day."
He smiled as well. "Shall we go now, then?"
Years would pass and Kishin Eggs would be consumed but sometimes, even with twenty more souls in her system, she still felt like nothing had changed.
For her at least.
Psyche and Spirit were getting along well. He would piss her off all the time when he found pretty girls to look at and she'd elbow him in the chest so his breath was knocked out of him. But despite that, she often found him carrying home sacks of books to their house and when she'd come over, he was curled up on the couch lost in whatever he was reading. Sometimes she would see her old meister reading the same books too and exchanging conversations about them.
But perhaps the most surprising was when she was walking home with Stein and found the two of them reading under a tree, her head on Spirit's. It had been the type of contentment she had never seen on her best friend like that, the type that just partners or just friends didn't have. Was she in love? Marie couldn't tell. But all she could see was that every time a girl with a large chest walked by, Spirit's gaze would shift just a little and Psyche would pull away just a little and she was bound to be hurt by him, sooner or later.
When she asked about them, she was told that things were complicated and sure they were complicated enough, when the metal doors of her bedroom were thrown open and Marie now had a sobbing girl in her arms, professing her undying hate of the male species. And when this kept on happening, not only to her friend but many of the other girls in the DWMA, she wondered where they went wrong. When did they become girls with ambitions and dreams to become the greatest there ever was to girls who were sobbing over boys who weren't in tune with their emotions?
To her, love ended in heartbreak, and while she wasn't pessimistic, that fear kept her away from it. She told herself it was ridiculous, that all fears were meant to be faced and she was strong enough to. But no matter, when boys asked for her number and bought her flowers she sent them each away with a smile and a gesture of kindness. It was easy for her to go on dates and receive free chocolate but never a second one.
Sometimes she gave Stein some of the chocolates to share and she would tell him how each one would go, how they walked her to the door and went to kiss her goodnight but she would dodge, every time so they reached her cheek instead of her lips.
"Why don't you want a relationship?" he asked, as he picked out all the best chocolates that she earned with her beauty and charm. "Are you looking for love at first sight?"
"No, I just don't want to date anyone, ever," she replied, grinning. Their fingers brushed as they reached for the same chocolate. She froze at the contact, pulled away those fingers. Her breath caught in her throat.
"Go ahead," she smiled, withdrawing her hand.
"They are yours," he said, passing her the box. "I already have enough coffee to keep me jittery through the night."
"I can always get more," she smiled. "I can find dates easily enough,"
Stein paused, then set the box down. "I have a rare lagomorph specimen that someone has asked me to dissect."
He left her then and did not come out of the room for the rest of the evening.
She did the usual chores, washing dishes, doing her homework, meditation and further studying, but something gnawed at her from the inside until the night was pitch black and even the moon was asleep.
Marie wandered out of her room, exhausted. As she went towards the bathroom, she noticed that there was a faint glow from the door of Stein's room. Forgetting her task at hand, she slowly opened the door and saw him at his desk. His gloves were still on, the stench of acidic preservative heavy in the room. She was used to it. Yet he was asleep on his desk, glasses neatly folded by the lamp.
She entered his room and touched him on the shoulder. He was still asleep, Sighing, she picked him up from his chair, the years of heavy weight training paying off, and she dragged him onto the bed. He rose from his slumber then, eyes weighing down heavily.
"Marie?" His breath was soft like cotton bandages.
"Come on, I won't let you sleep at your desk. Your back will pay for it."
"I'm sorry," he whispered. "I'm sorry I can't be the partner you deserve."
"You have nothing to be sorry about," she insisted, though the words came too easily for her liking. "You're the best meister the academy has had and you're gonna make me into a death scythe."
"It's not just that…" he trailed off.
"Don't be sorry," she said. "Just go to sleep,"
He did shortly after, and she turned off his lamp as she headed to her room. But even with the remnants of his soft snores in her ear, she could not manage any sleep at all.
Stein started smoking when she had eaten 87 Kishin Eggs. They were only sixteen but he would buy them off of a man he'd meet up with every five days and buy four packs of cigarettes. Their home smelled worse than it had smelled ever before and while she was sick of it and as were her plants, she put up with it.
Yet she could see his growing addiction every time he was bored, jittery when not smoking, and going outside of school grounds to burn through a cigarette before having lunch with her. No one else was really surprised for after all, what was another addiction for Franken Stein after his one with dissections? A tobacco addiction was extremely tame compared to that of a dissecting one.
But Marie hated it.
As he became absurdly happier after a cigarette and she became grumpier, she had to try very hard to continue to be kind around everyone with the second-hand smoke burning in her lungs.
Her dog grew incredibly sick over the next few weeks. She blamed it on the cigarettes. She told him to stop. He didn't. And when her dog died, Marie was absolutely heartbroken. She couldn't come out of her room to go to school and sobbed for hours about it. But one thing was on her mind: how would this death feel after being in love?
Stein offered to dissect it.
"We can figure out his cause of death," he said as if it wasn't a big deal. "It could give you closure,"
"I don't need closure," she said coldly. "I need to grieve."
"Are you sure?"
"He was an old dog! And I know his cause of death! Not to mention your cigarettes were definitely not helping," she burst out crying again, sobbing into her knees.
"It wasn't my cigarettes. Besides, even if it was, there's only one way we can find—"
"I am burying my dog without him having to suffer any more damage done to his body!"
"He won't feel it, he's dead,"
"Shut up, Stein! Shut up and let me bury my dog!"
She did. She buried him and still cried the whole day. It was absolutely horrible.
A couple of weeks later, she decided to ask Stein to quit smoking again. He had not even given her a second glance before refusing.
"Just because your dog couldn't handle it doesn't mean you can't,"
Marie didn't lose her temper very often, but that day, she did. "WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU! IS IT SO WEIRD TO YOU THAT I WOULD WANT TO BURY MY DOG PEACEFULLY?"
He seemed a little more intrigued now that she was angry, an uncharacteristic emotion for her. "I let you bury your dog, remember? You won that,"
"But you have absolutely no compassion, you sadistic zombie! When was the last time you actually asked to know how someone felt?" she screamed.
"You're so easy to read that I don't have to," he said.
She punched him in the nose then and did not hold back. It wasn't a slap to knock some sense into him, but a shot to start a war. As she went in for the next one, he blocked her and struck back.
So there it began, a vicious fight of hand-to-hand combat by the most powerful duo in the academy. Their souls started to separate. While in any other method of fighting, Marie would not be able to keep up, she was well matched when it came to brute strength. It went on for a long time, hours even, until they started to wear out.
They knocked over bowls in their living room and test tube beakers, each of which would fuel their anger more. But Marie's strength came from her calm temper, not her anger. Though her skill level was certainly similar, if not better than him, she was at a severe disadvantage, one that he used carefully.
"I just want a normal partner!" she screamed, knocking down another set of graduated cylinders. to rile him up. It didn't work.
"And you want to be a death scythe too?" he said mockingly, "Good luck with that."
"I don't care how long it takes me!" Marie cried. "At least it doesn't have to be with you! Anyone would be better than you! I'm asking for a partner change!"
That got him. He froze for a split second and it gave her an opening. But he was fast enough to recover, grabbing her wrists and pinning them over her head. She stomped her two-inch stiletto into his foot and pushed her knee into his abdomen and when she tried to use her head as her last strike to push him back, her chin stuck between his forefinger and thumb, lips caught in his.
She had never kissed someone before, or had been kissed. Marie had refused every approach and move on her that she wasn't comfortable with and never really planned on being comfortable with anyone. Stein had seen her in the nude countless times and would grab her in her weapon form all over the place but there he was, up in her space in a way he had never been before.
His lips were cold and dry and his grip was rough and too tight and everything combined threw a shock into her system.
Stein was not very good either. There was too much tongue, his touch was too hesitant, and she had no idea how she was supposed to breathe properly with his face pushed against her nose. But despite his inexperience, something unraveled in her stomach and she could only respond to his movements.
She melted and her knees went weak but his hold on her wrists were strong enough, he wouldn't let her go. Heat pooled between her legs, her body grew slack, and all that she could think of was the meister consuming all of her senses and destroying her soul.
It took her all of her energy to turn her head away from him.
Her voice was hoarse when she told him to stop.
He listened.
Stein pulled away immediately as if she had turned into her weapon form and electrocuted him and his eyes were wide with vulnerability. With the sudden loss of contact, Marie nearly collapsed, holding onto the wall with all of her weight.
Her lips were numb. She raised a trembling hand to touch them, brushing over the place where he had been, where no one had ever been. It was terrifying, and absolutely exhilarating.
She fled the scene, heels clicking softly on the metal floor, the door closing behind her without a sound. But her steps grew faster and her breaths grew more raggedy and she was high on the exhilaration of fear until she reached her destination: Psyche's house.
Her outburst was unexpected, her heart was racing, and Spirit was on the couch, reading.
"Marie, what's going on?"
"He kissed me…" she panted, clutching her chest.
"Who, your date?" Psyche looked confused.
Marie shook her head violently. "No, he kissed me. And—and I—I liked it."
Psyche was shocked. "No… no way!"
Spirit looked confused. "Who?"
It took them one look for him to understand.
"ON DEATH'S GRAVE, MARIE! YOU MADE OUT WITH FRANKEN STEIN?"
And it wasn't the last time.
If Stein felt the same way when he was dissecting animals as he did when she was kissing him then she could find it within herself to understand.
Keep your distance, they had said. Just because your souls are matched to fight does not mean they are matched to love.
But the message beneath their words were clearer than glass. She heard it like church bells, ringing in her head over and over again:
He can hurt you.
She had always woken up when he was opening her door, though she never reacted to it. Since she started living in his lab/apartment, Marie beckoned herself to be still so she could gauge his self-control.
Sometimes he would walk up to her bed with footsteps so silent that her breathing drowned them out like a stone landing in whitewater and sometimes the door would close right after as if he was too ashamed of the thought process.
Stein came the closest the night they kissed, walking into her room in the dead of night. Had it been anyone else, Marie didn't think she would have heard. And with her already half-sleep state, it was hard not to pick up on his soul entering her room. She often wondered if he could tell or bothered to tell whether or not she was asleep. She was a good actress when she wanted to be.
He had walked up to her bedside and he had run a cold finger down the back of her neck, skipping over each ridge of her cervical vertebrae. Goosebumps drew to her skin but Marie didn't let herself shiver. She wondered if she would feel the touch of a metal scalpel but she didn't. When he finally left her room, she had never been so relieved.
He hadn't entered her room since then, not even a crack. His footsteps would linger past her room and she'd wonder if he wanted to dissect her or something else that was much worse. Yet this hope was usually blown out like a insignificant candle and she tried not to let her mind wander so easily. With this small change, she also noticed that he started going through one pack of cigarettes a day.
The two of them became more jumpy, hesitant, and there was an obvious change in their dynamic. Marie wondered if she'd have to switch partners again. The moment she had gotten used to him, things started to change as if the universe was constantly throwing dice surrounding them.
On a particularly hard task, she was truly able to witness the shattered edges of their teamwork. With his body drained of energy and bruises that seemed to make the sewn scars along his body look like small scratches, she was nearly sure that he was going to die. Blood was dripping from the corners of her mouth but as the opponent went for the final strike, throwing her body in front of him was so instinctual that she didn't even have time to process it.
Marie went unconscious then, and the only thing she remembered was her name being called out in terror, but the voice that had said it only brought a smile to her numb lips.
She woke up and she was in a hospital bed, doctors crowded around her with the same jittery curiosity Stein had. She saw stitches across her arms and legs like intricate patchwork on old quilts. She was sure that there would be more on her abdomen and her back. The doctors told her she would have to endure a lot of physical therapy before she could fight again. Yet all she could wonder was whether or not it was for nothing. Was Stein still alive?
He entered when the rest of the doctors left, hair greasy and uncombed and his white outfit completely stained in old blood. She didn't bother to wonder whose blood, whether it was an animals or a monster's, whether it was from today or last week. He was shaking, his face paler than she had ever seen before, sweat clinging onto his forehead. Stein had grown incredibly tall over the years, towering over her like a tree, but she didn't think he had ever looked smaller.
He sat in the chair beside her and took her hand. She squeezed it with the little energy she could muster.
His eyes were dark with tiring worry, she still had to convince herself it was for her. So she smiled, turning her head to look at him properly. Marie knew that this was relief, to see that he was fine.
"You must be so jealous," her voice was hoarse, but she managed a small smile. She couldn't let down her cheerful reputation just because of a couple of surgeries. "They stitched me up before you did."
He let out what sounded like a sob then, she swore his trembling was turning into an earthquake now. Stein shed no tears but he may as well have with the state he was in. What she saw was a state of vulnerability she had never seen before. Every part of him was stripped raw, no façade or apathy. It took him minutes to collect words to form a sentence, which were less than impressive.
"How could you just do that?" his voice shook like the rest of his body. But she heard the real words.
Why would you do that? For me? Why me? Why me?
Not exactly the most eloquent, but she let it slide. "A weapon must be willing to die for its meister, remember?"
His body quaked again. She tilted her head, parted her lips, and stared at his. She didn't have the energy or range of motion to truly initiate, but he took it. Marie felt like it was worth it. Even though his touch was like a harsh winter wind, something about it made her feel like she had finally come home.
Of course, things did not go back to normal in the circumstances they were in but their soul's connections had never been stronger. He saw her every day, helped her, brought her food that wasn't entirely edible (but he had made it so she forced it down). And he would leave to spend hours dissecting things until his eye bags would become deeper and deeper. He started going through stronger cigarettes, his breath constantly smelled like them, his mouth tasted like them, and she asked him to stop.
He did, much to her surprise.
But of course the consequences were severe. Stein was clearly in withdrawal and he started practicing on himself more and more. He nearly had matching scars with her now, stitches in more and more parts of his body. He would spend restless nights in his room when she came back and she missed him, but couldn't ask him to give up more than what he already did.
Sometimes she caught his hand wandering to the pocket of his lab coat and grabbed nothing, then the shock that he had quit would run into his system all over again. He saw her looking in those moments, but he never seemed resentful towards her.
It was easier kissing him in these times and sometimes she liked to think that she was his new addiction, a relatively harmless one compared to all of the others. And she could fulfill his sometimes animalistic desires that only seemed to arise around her. Marie felt like she was special, but it also scared the living daylight out of her.
She and Psyche promised each other that if they were to fall in love (in which neither of them had ever really planned,) it would be with kind-hearted individuals who had the same morals as they had. Their hearts would only be given to those who deserve them and would treat them delicately. Yet maybe it was all just an excuse, that love was too terrifying of an emotion to face despite every other monster killed.
But often, you couldn't choose who you loved or perhaps you can't force yourself away from simply wanting to love and there she was, unable to tear herself away from him. And he could hurt her, but Marie refused to believe that, refused to think that after all these years he'd ever betray her trust like that. A part of her knew that Stein wasn't quite capable of love the way most people were, it was more so an obsession he couldn't afford to lose, but that was enough.
Loving him was intense, the same feeling she had when they were fighting together, synced in harmony with every inch of each other memorized, able to use. She felt like she could do anything, take on the world, rule the world, or even let the world crush them. Yet no matter the exhilaration she felt with his steady hands roaming over her body, they seemed to be stuck. They were never moving forwards.
Sometimes he would trace the scars she had taken for him, grey lines across her skin that would have been ungly had she not known why they were there. Marie had been joking when she said that he must have been jealous but perhaps she wasn't. There was always a hint of longingness as he would touch those scars, a touch that scared her but not away.
She'd never let him touch her that way, reach into her stomach and learn every organ that made her who she was. So instead, she taught him the other places. The parts of her that she had never even thought to teach anyone else, he would learn, and he would learn them well. He knew every inch of her, what she liked and what she needed and what parts of her would come undone within seconds.
She allowed him to have this much power over her in exchange for her skin to be unharmed, but sometimes she allowed herself to believe that she had a similar amount of power over him. She saw it in the ways his gaze lingered on her for more than "just friends" and the way he would slip into German during their most intimate nights.
But she'd be happy if this would be their life forever. And while she didn't necessarily believe that they would be an endgame, she didn't really think that this could ever be less than a part of her soul.
His maniacal tendencies started to increase after she had eaten 99 Kishin Eggs. With a witch to kill and many failed attempts to, they had to take their frustrations and feelings of failure out in other ways. But while Marie took her anger out by ranting to Psyche and shopping, Stein took it out the way he always did, dissection.
Before, at least, Stein could actually be satisfied by a few small animals cut open a day but now it appeared that with the combination of his stress and withdrawal for so long, he never seemed to be satisfied. He started to fall behind on classes and she found that he often spent hours staring into space and tracing his movements under the desk, as if he was envisioning himself cutting open a body.
A steady stream of madness was seeping into him and she didn't know how to hold it back. But sometimes when he seemed to be on the verge of tipping into a spiral of consuming destruction, he would have her instead. It was heaven and hell at the same time, her body reveling in his touch and his presence, but her soul ached as she wondered if all she could ever be was his favourite temptation.
Marie could handle anything he would do to her during those nights, no matter how harsh and rough and emotionless it was. Yet as the number of them increased, she could only ask him what made him into such a beast.
"It's just hormones," he said, a wide grin spreading that sent shivers down her spine. "All of it is just hormones, hormones, hormones…"
She tried to smile it off. "And your hormones really love it when I'm around…"
And perhaps it just was. Everything could be explained by science, with chemicals sending signals to their body to a natural reaction when people wanted to reproduce. But just because she knew what was happening to her body didn't mean it hurt any less and just because her love to him were just hormones in her brain didn't mean it was less amazing.
But slowly, at one point constant dissections and constant sex wasn't enough and she wished that she would have known and done something about that sooner.
Because after waking up from a night where all she could remember was the way his hands were all over her and so was his body, she felt a sore, throbbing pain in her abdomen. Disbelief drew from her heart but fear shattered every complete piece of her. He wouldn't do that to her...she refused to believe it.
But people are predictable and she knows how to read him better than anyone, and when she slowly lifted her nightgown with trembling hands above her stomach, there was a freshly sutured incision line down the middle of her body.
An irrelevant note that has nothing to do with the plot but you should read:
I know that the majority of this fandom refers to Maka's mother as Kami, but personally I despise that because Kami literally means god so when Black Star says he's gonna surpass god he basically says he will surpass Maka's mother. According to many forums, when Spirit refers to Maka's mother he refers to her as "moto kamisan" which means "ex-wife" not Kami-san as a person.
Psyche, which is the Greek word for soul, also the goddess of the soul associated with the butterfly. She was originally a mortal whose beauty attracted Eros, the god of lust. However, she did not know his identity and became very insecure, accidentally betraying him. To win back her lover, Psyche had to go through the goddess Aphrodite, who gave her seemingly impossible tasks, but because she was kind and had gained the sympathy of other goddesses, she was able to complete these tasks. Ultimately on her last task her insecurity caused her to suffer into an eternal sleep so the gods made her immortal as a favor to her and Eros.
Anyway, this is literally my favourite Greek myth and I thought that you guys would appreciate a little bit of insight into why I chose the name.