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Usually, he was fine with being the bearer of bad news. When all the other students dreaded the classes regarding how to deliver grim results, he was indifferent. Perhaps not giddy, not always, at least, but certainly not affected by the sorrow. Isolating himself from it completely.
Not now.
Perhaps, he muses, he has grown soft. Or maybe this was the reason doctors were discouraged from working cases that meant a lot to them. Because he stands before his wife and his former students, now grown and just as deadly as he is, feeling more like a shroud of ill fate than a doctor.
“That…that can’t be right,” Marie said, swallowing hard, her hands shaking at the news he has just dropped upon her. Stein looked grim at her voice, the paper he was holding crinkled at the edges, his wedding ring leaving a particularly harsh demarcation.
“The bloodwork confirms it,” he assured, his voice surprisingly gentle as he spoke to her.
Maka stared straight ahead, one hand on her stomach and the over over her throat, her face sickly and pale. Soul looked all too concerned, sitting next to her so close it seemed as though he were ready to throw himself between her and Stein as though to protect her with his body from the words themselves. “But my wavelength…” she started, feeling something bubble in her stomach, the bile sour in her throat. Stein turned his head in her direction, but didn’t take his eyes off his wife.
“An offset of Marie’s,” he explained, but paused after a second of thought. “Rather, a mutation.”
“A mutation,” Maka echoed, hollowly, and from beside her, Soul’s arm over her shoulders drew her closer. She followed without seemingly noticing, pressing herself close to Soul’s chest.
“Technically,” Stein drawled, “a mutation of the witch’s.”
“I can’t…I can’t believe…” Marie started, her lower lip wobbling.
Maka’s soul, however, expanded, getting large and fierce and furious. “But we have anti-madness wavelengths!” she spat, pulling away from Soul’s tender embrace. “How can it relate back to…back tothat.”
“Wicca started in pacifism-” he began, the old lessons in Witch History coming back to him without a hitch, but Maka snarled, fisting her skirt.
“They aren’t pacifist. They’re murderers!”
“One of them is your relative. Murderer or otherwise,” Stein responded, cooly, his face barely showing the slightest tinges of regret until he heard Marie inhale sharply, falling heavily against the seat she was in.
Stein’s mouth pinched at the edges, his arm twitching in that familiar way it always did when he wanted to comfort his wife and realized he was in the company of others, so he simply threw one hand into his labcoat. Being reminded of his wife seemed to soften him, and he sighed, closing his eyes for a moment behind his glasses.
“The bloodwork confirms it, Maka.”
“Maybe there was a mistake!” she insisted, her bright eyes dimmed and sad. “You must have messed up, somewhere.”
“The proteins I isolated-”
“Isn’t there a different test?” Maka asked, and he cracked one eye open to see her standing up to her full five feet and four inches of height. “Isn’t there a way to redo it and double check?”
“The results will be identical-”
“You don’t know that! Redo it! Maybe it’ll be different!”
“I’d heard, Maka, that was the definition of insanity,” he replied, dryly, and Marie reached out, grasping his labcoat in a trembling hold as though to reel him in. She was, evidently, all of his impulse control, and he looked down at her, both eyes open, now, and the slightest hints of guilt gnawing at his gut.
Truthfully, he wouldn’t be so snippy if it weren’t for the fact that the two of them had insisted he dig deeper into the results. What had started as an attempt to locate a kidney donor for Maka quickly turned into a curious rabbit hole. After they found out that they were a match, and one ill-timed joke from Spirit that maybe they were related, that the gold hair certainly connected them, they’d asked him to look into it.
Likely not because they had any suspicion that there was some sort of link between them, but as another silly suggestion. Maka and Marie had giggled at the idea of being cousins, that they could go to family events together. No one bothered to inform them that, sometimes, ancestor was a minefield.
It was simply too bad that Stein decided to throw caution to the wind and run the tests, anyway, digging into research for their samples and running their genealogy. He already knew most of Marie’s, as he ran the tests when they got married. Marie’d been a willing subject in most of his benign, harmless experiments, so he already knew she was 99% Scandinavian, mostly Swedish.
The smallest sliver of Greek and Japanese was the real surprise. And how interesting it was that Maka, instead of being a soup of European, German and Polish and English and French from Spirit’s side and mostly Japanese from her mother’s, was, still that exact soup of European, but only a quarter Japanese at most, with a large chunk of Greek thrown in as though some sort of odd wildcard.
Spirit’s bloodwork, that Stein had run in the past without his knowing, however, revealed not a single drop of Greek.
It didn’t take much digging, after that, to connect the dots. The relation they shared.
And when he found the proteins in their blood, the ones only found in witches, well, it certainly explained quite a few things.
He couldn’t keep such things from his wife. He couldn’t keep much, if anything from her, honestly. And so, there they were, after getting the greenlight for the surgery, finding out just what kind of connection they shared.
He didn’t expect for it to be a savory reaction, to say the least. Family reunions must have glossed over this particular relative.
Maka fists clenched, tight, and his eyes followed the motion, preparing himself to duck if she were to swing, but Soul stood up with her, his hands reaching out as though to placate his girlfriend, to which Maka simply flinched. The reaction was instantaneous, the way she turned on a dime, her soul shattering in fury as she stormed out of the lab, and Soul stood there, his hands still up before he called her name, a panicked “Maka!?” breaking against his sharp, glinting teeth.
When Soul turned to look at him, his eyes held nothing but irritation, likely blaming him for everything happening.
Misplaced fury, it wasn’t on Stein that someone in Maka and Marie’s families fucked a witch. He wasn’t the one who did so. But he could understand the weapon’s protective instincts. Soul had been protective of Maka for years already, and it was no different after they got together.
“Has anyone ever told you that you’re shit at delivering bad news?” Soul asked, already making his way out to find Maka.
Stein said nothing, though part of him wanted to tell Soul that, yes, obviously he had been told such a thing before. Multiple times, really. But he only leaned his head back waiting the three seconds it took for Soul to rush after his girlfriend, yelling out “Maka!?” once more. The door slamming shut indicated that they were out of the lab, and he pinched the bridge of his nose for a moment before he finally focused on his wife, who had her head in her hands.
He had been so caught up in Maka’s reaction that he didn’t notice just how fractured Marie’s soul was.
“Marie?” he asked, throwing the results down on the table before he stooped down in front of her, taking in how her shoulders shook. Seeing her upset always wrecked him, and his lips turned down at the edges, one of his hands coming to her shoulder. “Marie?” The soft, sad laughter bubbled out of her, her head shaking back and forth.
“It was just a joke. We were just making a joke. We didn’t think…we didn’t-”
Stein bit the inside of his cheek, roving his touch to settle atop her head so he could guide her face to his chest, pressing her close, letting her hide away.
Perhaps his call was a good one, then. They were already upset enough just finding out it was a witch, they didn’t need to know the details. They didn’t need to know how every witch family had a specific genetic code, how witches were so easy to trace by bloodlines, since they were so old, and so sparse. How Maka’s percentage of witch blood was too high to be anything but a very close relative. A first cousin. An aunt.
A mother.
How Maka’s Mother had always refused to put her bloodwork on file, how she’d always patched herself up, alone.
Maka didn’t need to know. Marie didn’t need to know. They didn’t need to know how easy it was to look in the databanks, how simple it was to narrow down the family, to narrow down the locations, to narrow down that it was Gorgon blood. That Arachne had been dormant, presumed dead. That Shaula was captive in Guatemala for 200 years until just three years after Maka was born. That the only other Gorgon sister had been off the grid for centuries, unaccounted for before she showed up at the DWMA as a nurse.
Stein slowly strokes Marie’s hair, gold as a wedding band, and his mind flashes to Maka’s ashen locks, to a witch’s braid the exact color in between.
And he says nothing.