WIMTLC-5: Love

She told him she loved him because it turned his stomach. He shuddered when she said it, repulsed and grateful and powerless to escape her either way, and it pleased her. So she didn't care whether the words were true or not. They were for effect. They produced that mix of need and terror in his eyes that she craved.

They could have been true; it depended on how one defined love. Medusa had never thought that her sister was capable of love—what she felt was a self-centered desire to draw everything into herself. But Arachne called that love, and it wasn't really all that different from what Medusa felt towards Stein.

What she felt was selfish and possessive, but it was far more tailored than Arachne's greed. She kept Stein because never before, in eight hundred years of life, had she met someone who matched her desires so flawlessly.

*

"What do you think madness is?"

Stein didn't respond right away. He was lying on her bed, staring up at the ceiling, and she watched his eyes roam as if he saw something moving there. With a gentle hand on his cheek, she guided his gaze towards her. "Define 'madness' for me, Stein."

But he wasn't really looking at her. He shrunk away, trembling. "They're everywhere," he whispered with a helpless giggle.

Medusa sighed. She could never get him to tell her what 'they' were—obviously hallucinations of some sort, the ripples of Ashura's wavelength that his mind caught so easily, but what exactly she didn't know. And when he was seeing whatever he saw, it was impossible to get any sense out of him. She disentangled herself from the sheets and slid back into her clothes. If Stein had no opinion to offer her, she might as well get back to her own work on the matter.

"Medusa," he said, voice thick as if he was speaking in his sleep.

She pulled her hood over her head, but didn't leave the room just yet.

"You've only yourself to blame that I don't make a good partner for intellectual conversation."

Now she turned back to him, to treat herself to his expression—the irony-scorn-hatred-despair that meant somewhere in the depths of his mind was a sliver of sanity that realized just how broken he was. A smile stretched across her face. "Madness," she answered her own question, "is when you know something is going to destroy you, but you can't bring yourself to get away from it."

His eyes, numb, full of need and anguish, bore into hers as if she were the only person in the world. "Sounds about right."

*

He got underfoot. Constantly. When she was working on something that required her full attention, she locked him in his room, but she preferred to let him roam free when she could; he was more interesting that way. He looked through her research with a wholehearted curiosity that she found almost flattering. In return, she put up with sometimes having to pry the test tube she wanted from his grasp or chase him from her lab for a little quiet so she could think. It was worst of all when his lust awoke on its own and he came on to her while she was trying to work. The words Not now, I'm busy never seemed to mean anything to him then; nor was he deterred by the sudden, painful convulsions of the single snake she always kept inside him. Instead she was forced to waste magic laying a path of Vector Plates to get him out of her hair. At least she knew her home well enough to propel him back to his room (with another plate preventing him from leaving once she got him there) without looking up from her experiment.

*

"What do you think madness is?"

He looked at her, and she knew that she was going to get an answer this time, a good one, one worthy of someone who had spent much of his life trying to answer that question. There was light in his eyes, but no struggle. He had found the perfect, rare equilibrium where he was mad but still human enough to realize the freedom insanity afforded him.

He said, "Insensible actions characterized by dampened or missing desire for self-preservation and often caused by unbridled passion."

Medusa quirked an eyebrow. "My, what a technical definition."

"It's from my dissertation. It was a stupid, rambling thing—less a conclusion than a collection of thoughts. I think they only accepted it because it's the only time an insane person has ever analyzed himself."

"I suppose that does make it valuable." Smiling, she traced the scar across his chest. "Ramble on, Doctor Stein."

He pulled away from her touch and got a cigarette from the pocket of his lab coat that lay crumpled on the floor. Lighting it, he sat back down on the bed. "Everyone contains some degree of madness."

"Mm-hmm."

"In other words, there's no one who wouldn't risk his or her life and make unpredictable actions for some reason. The problems tend to develop when the 'trigger' is tied to some basic human feeling—fear, curiosity, the desire for power…"

"Because it's always there?"

"That's part of it." He took a drag on his cigarette. "But it's less a matter of frequency than one of depth, so to speak. We're talking about instinctive human characteristics here. They're not learned or developed slowly over time—they're inborn traits that underlie every other thought we ever have."

"Inborn madness, in other words." She smirked. "I see. So it's hardly your fault you wound up like this. You were born with a proclivity to madness."

"This isn't about blame," he said, looking at her with reproach. "It was never about excusing myself to others. I wrote that paper for my own satisfaction. Because I wanted to solve myself."

"And in the process, you gave Death and his minions such wonderful guidelines on suppressing people like you. Well done."

She expected him to respond to her teasing with sarcasm or defiance, but instead she saw him tense, saw uncertainty and fear creep into his eyes. "Stein…"

She'd disturbed his equilibrium by reminding him of Death's former power over him; she hadn't meant to. It wasn't that she didn't like breaking him, but—not now.

"Forget it," she said. "Forget I said anything." She pulled him into her arms as if to say It doesn't matter what they think about you. I have you now, and I want you to be like this. He sat in her embrace, docile and shaking, until he finished his cigarette; then he pulled away from her, got dressed, and wandered out the door.

*

There were times when it almost seemed like they trusted each other. Once he cut across her chest deeply enough that it did not stop bleeding right away, and he offered to stitch it up.

"It'll scar," he warned, as if she couldn't have deduced that from his own appearance. Nevertheless she lay down across one of her operating tables, breathing calmly as his needle went in and out of her skin. There was a kind of intimacy to it. When it scarred, it would be a permanent reminder that he could be gentle with her.

But at other times he fought, struggled like an animal in a trap. Gripping her arm so tightly it hurt: "What did you do to Marie?"

She tried to stare him down, to remove his hand by the force of her glare, but his resolve flared at odd times and she had to pry his fingers loose. And then she told him, I let Sid Barrett take her away on the condition that I got to keep you. Or, I killed her. Her body's probably still rotting in front of that lab. Or, You mean you haven't found her yet? I took her in too. She's been wandering this lab, even crazier than you are.

She watched him try to claw towards sanity, watched him fail. She said, "Why do you keep asking me that? The more answers I give you, the lower your chance of discerning the truth."

For that he had no response. But the first time, she'd asked him why he cared, what he saw in her, and though he hadn't been able to put words to it, it was in his eyes: Marie flooded him with hope. She hadn't asked again.

*

Medusa had always been a scientist and a hoarder of information, so it was only natural that she began to pick apart Stein's life. She asked him questions whenever he seemed capable of answering—questions like why do you want to dissect everything? and what did your parents think of you? and, in absolute fascination, what's it like inside your head?

One night, as they lay together bloodied and bruised and certain that they belonged with each other, she admired the stitches that riddled his body. She was unsurprised to learn that they mostly closed cuts of his own handiwork, experiments and observations and attempts to dig the madness out of the recesses of his body.

"What's this one?" she asked, touching the band of stitches around his right arm. But he caught her hand suddenly, holding it so tightly that her fingers stung. She raised an eyebrow. He was glaring at her, eyes shining in scorn.

"I hated the doctors who analyzed me. I drove one of them insane."

She smiled indulgently. "Now you're comparing me to them."

"I am not your experiment," he spat, and Medusa couldn't help but laugh.

"You don't believe yourself when you say that, do you, Stein?" She entwined one leg around him and stroked his chest with her free hand. But there was hatred in his eyes, and his grip on her other hand only tightened so that she thought he'd break her fingers. She bit back a hiss of pain and instead loosed her snake from her shoulder and told it to bare its fangs against his throat. His gaze shifted to watch it warily.

"Your choice, Stein," she said. "She's poisonous."

He released her hand, still glaring as she flexed her fingers thoughtfully. Then she pushed him down and straddled him so that he couldn't escape.

"I told you once before," she murmured, "I can and will do whatever I want with you. You will be whatever I want you to be: my experiment, my mad puppet—my lover—" She ground against him once. When he tried to push her away, she wrapped him in enough vectors to hold him immobile. "You ought to stop fighting. I've claimed you because you fascinate me. Be flattered, Stein. You might as well, because you will not escape me."

*

"What do you think madness is?"

In a voice that sounded like it was being dragged across gravel, he said, "This." He was shuddering.

She stroked his jaw, to no avail; so then she snuggled close to him, wrapped herself around him, brought her lips to his. He didn't respond at first—couldn't stop shaking—but as she continued to kiss him, not forceful but firm, he began to kiss back. He wound his fingers into her hair, and when they pulled back, his hands came to rest on her face.

"I love you, Stein," she said seriously; and as he curled against her, at peace in her arms because she and no one else would accept him like this, she found herself really weighing her own words. She tried to clear things that were not love from her consideration, stifling possessiveness and greed and triumph and scientific fascination. It left her feeling hollow, because those emotions were all that she was.