Chapter Five

His fingers itched. His heart pounded. His mind rushed. Every twitch of his fingers, every pulse in his temples urged him onwards onwards onwards onwards… It was nearly done. It was nearly finished.

He had known Marie would be gone on a Death Scythe mission when he completed it. He knew she'd be furious when she returned, perhaps frightened, perhaps worried for him. Worried for him. He would have to push that thought away.

And so he collected himself again, attending to his delicate work with practiced fingers. Medical school had taught him to contain himself in these situations, at least for long enough to complete his handiwork. Madness was useless if it led to incompletion, and he had ruined enough projects in his uncontrolled mindset. So he made himself cold, empty and indifferent to the task ahead of him. It was research. It was science. It was progress. This was living.

Stein's sanity left again; rivers of data crowding out rationality pouring like a fast-acting stimulant flooding through the bloodstream. There was a reason he smoked cigarettes, with their ability to kindle the senses. Cigarettes were a way to keep a lingering taste of this madness on his tongue, to tide him over until he could carry on later, out of sight of Marie and Spirit.

Marie and Spirit…

His hands trembled and he nearly lost his needle, taking a moment to straighten himself. He had to leave them out this. This was not about them; this was not about his relationships. This was about a battle, a battle that he had to win else humanity be swept away again. He had to be practical, not distracted by petty doubts and insecurities. He needed to be a surgeon.

Damn it! The stitches were all wrong! They were hastily done, incapable of holding anything together for very long, and that would entitle him to a faulty product, something he could not afford to fix later. He would have to begin again. He would have to tear into it, rip every suture out of its structure, relishing the moment when he destroyed everything inside-

No!

Stein tore himself away from the table, propping himself against the wall even as he felt his body shift back towards his project. He was not going to give into this, not now when so much was at stake. A deadline was approaching, and at this rate, he wasn't going to finish anything. He had a job to do, and if his urges kept him from finishing it, he would lose more than a few gallons of disinfectant. He would lose the war.

You hate losing just as much as I do.

He sighed. He shouldn't be surprised that he was hearing this again. His mind was fond of playing tricks on him, pulling back faces that he didn't want to remember, and her voice was no exception. As much as Marie tried her best to be his everything, deep down, Stein knew that Medusa would always be a part of him regardless of his partner's love.

"I love you, you know. A man after my own heart." The witch's words would always whisper condemnation from the shadows, even after Marie had brought light into his darkness. Stein would always be afraid of Medusa, for she had known him like no one ever had, and until someone else understood his "otherness", he could never truly forget that-

"At your core…you're just like me."

He brought a hand up to remove his glasses, wiping his sweating forehead with the back of his palm. Back at that first battle, he had said a lot of things, almost as if he'd been waiting to give a desperate confessional, and he had felt Spirit's unease at his connection with her through their resonance link. She had been his committed confidant, smiling knowingly when he'd said that neither of them could feel love and proceeding to easily knot him into her web as easily as Arachnophobia had ensnared the Academy.

He twitched and crossed the remaining feet to the table, gazing upon what would soon be the completion of his magnum opus, the masterwork of his creative mind. Throwing himself into his work with a new vigor he tossed his thoughts to the darkness, immersing himself in passion and procedure. This was living. This was feeling. This was breathing. This was hopeless.

And so what? He was never going to have fun like this again, so he might as well enjoy every minute of it. After this, he would be off to a cell, strapped neatly to a stretcher as a present for the great Kishin hunter, the infallible Lord Death. He would be nothing more than an artifact, a symbol of the consequences for going beyond humanity. Humanity. What had it ever been but a cage to him, a way of keeping him from being what he truly was?

Stein's hand flew to his shirt to clench his chest tightly. He wheezed as his fingers clawed at the monstrous swelling within him, a strange creature that hadn't had free reign in a long while. Not since college. Not since Medusa. Not since Ashura. An agitated grin spread itself on his face. It was nearly time.

He shook his head and resumed his feverish pace. He never should have worked this late; the world was spinning too fast and he was finding it difficult to concentrate, but he had no other choice. Conditions were perfect with Marie gone and if he timed this right, it would only be about a day before they found him and his creation. His experiment would have a chance to be found unbroken, provided that he didn't damage it in his insanity. He sighed. It was getting more difficult to predict what he might do. It was time to bring everything to an end.

He ascended to his living quarters for the last time, pushing his cabinets to the sides of his secret lab's entrance so that Marie could find it. The sitting room gaped before him, empty, gray and cold even with the accumulation of Marie's knick-knacks and couches. His office chair stood motionless by his desk, nestled beneath one of Marie's black jackets and too tired for one more ride over a doorframe. And on the top of his desk sat Marie, well, at least the picture of herself she had left on his desk. Yesterday, she'd been sure to stick a huge yellow Post-It note that read "Be good!" to its surface, much to Stein's bewilderment. She was only going to be gone for a day. What difference would twenty-four hours make?

He didn't want to answer that question. Instead, he brought the picture downstairs with him, tucking the yellow Post-It note inside his lab coat pocket so that it wouldn't fall and drift to the floor. He didn't know why he's saved it. Then he realized it could double as a list, if he only wrote on the back of it with the pen

He was already forgetting her face.

He bolted the doors of his basement laboratory. He slid his keys under the doorway so that he would have no chance of escape, no chance to wreak havoc on his coworkers and students. He slipped the Post-It note under the doorway, Marie's love note now inscribed with directions on its backside so that she would know what to do when she came home.

"Don't come in alone. Bring back up. Folder: Psyche."

His preparations completed and his person safely locked in, Stein looked at Marie's picture, looked at his project, and then glanced at her picture again. For a moment, there was hesitation. Removing her photo from the frame, he looked at it one more time, noting Marie's kind and innocent expression. Too kind and innocent for him. Resignedly, he folded the picture and put it in his pocket, forgetting it along with his students, coworkers, and friends.

But these past years had been part of an experiment, the result of an optimistic hypothesis that was already being disproven. All of this had been a trial, a test situation that was not destined to last longer than the procedure demanded, and it was time to move on. He had to let go if he was to win this cold war, this war of information and development already beginning in the kishin's mind. As old thoughts evaporated and new ones replaced them, Stein took a deep breath, let it out, and closed his eyes. He desired only one thing… What was that?

What I desire… What I want more than anything…

He counted his heartbeats. He counted his breaths. He opened his eyes.

And then he smiled.

Before he completely lost himself, he thought he heard a small voice, a far off memory from a night almost twenty years ago.

"How long are you going to keep doing this?"

But as he grinned and let his instincts take him, filling him to the brim with hunger for knowledge and a lust for power, Stein found he finally had an answer the question that had so tormented him when he was younger.

I WANT TO DO THIS FOREVER!

The switch was thrown. The deed was done. Stein was lost.

And something twitched.