Chapter Six
He lies on the laboratory's tile floor in silence, convulsing with every silent scream of laughter that tears from his chest. He is drowning again, a fish thrown up onto a rocky shore by a sudden seaside storm. He can do no more than gasp and struggle against the stifling, unavoidable air. Unexplainable glee seizes him and he giggles into oblivion, his teeth no longer able to hold their frozen grin. The dam breaks and the madness rushes forward, pouring out of him in high, screeching laughter.
Oh, Marie! If only you were here to see this!
It's beautiful, the insanity that surrounds him. A stone-lined path stretches outwards, shrines to ancient gods enclosing the way to Understanding. The idols' ageless eyes stare into his soul, bidding him forwards, upwards, and onwards into the future. There is no time left.
The sound of skittering comes from behind and he turns to find millions upon millions of psychedelic spiders racing towards him, a wave of legs and eyeballs scratching at the ground before them. He jolts out of his reverie and flees towards his destiny. There are too many spiders, and if he stands his ground, they will bury him in his doubts, his deeds, his desires. So he presses onwards, trying to escape from the inescapable.
On the laboratory floor, his body writhes in pain and his lips cry out, but he is beyond awareness of anything he says and does. He is too busy clambering up the hillside of his hopes, too lost inside the maze that is his mind. He cannot even hear when Marie bursts in, Spirit and Sid in tow, and rushes to his side. She calls his name, a lifeguard throwing a buoy to a drowning child, but he is unable to grasp the life ring, for he is already under the sea of faces, the sea of madness that waits to claim him, remake him in its image and for its purposes. He thrashes towards the surface, kicking at the water beneath him in a desperate hope to save his soul.
And breaks the surface. He is at the end of the path now, as if he were never drenched in the first place, standing in the solemn silence of the shrine that stands before him. Atop the stonework sits a god much larger than the others. This one looks down in judgement, coldly evaluating everything inside of him with its eyes sewn into its blindfold, a Lady Justice peeking from the outside. And then she smiles.
He knows that smile more than anyone's and knows its cruel, viperous intent the way he knows his own psychotic grin.
"Medusa…" He is unable to move from his place of shameful fear, wishing against everythingthat he's mistaken, imagining, even hallucinating. Anything but this. Anything but this again.
"So you recognize me," she says, leaping off her pedestal with long, powerful legs. He shifts back a little, regarding her with a wary half-lidded gaze. She is different now, her snake tattoos rejected in favor of real eyeballs peering from her arms. Gone is the snake-inspired hoodie, replaced by loose bands of fabric hanging from her shoulders. She glides forward surreptitiously, her legs dividing to form six new appendages. A spider. He shudders but manages to defend himself with words of educated disgust.
"So you've absorbed Ashura. And Arachne for that matter. I never thought evil destroyed by Maka's wavelength would survive the purification process."
She sighs, the teacher of a frustrating novice, and tilts her head in mocking surprise. "So good to see you again, Stein. Did you miss me?"
He smirks, his cocky grin his only defense against a newly-resurrected kishin. He knows that she can destroy him right here and erase every bit of the mind he calls his own, but he stands strong, hoping that with a last resistance, he may find hope for his soul. If not here then maybe in the next life, wherever that may be. It's so hard to believe in heaven right now.
"To be honest, Medusa, not much," he manages, taking a bit of arrogance from the terror within him. He has to be a little crazy to even attempt arguing with her. He needs the adrenaline more than anything. "You're as serpentine as ever, alerting me with a madness wavelength only to have me come right to you. You haven't changed a bit."
Her gaze drops and she loses her smile, a reaction he remembers from their underground fight. She never could stand an insult to her cunning, and being called predictable isn't something she'll leave unchallenged. They are so very much alike, the snake witch and he, and that can only be to his advantage. If he's lucky, he might get out with his life. But that has never been essential to his plan. The true hope lies in Psyche, the project he left to Marie and the Academy and he has to believe in them. He has to believe in his friends.
She chuckles, recovering her haughtiness in a second and starts forward, her eight legs clicking below her. The scientist watches their pattern, already vivisecting them with his eyes. Click clack left right back front. He finds himself smiling.
"Oh, you like that, don't you?" she laughs, pitying him, "You're so easy to read, Stein. I never did have a hard time leading you."
His fists clench, but he is at it again, counting the ligaments on her legs and cataloguing them. Three six nine twelve fifteen eighteen- Perceiving his thought processes, she withdraws her extra legs, wagging a finger playfully at him as the school nurse persona falls into place. He is her patient now, a boy caught playing outside with a broken arm against doctors' orders. A boy caught taking things apart. An angry grin slides firmly into place on Stein's face, memories seeping into his subconscious.
"Now, now, Stein. Can't have you losing your manners."
The grin spreads wider and Stein steps forward, a deep noise in his throat.
"I'm going to dissect you…"
And he lurches forward without thinking, only to be caught in her coils again. She takes him by the shoulders as she sidesteps him, pulling him into a dance expertly. Guiding snakes wrap around his legs, directing his movements as deftly as a puppet's strings. The madness fades and he trembles, remembering too much about what happened between them, the night of their dance and the night of his wanderings. So many things that he'd rather not remember.
She leans forward and he struggles a little, unable to move under binding serpents. So many serpents with so many eyeballs. His own eyes count their pupils.
"Look at me, Stein."
He shakes his head emphatically and keeps counting eyeballs, retreating into insanity as fast as his mind can carry him, drifting into a sea of harmless data, harmless questions, kind delusions. He doesn't want to hear this, doesn't want to hear Marie's own soft words twisted in this mockery of partnership, doesn't want to feel Medusa's body against his fingers, doesn't want to taste Medusa's lips inside his mouth. Not when he had his Marie. Not when she had been in his heart.
"Stein…"
But it's not Marie calling his name this time. It's Medusa. Medusa! The witch one, the wicked one, the wrong one. Thewrongone the wrongone the wrongone. The wrong one is calling him from his sanity. And why does it feel so right?
He turns to look at her slowly, the snakes slackening on his neck a little for him to do so. He could dodge her if he wants to. He could fight against the insanity inside him. He could defy reality and try to find his way back to the Academy. Again and again and again. But as he gazes into her three kishin eyes, his own eyes widening and beginning to glisten with wild curiosity, he realizes that it is useless to defy the kishin's insanity. It is useless to fight against the undertow.
"Insanity…" says Stein, wearily, and she pauses halfway to his mouth, waiting for him to finish. She smiles expectantly, waiting for him to say something confirming her victory. He steels himself for the inevitable, deciding to make one last struggle before he loses it, before he becomes a part of her grand experiment. Before he becomes her monster.
"…is inborn…" She smiles at him, falling for his poorly laid trap. He does not have the energy to think much faster than this, but it will have to do for now. After this, it will be up to the others and his project. "…but it cannot defy destiny. It cannot escape Death."
Catching his double entendre, Medusa has a moment of wariness, but ultimately understands his threat, laughing loudly until her body begins to shake the two of them. When she recovers, four legs bring Stein inches from her forehead. For a moment he is in rapture, but then he struggles against her endless eyes, squeezing his eyelids shut like an airlock desperately trying to defy a black hole's pressure. It's time to break him. She grins at last, a viper victorious and lets her new-found wavelength guide him, gently of course, because she likes to see him free for just a little while, if only to crush him later. He bites down on his lower lip and begins to tremble, trying to keep the laughter in his larynx even as he finds his left eye opening slightly.
"My dear doctor," she begins slowly as he begins to wheeze a little. The laughter is getting harder to hold in now, and the fear within him is starting to wrap around his innards. Realizing this is too slow for her taste, Medusa delivers the clincher, using his insecurity against him. "How do you know Project: Psyche wasn't me?"
His mouth and eyes fall open in horror and she is in, tearing into his mind with her kishin gaze and shaving the humanity from his being. The last thing sane Stein hears is the sound of raving laughter and a single lovely voice.
But that is lost quickly in the sound of the waves.