[June 24th] [Soul Eater] backwards and forwards

[ansibs.livejournal.com]

Title: backwards and forwards
Day/Theme: June 24th - backwards and forwards
Series: Soul Eater
Character/Pairing: Stein/Spirit, Spirit/Kami
Rating: G


24. backwards and forwards

Backwards...

"Hey," he murmured, surprised. Outside the door, the rain was coming down in a silvery sheet, as evidenced by the way Stein was dripping from the ends of his bangs, his fingers, and the soaked fringe of his long white shirt.

"Sempai." Even his voice had a rough quality to it. "Can I come in?" As he pushed his glasses up his nose with two fingers rainwater splattered over the threshold. Spirit hastily moved aside, only reaching out a hand when Stein stumbled. "Thank you, sempai." The way that moniker rolled of his tongue sounded different, somehow.

"What the hell were you doing outside?" he demanded as he toweled Stein down right there in the entranceway. "It's pouring like crazy outside, if you haven't noticed."

"I noticed, sempai." At least the wry sarcasm hadn't gone anywhere.

"You're still wounded," Spirit admonished, eyeing the swath of white bandages that striped across Stein's torso. "Go strip in the bathroom, I'll lend you clothes."

Gold eyes flickered to him and back to the wall, but Spirit didn't notice while he started to mop the floor, grumbling all the way. "Is anyone else here right now?" Stein asked quietly, too casually.

"Huh?" Spirit blinked up, and then returned to his cleaning. "Oh, no. Kami was here a while ago but she left before the downpour started. She stayed the night last night." Abruptly Spirit realized he had someone else to eat that charred mess of what was supposed to be stir fry that was probably taking over the refrigerator as he spoke. "Oh hey Stein, you think you're up to -"

The firm closing of the bathroom door neatly cut off his question.

And forwards...

He blinked slowly, blearily. He remembered...darkness. Black. A white mask.

Shinigami-sama!

He shot upright in bed, but to the side Shinigami-sama only turned slowly, before the eye holes of his mask turned upwards into a pleased smile.

"Deathscythe, how do you feel?" Behind him, the school nurse bustled with a tray of medicines and syringes, putting them back into the cabinet. "You were only out for a couple of hours this time."

The training room. The coolness of the meter against his arm. The enemy had told him, It'd be so easier to just break but Spirit-now-Deathscythe could remember broken, and he wasn't that, he wasn't a slouch like Stein -

"Deathscythe," he tasted the word in his mouth. He looked up at the chairman of the school he'd lived in all his life. "I'm...the best Weapon," he phrased slowly for confirmation.

"Yes," Shinigami-sama said. Those big hands that could Chop him into oblivion now patted his head in congratulations. "From now on, I'll wield you into battle."

The crash of emotion in his brain almost overloaded him with intensity: pride, amazement, disbelief, but sadness and confusion too.

And backwards...

"Stein," he called. Where had that hunchbacked crazy researcher disappeared to in this maze anyway? "Stein!" he called, waiting vainly for a response. He wandered further into the corridors, shouting as he went, but all that answered him were cobwebbed echoes.

The room at the end was brightly lit, with unidentifiable materials bubbling and brewing over burners and through tubes. Against the wall glass jars filled with mutant squishy things floated suspended in some sort of greenish goop. A pushable trolley laden with very clean and pristine dissection materials sat unmoving against a large operation table, empty except for unbound straps for arms and legs. Spirit noticed with some alarm that there were an extra pair of straps in the middle; was Stein studying some sort of insectoid?

Stein...Stein was so motionless and white against his surroundings that Spirit almost didn't notice him. But then he saw the rise and fall of those shoulders, the glint of the bolt that honestly, Spirit thought Stein cranked not to think better, but to scare people off, and he called out annoyed (and relieved), "There you are, Stein."

Those shoulders pointed down in resignation or exasperation, Spirit couldn't say. "Sempai," he answered, and the word sounded stuffy in a room so crowded with laboratory materials. Spirit waited for him to continue, but Stein only twisted his screw once, and went back to scribbling.

Spirit opened his mouth and abruptly shut it. "How've you been?" he asked fake-casually. He'd never asked Stein that before, and the awkwardness showed. Stein still hadn't even looked at him once.

"I'm alright. How is Kami doing?"

"Haha," he almost danced at the thought of his lovely wife back home, their new baby against her breast. A little girl. Maka. "It's a girl, Stein. A precious little girl."

"I see. Congratulations." There was a tint of warmth in there, Spirit just knew it, but if it was there it stood very lonely. Stein still hadn't turned to look at him.

Spirit opened his mouth again and then closed it. He'd been foolish to think Stein would just shrug and move on. Stein was a person who loved to cling to things that he cared about. And in his faltering steps to become a 'normal human' Spirit had been the one to push him, cajole him, plow him through that long and confusing journey. They'd been - what was the old word - shieldbrothers, like the old tales that sometimes he knew Stein read from the old shelf of books in Spirit's dorm room. Scythe and Meister, soul-synched.

Now Stein was someone Spirit barely recognized from those old days. He didn't cut indiscriminately, he didn't fly into destructive rages, he didn't act creepy and stalkery like he used to. Stein had shrunk into his own shadow. He stuck to his research in his remote lab and never came back out.

Spirit missed him - of course he did, they'd spent the better part of their growing years together - but the look in Stein's eyes was strange and cold. They certainly didn't invite Spirit to pry him back out of his new shell.

God, when had the wall between them climbed so high? Spirit couldn't see over it anymore, much less feel the length and breadth of it. This wasn't a wall he could just break by being hard or sharp, he realized. This wasn't a wall he could break as Deathscythe.

He could feel those own stupid walls he'd built come down. It'd only been a few years ago that Stein had sat close, put his head on his shoulder. Even slept in his bed at night, leaving Spirit hugging a fetal ball of skin and bones that shivered though it was perfectly warm under the blankets. He'd let Spirit kiss his hair, his fingers, stroke his cheek and run a curious hand down that silver bolt -

"Stein," he whispered, and the word was so pregnant with weary longing that he couldn't believe it'd come from him.

"You should go, Sempai," came the drawling answer. Spirit waited for more, but Stein didn't even turn around to look at him. Spirit opened and closed his mouth one last time, staring hard at that back, but in the end left without saying anything.

And forwards...

The envelope was thick and very large, but really all that mattered was the first few pages.

Black on white, scrawled across the page. Legal words popped up at him but after the title at the top he wasn't sure if he absorbed everything after that.

He remembered the first time he saw her, primly dressed, fair hair bouncing. Maka was very much like her; they thought quite alike, so much that many times he could see the same words being said by Kami. In the end Maka had only stayed in Death City because of school, not because of him. If she'd had her way she'd be traveling with her mother all over the world, learning what she wanted, researching what she wanted...

He stared at the box where she'd signed her name with the same flourish as she had when she was fifteen. As if in a a dream, he lowered his pen to the box next to hers.

Signing divorce papers should've never felt like such a relief.

And onwards...

"You should stay," he murmured. Stein wasn't looking at him again, he was tidying the cage where a sad, squawking bird remained. It looked over Stein's shoulder mournfully as if to plead for its life.

"Why."

Spirit shrugged. "The kids like you."

Stein closed the cage, gathered his books, and brushed past. There came the sudden sharp smell of cinnamon and something deeper, something sharper like steel or formaldehyde -

"I'll think about it," Stein replied just before the door shut behind him.

And onwards...

"Dad!" A shout cut viciously through the haze of alcohol. Abruptly he stopped laughing and squinted up through the haze of cigarette smoke coming from Jessica's side.

And then he smiled brilliantly. "Maka, what're you doing here? You should be sleeping -"

He had one second of his own green gaze looking out at him before she punched him square in the jaw.

And onwards...

"Girls ARE different," Shinigami-sama said. "But don't you think maybe it's you? You give up too easily on things that you should hang onto, Deathscythe."

Spirit opened and closed his mouth like a fish. He seemed to be doing that a lot lately. In the end, there was nothing he could say back to that at all.