"Seriously, Marie, you don't have a chance."

The blonde looked at her friend and sighed. "Look, I know that. No one has a chance with him, but I'm not just going to give up."

Azusa adjusted her glasses. "You're setting yourself up for pain, you know that."

"Yeah, yeah. But there's got to be something that will get his attention!" Marie slammed her hand fist into her open palm and sat up on the couch. "I just have to do something to make myself stand out."

"And how are you going to stand out, and impress, the best meister this school has ever seen? You're not even the type of weapon that he uses," Azusa said, leaning back into her recliner.

"I'll come up with something. I will."

"Um..." Marie said awkwardly, twisting her hair around one of her fingers as she held her books in her other arm. "Could I maybe borrow your notes for tomorrow's class?"

Green eyes met hers, a disinterested look on the boy's face. "You should have taken your own. You won't be able to decipher mine."

"Oh come on."

He raised an eyebrow, but shrugged and handed over the notebook before turning and walking away from her. Marie stared in surprise at the notebook, and was soon crowded around by other student.

"Stein really gave you his notebook?"

"What did he say?"

"Come on, Mjolnir, open it!"

"Yeah, let's see what the genius uses!"

Marie opened the notebook and a shocked silence followed. The stark white pages were covered in notations in a bright red ink. Some (the fewest) were in English. One student was able to point out German. Another pointed out French. What they were able to read only accounted for about a third of the notes, and Marie wasn't certain that what they could identify wasn't in code.

After all, what did, "Tracheal shift by carotid blow. Hemorrhagic. 95%," have to do with their class? They were just learning about resonating.

"Here you go... thank you for letting me borrow them." A blush covered Marie's cheeks as Stein met her gaze and he took the notebook back from her without a word. "Um... were you using shorthand?"

"I told you that you wouldn't be able to decipher them. And yes, I was," he said calmly as he slid the notebook into a battered backpack.

"Thank you anyway, though. I mean, what I could read was interesting."

"And completely irrelevant to the test we are taking today. Good luck." He had left before she could reply, but the nervous smile had fallen off her face.

Marie swallowed, moving into the classroom behind him. She settled into her seat and pulled out her own notebook, looking at the carefully copied notes from Stein's. She may not pass this test, but she would figure out what he had been writing about. She sat there, hunched over her notes, until someone slid a slip of white paper in front of her. She smiled at the student who was passing out the tests, closed her notebook and started to work on it.

She was sweating by the last question, the pencil's end chewed and its eraser nearly gone. She bubbled in her last response and sat back, looking at the clock. She had finished with only a few minutes to spare and the classroom was almost empty. She stood, taking the test to her instructor and moved out into the hallway.

A flash of white and red caught her attention and she watched as the few people in the halls parted, letting Stein and his weapon partner, Spirit, through without any issues. Though slightly shorter than his weapon, it was the weapon that had to match his stride. Stein's backpack was slung over his shoulder, and Marie thought that she caught a glimpse of something that glittered in the light through the slight opening. She watched until they disappeared through the front door, her hands gripping her notebook.

"You could slow down, Stein."

"It should be no problem for you to maintain this pace. I would rather have this assignment finished quickly, we have another exam tomorrow and I will not be missing it."

Spirit shook his head, stopping for a second to flip his hair out of his eyes before taking a couple hopping strides to catch back up with Stein. "I'm not looking forward to tomorrow's exam-"

"When are you ever?" Stein interrupted.

"Oh shut up. You know that I'm not good at explaining Resonance."

"And yet, inexplicably, it is your best class in practical exercises."

Spirit rubbed the back of his neck, "Yeah. I know."

"Regardless, we'll be back in time for tomorrow's exam if everything goes well. Our target is a 6 hour drive from here. That leaves us with an hour and a half to track it down and destroy it before we need to leave in order to arrive back here in time for your morning cleansing rituals and our classes."

Spirit stopped, his arm snaking out so his hand could wrap around Stein's arm and force the other boy to stop. "Wait a minute, you can't be serious. There's no way we're going to be able to pull that off and take an exam on the same day! We have to get some sleep."

Stein met his gaze squarely and Spirit swallowed as Stein responded, "Then I suggest that you utilize the 2 hours for sleep instead of on your hair or whatever it is that takes you so long to make yourself "presentable" as you put it."

Stein shrugged his arm free and walked on, Spirit staring slack-jawed behind him.

"Azusa, I can't do this!" Marie cried out in mock melodramatics, collapsing against the couch, her arm slung over her forehead.

On the other end of the phone Azusa shook her head and sighed. "You have to, because if you don't study, you're going to continue bothering me, and I won't be able to finish either."

"I'm sorry, I'm sorry!" Marie clicked the phone off and sat upright, looking out of the window and over Death City. With a sigh she moved over to the desk and opened up her notebook, trying once more to figure out what, "Tracheal shift by carotid blow. Hemorrhagic. 95%," could mean- these were his Resonance notes, right?

Stein hit his knees, sliding a good ten feet across the broken ground. Shards of glass tore his pants and penetrated the skin beneath, but he didn't seem to feel it. He came up running, using Spirit's shaft to reverse his movement at the last moment and slam his feet into the prekishin that was chasing the pair. His feet collided solidly and knocked the monster backwards.

He checked the watch on his left wrist almost casually as he brought Spirit in a sharp arc towards the thing's neck.

It moved too slowly, and Spirit sliced through its throat. The creature came forward a handful of steps before it collapsed in front of Stein. Its flesh peeled away as the pair watched, blood pulsing onto the ground before it collapsed in on itself, leaving nothing but a stain and a soul hanging in the air.

Even as Spirit tilted his head back to swallow the soul Stein said, "Look at that, Senpai. You will have an extra 30 minutes for sleep." Spirit paled.

"I can't believe they're here!"

"I heard that they were out on a mission and didn't even sleep before coming back in!"

"No way! And I heard that Spirit-senpai is only a couple souls away from being a death scythe!"

"Really? That's sooo cool!"

"Yeah, but isn't it Stein that's doing all the actual work?"

"Who cares about that, Spirit-senpai's the hot one!"

Marie took a deep breath and stepped into the classroom. The pair was already in place, a few girls hovering around Spirit, who was trying hard not to yawn and be suave at the same time. Stein sat beside him, reading from the same notebook that he had loaned Marie earlier, and Marie's hand clasped her notebook.

The bell rung a few moments later and the class settled into their seats. The exam was harder than the previous one, asking more technical questions about Resonance instead of just referring to what circumstances would warrant its use. Once again, Marie managed to nearly chew through her pencil before she finished.

Unsurprisingly, Stein was the first person in the class to finish. He was followed shortly thereafter by Spirit's on-again off-again girlfriend, Kami. By the time that Marie finished her exam there were only a handful of students left- but she was more surprised to see that Stein, though finished, hadn't left the room as he usually did.

He stood and followed her when she left.

"Have you figured the notes out yet, Mjolnir?" She stopped and looked at him in confusion. He just gave her a smile that may have been of pity. "Never mind. I'm sure you did fine."

Marie stood there as he left and shook her head once he was gone. Now she had to know what had been in that notebook.

She didn't do fine. In fact, she was going to be taking remedial lessons because of the exam. But, she had figured something out. The notebook she had borrowed from Stein, the one that he was constantly studying, wasn't for Resonance classes at all.

It seemed like more of anatomy study- in fact, she had sat up for most of the night piecing together medical terms that she had thought were notes in another language. She was upset about having to take remedial lessons, but she was tickled that she had finally cracked the code. Not that it was that much help- a lot of the notes were still in languages other than English, and the more she read the less she wanted to know, but at least now she knew what he was doing.

And maybe, just maybe, this was the break she needed to get his attention. She spent the next three nights looking up everything she could about human anatomy, reading and rereading dry medical texts until she felt that she could have recited it backwards and forwards, and then she made up her mind.

"Azusa, I'm going to impress him." The other weapon's laughter just echoed through the phone to her.

Her hands were clammy, her throat and mouth dry and she couldn't help but swallow. She stood around the corner, waiting on Stein and Spirit to come through when she heard the screaming start. She peeked around to see Kami standing between Spirit and Stein, Spirit's shirt pulled up and exposing scars that didn't look like they came from a weapon's blow.

Stein took it all in stride, but Marie was astonished- especially when Kami slapped Stein hard enough to snap the teen's head all the way to the side and cause him to bite his lip, drawing blood. She held her copied notebook in her hand's as she watched Kami all but drag a shocked Spirit away from Stein, and she nearly bent it in half without realizing it.

Stein stood for a long moment, watching the two move away from him before he turned to look at Marie. There was a bright red hand-print on his pale skin and he turned away from her before she could say anything, moving in the same direction (towards the exit) as they had.

"Hey, wait!" Marie's heart felt like it was going to burst when he stopped. She rushed over to him, and pushed the notebook into his hands. "I figured it out. It wasn't for our Resonance course at all. It was anatomy notes."

"Yes. Good job."

Marie's cheeks heated as red as Stein's from the slap as he acknowledged that she had figured out his code. She darted off them, leaving Stein holding her notebook. He opened it, read the message inside, and tossed it into his locker on the way back to the apartment he used to share with his weapon.

Nearly 20 years later, cleaning out a seldom used room in Stein's lab, Marie opened a desk drawer and found her old notebook. She laughed, remembering how everything had happened, and how stand-offish Stein had been.

Her smile turned to tears when she saw that he had checked yes, and she had never seen the answer.

A/N: This is semi-canon and semi-AU. Stein and Spirit were partners together at the DWMA and Kami did find out that Stein was experimenting on Spirit. However, I played on the one-sided love between Marie and Stein that was never fleshed out. I hope that you enjoyed this version of it. Written from the prompt: Star/Idol. A little oddly done, but hey. Whatever.

~Lia.