AN: Post-manga, so spoilers ahoy!

wear the doormat down

He graduated with the notion that this would be the last of it: he'd served the Reaper, played his part, behaved himself long enough to be deemed non-threatening. He already had his eye on a building just outside town – a dilapidated thing, but it was real estate being sold for nearly nothing, leaving him with enough capital to renovate it however he pleased.

A laboratory is what he wanted, and it's what he got, and it's what he still has. He set that up himself, narrowly assuming it would be all he needed from there onwards – but it was at least his own private endeavour.

Everything else simply flocked to him.

The last time Franken saw his parents was the last time he set foot in Geneva. He'd been at the Academy for a year and they'd called him home for Christmas: not a holiday he had much time for before he turned thirteen, but that was the year in which he began to find it insufferable.

His parents were... nice, he supposes. Kind. Charitable people, pillars of the community, but more concerned with keeping up appearances than letting their son attend other children's birthday parties. Once Franken moved abroad, the odd letter here and there reminded him they still thought about him (even if they were content to stop seeing him, their moody child who'd never grown out of terrorising the cat) – until they stopped coming. Until there stopped being anyone to send them.

His father smoked menthol cigarettes, the thin kind, their barley underbelly laced with oil and mint. That's what left the largest impressive on their prodigal son, as Franken spent his time fighting demons and monsters half the world away.

He took up menthol too. Cold on his tongue but hot on his lips.

It's the first time Maka hugs him that he truly pauses for thought, only because he's never seen her hug Spirit that way. He isn't her father because no daughter of his could possibly be so lovely, clever and cunning with skin made for carving.

The telling thing is, he hadn't really wanted to open her up – to see the sides of her chest burst apart like frayed cloth. Rather, she's his pampered teacher's pet, in the sense that he doesn't pamper her whatsoever. That's the kindest way, offering advice when it's necessary but watching more often than not. He knew she'd become a fine meister the moment he'd laid eyes on her again, closer to a woman now than the baby she'd been last time he saw her.

He thinks about Maka, sometimes, when idling in his laboratory. Rather, his mind drifts towards all his students, though it really has no need to. Their job is done, just as his was, and they're telling the world how eager they are to move on and leave the City behind.

It never ceases to stretch his mouth into the widest grin, because he'd said that, too. But he did, in fairness, leave the City... by about half a mile.

He's no longer their teacher. That doesn't stop Maka from dropping by and Tsubaki from baking him things and Kid, brave new Reaper, from demanding his advice – how curious.

The class he has now is bold and bright, a collection of misfits he's meant to mould into heroes. The Academy's prior purpose (to hole away the Kishin so it's all business as usual) – that's no longer relevant, so students now know they're here to become soldiers, police, defenders of gates here and beyond.

But some things never change. Teenagers now still have so little respect for the value of dissection.

Stein learns all their names slower than he learns their souls: there's a boy, studious, who's always in the front row – and there's a girl, oblivious, who'd go well with him if she wasn't so keen to sit at the back. They're similar in that their wavelengths both shimmer with respect when Stein addresses them, awed by their renowned professor with a mysterious past and terrible sense of balance.

They'd perform miracles together. They remind him of those who came before.

There is a reason why his mind wanders this way, of course. He knows this, tucked away somewhere in the treachery of his subconscious.

His past students were children, are children, young lives changing but not yet fixed. They've created a safer world for themselves through violence and that's what they'll have to carry – but it means (so he thinks, with a sense of something like gratitude) that the next generation won't have it on their shoulders.

The generation inside Marie.

Each morning, he wakes with a pleasant sense of surprise from what he sees: gold hair strewn across the pillow beside his own. Her soft, white body shines in the watery dawn-light, and he reaches out to touch her, to make sure she's real – but for all the trouble it's caused him before, his mind is no longer playing tricks.

They've slipped inside each other's souls on the battlefield, hers a comforting cloth that smells like the ground after lightning. So when he slips inside her again, senses the tiny wavelength growing in her that he put there before, he's still not sure what love is – but what he feels for her is close enough. He seems to make her happy, though he can't think why.

He churns his bolt clockwise to silence his bewilderment whenever it tries to flip inside his head, and what he has with Marie is a type of madness he can tolerate.

People should only be good for sinking fangs into, layers of soft flesh and oozing blood: prey. He'd always thought his purpose on this Earth was to research and record, be it by extinguishing life or watching death from afar – though these days, there's more life in his house than there ever was.

Lone wolf, not papa bear, though nobody seems to agree.

They conspire against him, Kim making the curtains as pink as her hair before he even has time to notice, and the matching furniture is Patty's work. Nygus puts the notion of 'flowers everywhere' into Marie's gleeful head, the décor rendered horrendously symmetrical thanks to Kid's meddling, for a while... until Stein spends an afternoon tearing things to pieces just to stitch them back up again.

Much better.

They still don't leave him alone.

He dwells on it, sometimes. It's not safe territory to think about where he might be, now, had he not been saved by people he thought detested him; he knows Spirit still feels wary, on occasion, whenever he looks up from lamenting in his beer long enough to find Franken staring aimlessly at the moon.

(But that isn't so. He can spend consecutive evenings on his balcony, as dusk turns to night, head tipped up to the sky – to that moon, to Crona, to wherever Kid's father might be.)

(There are some things he couldn't salvage.)

His head is unclouded, when cleared out by menthol smoke. He's rational and in control, or at least, to the best extent that he can be. He simply doesn't see why it's so irrational to crave the peace oflunacy, too, once in a while, because he was never built for family and this is enough to drive anyone nuts.

The truth is, he hadn't expected to live this long and it's a novelty that he has. Men like him don't get these endings. Men like him don't get endings at all.

One night, he finds himself repairing a torn labcoat, ripped by Azusa when she'd seized him in the corridor to scold him for something or other... not that he'd cared enough to listen. Intrigued and bored, Stein tallies them up through his stitches – all the times he should've died.

It's because he can taste it. The copper blood that was meant to be ripped right out of him, arteries dragged from their dull, comfortable places beneath his skin. He can't shake the feeling his heart is beating on borrowed time, plasma and living cells growing within him, taking up someone else's space.

But his are deaths that can't be quantified. He runs out of fabric to stitch before he's even finished listing the misadventures of his youth, and he's never been one for nostalgia. Asura couldn't kill him and Medusa couldn't kill any of them, all other threats fading woefully into the ether.

He sets the coat aside when he's done, content with his latest handiwork.

The Last Deathscythe leads the processions for a Reaper now able to leave his grand Academy, a novelty to retirees and children alike. The City is changing and here is why, Kid at the helm with Soul by his side.

Humanity hasn't seen this for nearly a millennium. The decider of life and death is able to walk amongst them, kiss their children, comfort their sick.

Stein had no interest in politics before Kid's father called him back. Men of his sciences rarely do, aside from voting for whichever candidate seems the least ethical. Now, he spends so much time in the city he'd once avoided that he can navigate it with his eyes closed – and people nod to him from cafés, wave to him from benches.

It's almost troubling. He remembers when his presence on these cobbled streets had been greeted by mutterings of it's that crazy professor oh god oh god did he see me oh god no don't talk to him.

Now, now they feel like they can all talk freely.

Marie tells him it's normal; no man is an island, so it's a good thing he won their respect. Didn't you care for your students? Don't you care for them now?

Of course he does – he approaches responsibility on his own terms, but there are only so many times he can face death for someone else before having to accept the inevitable. Marking his body are scars that he didn't put there of his own accord, reminders of fights undertaken to prevent the ridiculous children under his care from getting themselves killed.

It washes over him when he's standing in the courtyard of his lab, saying goodnight over and over to troublesome guests in the hopes they'll get the hint and finally leave – with Black Star lingering in his gate, insisting they definitely have to have a rematch eventually, while Maka and Patty cling to either side of him in some messy approximation of a hug... and only Soul, reliably cantankerous Soul, is checking his watch.

Franken accepts it in waves, lets it take him under because fighting it will make him go quite mad.

The thing that's swallowing him whole: it's family. It's what's keeping him anchored here, safely sane. The pregnant Weapon he's teaching himself how to love is watching fondly from the doorway, and he lets his eyes slide shut while Patty shamelessly helps herself to the half-empty cigarette carton in his pocket.

She can have it, he tells her flatly. He's going to quit... again.

They all know he won't, from Tsubaki's forced smile to Liz's raised brow, but that's family summed up. Lies to make everyone feel better happen to be the currency, and they'll even let him pretend he doesn't like it when they flock, flock, flock.

(Life is laughable but it refuses to stop.)

(Some day, they'll be inviting him to all their weddings.)

-x-