Once, in her girlhood, Marie remembers her favorite teacher retiring. She remembers waiting for Death, sitting outside the hall of guillotines, waiting with Kamiko to present their newest soul collection. She remembers Miss Morningstar's voice raising, livid and not at all like the good-natured mezzo she had when she taught.
"I will not lead these children to their graves!"
Marie remembers Kamiko staring down at her feet, wriggling her well-painted toes as they sat on the side and winced. Marie remembers how she was in the hospital for three weeks because of a Kishin Egg's claws in her belly. Marie remembers Spirit, Sid, Stein holed up for days and days, waiting for diagnoses from doctors who looked at them on clean white cots and said nothing.
Marie remembers how Miss Morningstar, as spiky as her name and true to her weapon form, blunt as always and all hard edges, stormed from the Death room, her resignation papers in tow. As she left, Marie had looked up, her two, golden, glistening eyes watching her now former teacher leaving the DWMA, severed of connection, and when their gazes met, Miss Morningstar only spared her a sad smile.
Marie remembers being called into the Death room, her Lord in cheerful disposition she could only begin to see was artifice. Marie remembers getting up, sparing a single look at her teacher's retreating back, and walking into a room of blades suspended above her head.
It is only later that she understands that she is teaching children to die.
And she sees that is what Miss Morningstar had meant from the very beginning. Because Marie thought being a teacher would be fun, but the situation is all wrong. She is a substitute, wearing a teacher's clothing as she stands in front of the class where Stein should be and her borrowed students look back at her with wide, trusting eyes.
Her job is to prepare them. Her job is to send them to their deaths.
As she stands before Class Crescent Moon, her singular eye, the other lost for the good of the world and the good of the DWMA and the good of the children who thank her in the streets, passes from child to child. Here, Ox with his lack of field experience, hiding behind textbooks and vocabulary. There, Kim, sharp, shielded, smiling thinly as she sits close to Jackie, the only person able to get close enough without being burned. Some of the children she knows only in passing, others, she knows all too well. Others, her eye lingers on.
Maka and Soul sit together, because they are partners, and Marie has read their file. They are partners and she has memorized their missions, the ones that were triumphant, the ones they failed. The ones where Soul lay, bedridden and bleeding, the ones where Maka, just a girl, poured her faith into him and was broken open because he was hurt.
Love in the DWMA was not sunflowers. It was not drinking coffee at a scratched up table with the TV running behind you. Love in the DWMA was throwing yourself before your partner to hide them from a world of sharp knives and angry eyes. Love was a fist that knocked on teeth that dared to insult the people you care for. Love was an angry glare, with two eyes, not one. Love was painful, love was watching the person you love doze on a hospital bed and leaving when the nurses changed the bandages.
So, Marie reads from the textbook. Marie reads Stein's notes, the ones he made before his hands started shaking so bad, the pen would skitter over the page. Marie reads to the children as though she were giving a history lesson and not a blueprint for war.
She knows the apocalypse is looming. Knows the kids know. Patti who hides herself away in origami and Liz who hides herself away in her thinly veiled care know.. She knows Harvar keeps sneaking glances at Ox, thinking of situations,every impossible situation that could fall before them, trying to come up with an ending that does not pan out in a loss.
Marie is teaching children to die, so she says nothing when Soul and Maka hold hands beneath their desk, when they spare soft peeks at one another, fingers furled round each other, Maka's soul calming even as she shakes when she reads about madness wavelengths and Stein's notes on black blood. Marie looks at them and envisions a happy ending she hopes to Death that they get.
Marie ignores the rule book that explicitly states that no weapon-meister pair may have romantic or sexual relations.
Marie figures all is fair is in love. In war.
She is teaching children to die and she knows it. She is teaching them to run into battlefields with guns and blades and blaze and spunk. She is teaching them to hold their own. She is teaching them this is their duty.
They did not ask for it, but it is theirs all the same.
It is never so much in clarity as in BREW. BREW is a warzone and she is fighting time, and she is fighting Stein's body weight and exhaustion and every ounce of her is gritted teeth and hellfire. Marie may be warmth and soft touches but she is also a hammer of god. She is a lightning bolt, a hurricane, a typhoon of a woman ready to whirl out.
The children are the ones to pull her from the spiral. The children are the ones who come for her and she is flickering out of existence and Stein, Stein, he is fallen to the ground and he cannot resonate with her, her partner. The children tell her to go, that they will deal with it, and because she has taught them to die, she turns tail and runs.
Because that is what love is, in the DWMA. It is shouldering Stein through a tornado, through snow, through the odds. So she walks him back, so she drapes his arm over her shoulder, so she warms herself against his chest.
So she cries.
Because when she comes to the threshold, throws her headband off, is ready to run into the storm headfirst until she is unwound from her own skin, it is her students who go in, instead.
Her threats mean nothing, her expulsion, her furious stare.
She has taught children to die and she has done it well. She has taught them to die and they walk into the gale as she collapses to snow.
Perhaps that was the problem with Miss Morningstar: that she did not do enough teaching for Marie, for Stein, for Spirit and Sid, for Mira, for Azusa, for Kami. Marie cries on the outskirts of what would most likely be a tomb, with the only anchor as Stein's hand on her knee. Warm affection in a blistering wind.
Marie is glad when the children come back.
She does not want to be good at her job.
She is teaching children to die and no one calls them soldiers regardless of the fact that it is what they are. She is teaching children to die and she can name every single student she has without a mother or father. She is teaching children to die and she comes to morning meetings with Death and insists that she is okay.
She forgets when she feels Stein's hands on her skin. She does not remember anything of the DWMA, because they are on the lam together, running from Death, running from God, running from once-home, running from being teachers. His mouth is now home. His fingers splayed over her hip. Stein's hard body presses her to the labcoat he has set upon the ground and she remembers nothing of charred bones and everything of what love is outside of the DWMA.
He is her partner. It is illegal. And she doesn't give a damn. She doesn't want to be good at her job and she supposes she isn't, in a lot of ways.
Toy, she can almost hear in her head. People calling Stein an objectophile because he has kissed her, because he is doing more than that with her. Love is holding his huge hand in hers as she bucks against him and tells him he's perfect, that she wants him, that she wants this.
He doesn't have a condom.
She doesn't care.
The world is falling around their ears and she wants to drown in him and she wants him deep in her without anything to block the feeling of his skin on her skin. She wants to roll her hips and be home to him. She wants him to hold her as she shatters.
And he does.
And she lets him.
And he does.
She is pregnant and she is terrified and she is scared that she will teach her child to die, too. She is scared her child will die. But she must fight because that is what she is built for. Her teacher may not have wanted to lead her students to a grave but it is where Marie finds herself spiraling regardless of Stein's concern, and she demands a slot on the craft that brings them to the moon.
The days leading up to it are tense. Stein's shoulders are a hard line of wire and her spine is ramrod straight. When they lay down together, it is like it will be the last time. His hands are soft until they clutch her, her nails scratch down his back and she cries out his name like she is trying to memorize the way the vowels feel on her tongue.
She kisses his stubbled cheek, his scarred, chapped lips, his scarred knuckles, his scarred body, and she prays the prayer of the godless, Please, oh please, that they will make it back in one piece. Or many pieces that Stein can put back together.
She is pregnant and her baby is in danger but if she does not fight, they could all die. Die now or die later.
It seems she is only one in a long line. The DWMA has taught her to die. Miss Morningstar has taught her to die. She has taught children to die. The world is collapsing. This is her job. This is her duty. She has lost her eye for the good of the next generation, for the good of the generation after that.
They are not soldiers. They are sacrificial lambs. They are bombs in bodies.
She holds her hands out toward the gaping maw of inky abyss, but this time, she has one twined with Stein's.
When the black blood starts coming around her on the moon, she wants to scream. Spirit is there, one arm around her, Sid flanking him as though they could curl around her and protect her. And Maka shrieks and shrieks and shrieks, and Marie brings a hand to her belly and she whispers Stein's name and Spirit's arm tightens around her.
She has taught children to die and, yet, they are all off the moon, save for Crona. And she thinks that maybe Miss Morningstar has done a better job than she did. Maybe her former teacher has taught her to die so much better than Marie could ever teach her own students to die.
And then the world dissolves. And then she is dizzy, held up by hands that are strong and powerful and capable, then she swears the floor is rushing up to meet her but she stays upright somehow and when she rolls her eye upward, she sees the moon and she is alive alive alive and her teacher failed, they all failed, they failed failed failed and she feels something giddy in her chest because she is so glad she is a lousy teacher.
Maka is the first one to rush at her, her arms open wide, and Marie is almost knocked off her feet as she hugs her. And above her head, Marie looks for the looming man who is home to her, she looks for Stein and when she sees him, she relaxes. The explanation rings in her ears, the witches, their final save, but she sags against Maka and holds her to her chest and hopes the girl feels her heart thundering.
Her job was to teach children to die and every last one of them still breathes.
She retires because she is pregnant. Because her old boss is dead, because the world will enter new peace, but first reconstruction. Because Kid is the new order, because Kid works with others. Because it is revolution. Because she has done a different job.
She looks around at the crowd of people who have gathered for Kid's coronation. She watches Maka and Soul blush at each other, their palms brushing, almost secret though anyone can see what is going on between them. She watches them step around each other, flickering lights and bright smiles and a promise of tomorrow.
Marie brings her hand to her belly, she feels Stein's heat next to her as he stands, arm to arm, looking ready to tuck her against his side and lay his cheek atop her head like when they are alone.
"They grow up so fast," she says.
"We change, as well," he tells her. And she knows each way he means it.
She counts the heads in the crowd. Her former students. All intact. All present. It is like she is standing in front of the class once more, taking attendance, seeing a full roster.
She has taught children to live.
And, that, at least, she is damn good at.