WiMtLC: Devil's Advocate

Some time later

This had been a bad idea. Stein shut the anatomy textbook and tried to clear his mind of thoughts of cutting something—anything—open. There was nothing for him to dissect, anyway. Marie had "freed" all of his mice long ago, perhaps wisely, and now was not the time to go cutting himself up. But he wanted to, not destructively but just to relieve this itch, to answer the images of blood and pulsing organs that he'd accidentally summoned. He covered his face with his hand and sighed.

"Why the hell am I here?"

A soft chuckle. "Don't ask me that."

He stood and trudged to the washroom to splash some cold water on his face. She followed at a respectable distance, walked unhindered through the door that he closed behind him, and remained silent as he filled the sink and scrubbed his face. The water did nothing to dispel her presence, and he could feel her golden eyes trained on his back.

His hallucinations of her hadn't stopped—but he hadn't really expected them to. Not after everything she'd done to him, been to him; not after the undeniable influence she'd had on his mind. So instead of trying to fight them, he'd robbed them of their power. He'd trained them to stay back and stay clothed. They were not as cruel as the real thing, now. Now they were playfully argumentative, which made them a decent way to tug on his chains every now and then and make sure they still held strong.

In the mirror, he saw her smile patronizingly. "Anxious about tomorrow?"

He had a meeting scheduled with Lord Death and Marie to discuss whether or not he was ready for the anklet to come off. And though he would still be under house arrest, though he'd tried to tell himself that he didn't really care, he'd grown agitated thinking about it. He'd been reading in the hope that it would distract and calm him. Success on the first count; not so much on the second.

"Are you going to tell them you still talk to me?" Medusa asked. She looked faintly smug, and Stein was expressionless as he watched her through the mirror.

"It's not something I should hide."

"Even though it'll hurt your chances?"

This was meant to be an honest assessment. If his instinct was to hide the fact that he argued with a hallucination that had Medusa's face, that was nothing more than a sign that Lord Death needed to know.

So she tried a different angle: "Marie won't like it."

He smiled wryly and turned to face her properly, half-sitting on the sink edge. "No, she won't. She'll want to know why she's not enough. She's here to help me, after all." He sighed and shook his head. "I can't have these conversations with her." She would struggle to keep up and would never understand that the point was to talk through these borderline thoughts, not to talk him out of them.

"She'll never be enough, you know. You need someone who understands who you are—what you want."

"Someone like you, is what you're trying to say?" Stein asked as Medusa got closer than he probably should have let her. She placed a gentle hand on his cheek and smiled.

"Am I wrong?"

He stared at her. "My memory is nowhere near selective enough to let me fall for that."

"No? What a pity." There was pained sympathy in her eyes, in her voice. Her fingernails raked his skin ever-so-slightly, and it took a stupid amount of self-control not to tilt his head towards her touch. For a moment, he had a hard time breathing.

"Back off," he said finally, firmly. A bit too loudly.

So she reappeared where she'd begun, leaning on the far wall and holding her hands up in faux innocence. He couldn't pull away from her gaze, and he needed to, so he turned back to the sink to splash his face again.

"That didn't work the first time. What makes you think it will do any good now?"

Stein sighed, leaning on the sink. He couldn't let himself get distracted like this. "…What was the original question?"

"Why the hell you're here," Medusa said, "'here' presumably meaning under Death's thumb. I don't believe you'd found an answer yet."

She met his eyes in the mirror, smirking. He gave a lean smile in return. "You're wrong. I've always known the answer to that question." It was always there. Sometimes he tried to resist it, and in his worst moods it didn't make as much sense as it should, but it was always present.

Medusa's smirk slipped away, and she raised a skeptical eyebrow. "Oh? Enlighten me." The tone of her voice added, convince me. But she was a hallucination. It was his own mind rattling these chains, and it was nothing new.

Stein's fingers found the old scar at the base of his skull. It was one of his roughest, and probably his least proud. "You nearly didn't have a chance to meet me at all, you know. I almost died when I was seventeen."

"Is this relevant?" She folded her arms and tilted her head patronizingly. "Telling me boring childhood stories is one thing, but reminiscing to your own mind? I didn't think you were so desperate for attention."

"You're the one who asked. Are you going to shut up and listen or not?" She was silent, so he continued. "This was back when I was trying and failing to get control of myself. I could fight my own madness when I was conscious, for the most part, but every night I had vivid dreams about dissecting the corpses of people I called friends in my waking life." Stein stared at the mirror, seeing neither himself nor Medusa but the fragments of the dreams that he still remembered. Spirit. Sid. Marie, once in a while. And sometimes even Lord Death himself, dead by Stein's hand and stretched out on the table, with anatomy like nothing Stein had ever seen. He shuddered. It was treason to remember this.

"Poor Stein," Medusa said. "Scared of a few little dreams."

"If I'd been scared, it wouldn't have been such a problem." He gave a sick smile. "I would wake up buzzing, needing to dismember something. I gave in every time—got rid of my new apartment's rat problem in a week—until I realized I was feeling and obeying a compulsion to kill. …That spooked me just a bit." He hadn't slept for three nights straight after that realization, and when sleep had finally forced itself upon him, the dream he'd had—

"So you turned your knife on yourself instead of others for once?"

"Not like that. I extracted a piece of my brain stem so I couldn't enter REM sleep anymore. …It wasn't a wise move by any criteria. Considering my lack of experience, it's a miracle that I only almost died—I would have, if Spirit hadn't been sent to check up on my truancy. He found me passed out from blood loss, and ten days later I got a visit from Lord Death in the infirmary." He swallowed. "…This next part, I didn't tell Medusa."

She'd asked—multiple times, if his memory could be trusted—but he'd never been able to answer. Every time, the slightest thought of the conversation had sent his already-crazed mind spiraling through contradictory, unsolvable emotions. Surrendering his freedom had saved him and trapped him. It had guaranteed his permanent frustration even as it gave him relief.

"We talked. I said… all sorts of things. I couldn't figure out whether I hated myself or him. And I was afraid to tell him that, but he wasn't angry. He just let me talk, and when I stopped ranting he asked me what I wanted."

"Ha."

Stein smiled in wry agreement; he'd scoffed at Lord Death, too. "I told him that he couldn't offer me that choice. That I was incapable of making a correct decision. Care to take a guess what he said to that?"

Medusa rolled her eyes. "I'm your hallucination. I know just as well as you do what he said."

"Humor me. Answer me like she would."

Another roll of the eyes, a glance to the side. "I assume that Death ordered you to follow him then, and you agreed because you didn't know what else to do with yourself."

"Not at all." He too had expected for Lord Death to demand obeisance, and he'd readied himself to be forced into a shame-faced, bristling bow, but Death had known that to rob him of choice would only foster resentment. "He promised to always let me choose which side I wanted to be on. To kill me, yes, if I was a threat to order, but to never take away the freedom of that choice."

"Heartwarming." Then her gaze focused coldly on him. "But tell me… has he kept that promise? Are you still free to make whatever choice you want? You're under house arrest now. And remember, Marie would have stolen you back from me if you hadn't gone with her willingly. She admitted that."

Stein's stomach twisted, but he answered levelly, "House arrest and most of the details of it were my idea, and Lord Death is the one who's so eager to get this anklet off me now. As for when I left you… You stole me in the first place, and seriously compromised my ability to make rational decisions. I don't get to make life-changing decisions when I'm crazy. That only makes sense."

Medusa's eyes were contemptuous and painful. "You do realize, of course, what a pitiful rationalization that is?"

Stein only looked at her in the mirror again, silently.

"You're fine with that?"

If he were fine with it, she wouldn't be here. But what he said was, "He's the better option. That he allows me choice is undeniable. But you, Medusa… you don't seem to think I deserve that. If I were stupid enough to go back to you now, you'd tear the ability to make decisions out of me, break me until rational thought isn't even a distant memory. Who the hell would choose that? Sanity's a part of who I am, too, you know."

"He says to a hallucination." Medusa looked away, sulking.

"I didn't say it was a dominant part."

She looked at him again, her mouth twisted in bitter frustration. "Fine. For now, I'll leave you to your 'choice' and your mental slavery, since you've convinced yourself that's what you want." At the last second, faint pity appeared in her eyes. "Good-bye."

"Good-bye, Medusa," Stein muttered as the hallucination cleared. He pulled the plug out of the sink and watched the water swirl away. The chains held. He was here. He would never go to Medusa. "I'm looking forward to the day I forget your face."

Liar, said the ghost of her voice in his mind.

But in response, Stein let a grin spread across his face. "It's not a lie," he said, completely and wonderfully honest. "Not entirely."