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Torse counts 1,000 beats of his clockwork heart after the Wind Riders exit the mech before he steps out himself. He does not answer the questioning looks of the other members who’ve been left behind, and does not wait for their curiosity to be verbalized. There is a corrosion within him, rust threatening to spill into his words, and he will not allow his jagged, contaminated edges to cut into the flesh of his allies.
He cannot be here.
The crystalline cityscape of Zumhara glimmers in the sunlight, Zoodians rushing to their beacon of safety. Torse finds a direction clear of terrified passersby and drags his shambling bulk into the thick, unprotected canopy.
He does not fear the Queen’s influence, she has torn from him all he could provide. He is of no use to her. Nor does he fear becoming a casualty in her impending mass destruction. It is a likely reality, as he walks further away from any defensible strongholds and into the lush bounty she so loathes, but Torse does not fear it.
He will return to the Wind Riders when he regains his composure, or he will succumb to the beast he’s been battling his entire life. Either way, the brave adventurers will defeat the Queen, and nothing of value will have been lost.
A winding river cuts off his path, unpolluted water flowing with such abundance Torse can see the creatures racing within it, the softly glowing crystals nestled within the bed. He finally gains enough presence to recognize the trees that surround him, their bodies slumped toward the river and long branches skimming its surface. Crystalline drops form over their leaves, ringing mournfully in the wind. Weeping willows.
The Queen could so easily spy on him here. Torse reminds himself of all the reasons she will not, and does not feel any safer.
This place would be beautiful, surely, to an audience capable of thriving. But Torse does not possess the proper equipment. His claws have only ever clung to survival, they slice through anything more delicate he attempts to hold. Punch through, twist, shatter, and destroy.
He can have his golden heart if he desires it, Comfrey said.
Torse rips off a willow branch, crystals crushed in his fist. He hurls the limp thing down the river, soft weeping breaking into echoing sobs. A crash, the water’s glass illusion shattered.
The branch sinks below the surface and Torse sinks to his knees.
There is nothing Torse desires less than worthiness, if all it makes him is a pawn in the game that cleverer minds and greater egos have been playing with his home, as if the stakes were bragging rights and not the survival of countless souls. There is nothing Torse desires less than a worthy heart if all it makes him is a fucking body. His autonomy wrested away by a hateful monster who forces his fingers into the perfect shape to ruin himself; his idolatry stolen by a frivolous adventurer who obfuscates the reality of her influence so her commands go unquestioned. Puppeteers who do not think of him beyond his use.
Torse only learned about Professor MacLeod’s part in constructing the barrier at Katur because she was explaining it to his wind riders while he was within hearing distance. She would never have informed him, a mere cog in her grand machine, that she had cast the net that had trapped his people in Straka’s hunting grounds for centuries. The beast could never again reach her precious Zood, but neither could innocents seeking asylum. How many lives had been lost because it was decided that Zood was worthy of saving from destruction, but Zernians were acceptable casualties? How many people has he been mourning because of Comfrey’s “best idea”?
He punches his fist into the riverbank, blades sinking deep in the earth.
Torse is almost certainly the last of the Aganti Zernai, sentenced to a life of loneliness and alienation for the crime of surviving what has taken so many of his kinsmen. He had given his golden heart to maintain the barrier because of his frivolous fucking faith in Comfrey MacLeod’s machine. Torse had mindlessly believed in her goodness, afraid to ask too much for his people because it’d be selfish, ungrateful, greedy to take from a woman who’d already given so much.
His claws tear up the roots buried beneath the soil.
How much of him has been fed to the machine? Is there anything left in Torse, or has his soul been hollowed out so his body is of better use?
If all Torse is worthy of is abuse, he would rather have stayed disanimated in the crypt of Ramansu, the briny deep of Katur, or even the Corrodi’s damned halls of hell. Yet he keeps awakening to the beloved faces of his wind riders, and the shards of his lonely, aching soul resonate with a symphony of how much he wants to live.
He lowers his head to soft, glittering earth. The etchings in his iron heart ache. In his wildest imaginings he becomes a man capable of more than survival, who can look at crystal forests and only think of how beautiful they are.
It’s his most shameful fantasy to have room within himself for contentment, joy, and whimsy. He is so tired, but he does not want an unending rest. He just wants to not be so damned tired all the time. All Torse wants is to live, and to do so with—
Footsteps behind him. Torse surges to his feet, whirling around on,
“Maxwell,” he gasps, voice box crackling. His friend comes to a stop right in front of him, closer than is safe to an emotionally unstable Zernian warrior. The river is right behind him. No way to create distance. “What are you doing here?”
His friend wrinkles his nose, looking distinctly irritated. “I could ask you the same question. We got back from successful negotiations and information gathering to find our crew with a glaring hole where my friend is supposed to be. What’s with that, Torse?”
Maxwell’s well-manicured brows are incredibly furrowed. Beneath his mustache, his mouth is flattens in unhappiness. He presses an ungloved fist into Torse’s chest and doesn’t wait for a response. “Then Freyja tells me ‘Mr. Gotch, your metal man has absconded into the woods’ and points in the opposite fucking direction of any goddamn place it’d make sense for you to go.”
Ah, Torse is closer than is safe to a furious Gathie warrior. The river is right behind him. It’s a decent escape route, if a bit cowardly, but Torse has not survived this long by being above cowardice.
But it’s too late. Maxwell grabs a rung of Torse’s cast-iron ribs and yanks him forward. Their heads barely avoid knocking together, faces suddenly a hairsbreadth apart. Oh, he’s fucked. He is so, so fucked. “I had to get some guidance from Monty just to spot your fucking tracks. I’m not a naturalist, Torse, it was honestly kind of hard to follow you here.”
“I’m sorry,” Torse manages, because he has no idea what else to say.
His friend’s eyes shine in the dappled light. Countless micro-expressions Torse cannot identify pass over Maxwell’s face, his nose scrunching and mouth wobbling with the force of it all. Torse is tugged by the inexplicable certainty of his own monstrousness and Maxwell’s insistent hands around his ribs.
“And when I did finally manage to track down my missing friend, you were slumped in the dirt,” Maxwell drives on as if Torse hadn’t spoken. “Looking like you were fucking dea— ” His breath hitches, face screws up, fingers cling tighter. “Fucking disanimated, or something. What the hell, Torse?”
Oh.
Torse cannot be a monster, because Maxwell Gotch is frightened by the possibility of losing him. Nor can he be a soulless body, with Maxwell Gotch staring into his eyes and trying to understand him. Torse is certainly not dead, nor merely surviving. He is alive, and his friend’s grip makes it clear he will be made to stay that way.
A keening whine escapes Torse as this revelation dredges up everything he had escaped into isolation to soothe. The noise shocks Maxwell into loosening his grip, but Torse has been stripped of all the composure and control that would have him pushing for distance. Instead, his forehead falls against Maxwell’s, slides to his temple and down his cheek, finally taking refuge in the crook of his neck.
Torse listens for his friend’s thrumming pulse as he scrounges for an explanation. “I could not stay where I was while feeling like this.”
Stuttered breath. “Feeling like what?”
“Dismantled,” Torse rumbles. Tries not to imagine himself strung up in the Amphereon workshop. Fails. “Maxwell, why would Comfrey have made me my golden heart if she was the one who had constructed the barrier?”
“Why would she...? Oh.” Maxwell stiffens, then blows out a breath. He reaches past Torse’s mantle to clasp his neck, tucks them firmly together, and rhythmically brushes a thumb across his vulnerable nape. “Oh, Torse.”
His friend’s comfort breaks the dam. “What drove her to save me, when she was comfortable condemning so many to destruction? What had she found worthy of salvation within me that she deemed the rest of my homeworld to be lacking? Why am I not taken apart in the Amphereon, or walking as one of the Naughtomata, or lining the throat of that vile beast?”
Maxwell goes rigid. His grip on Torse’s neck clinches tight. Its unyielding, almost possessive hold is echoed by the hand that lands on his waist. Torse is abruptly overcome by his heart’s insistence on feeling many, many things about his friend’s hands on him, breaking up his melancholy haze.
“First of all,” Maxwell snaps. “None of that fucking happened because Marya chased after you with a ship she shouldn’t have been able to fly, Pappy shot through a hole in the sky to push you out of Straka’s claws—”
The clockwork powering Torse’s heart falters. “Wh—”
“—we decided as a group to chase you into Zern, I hit terminal velocity with an ungentlemanly yet necessary wingsuit to catch your unconscious body before you crashed into a million tiny pieces, which yes I suppose was only possible with Comfrey’s help—”
“You what?” Torse hisses against Maxwell’s throat.
“—but it was almost entirely me, not to mention how I was the one who held onto your heart and carried you on my back—”
“Maxwell.”
“—oh, and Olethra had the automaton she found in Straka’s mouth repair you so it was safe to put your heart back in. And we did all of that because you’re our guy, Torse.” Maxwell concludes, sliding his grip to Torse’s jaw and pulling him far enough back to clunk their heads together. That precious face overtakes his vision, so deeply sincere Torse struggles to process it. Weeping willows chime, curving over crystalline waters.
Maxwell opens his mouth, but whatever he intends to say dies in his throat. For a moment he looks so terribly unsteady, so achingly unsure that Torse curls his towering frame to maintain their closeness, sheathing his blades so he can cling to the fabric covering Maxwell’s shoulders while his friend resurrects his words.
“I think Comfrey... I don’t think it was a matter of your worthiness. I think she doesn’t understand the danger people are in unless they’re right in front of her. Sometimes not even then. I think she saved you because you were there, and she failed to save a lot of people because she hadn’t cared enough to pay attention.” Maxwell pauses. He drops his gaze, swallows, blinks rapidly.
Then clenches his jaw, looks back up, and reinforces his words with steel. “You’re my friend, Torse. You’re my guy. I can’t be sure of the professor’s motivations, but that’s the reason I saved you. I couldn’t live with myself if catching the golden heart meant losing you, so I caught you, too.”
Torse has never before been this enamored with another person’s soul. He feels deeply unwell. He becomes aware of the fracturing emptiness he’s been carrying his entire life in the instant it’s made whole.
Torse is more pissed off at this man than he’s ever been about anyone he wasn’t actively trying to murder.
“That is the most reckless, foolhardy, fucking nonsense reason for a suicide mission I have ever heard in my entire fucking life,” he growls, shaking Maxwell by his shoulders. “And yet you talk about what you did like it was obvious—”
“It was.” Maxwell digs his fingers into the soft underside of Torse’s jaw.
“Like it was simple—”
“It was!”
“You should have left me to die!”
“Oh, shut the hell up, you fucking asshole!” Maxwell yanks him forward by the chin, bashing their heads together. Sneers against his faceplate, “Go fuck yourself. Get out of here, I’m sick of your self-sacrificial bullshit, Torse.”
“And I am sick of you, Maxwell Gotch,” Torse wipes a thumb where blood is pooling under Maxwell’s nostril, presses cool metal knuckles along the bridge of his nose. “And your crew always risking your lives on hopeless causes.”
“Shut your mouth.” Maxwell leans into his touch, eyes squeezing shut. “You’re not a cause.”
“I know,” Torse says, sinking to his knees, because he knows. At least with Maxwell, he knows.
“You’re my friend.” Maxwell slumps forward so their heads never part. Torse will murder anything that tries to make them part. He’ll rend it asunder and salt its burial grounds. “You’re my guy, Torse. You’re my— You’re my—”
“Mhm.” Torse is going to kill that fucking bird. He’s going to crush the Corrodi into a fine powder, melt them down into knuckledusters, hurl those knuckledusters into the coldest sea of Zood, and politely ask Marya to help him craft Maxwell far superior knuckledusters. If Marya does not save her own hopeless cause, he’s going to turn the Queen’s royal fortress into her tomb, line that tomb with demolition-grade explosives, and level it into the perfect open space for a community garden.
He’s inexplicably overcome with the desire to do the same with Longspot Gotch, for no reason he can pinpoint. Strange.
Maxwell, seemingly fed up with trying to define them into something explicable, snaps, “You’re mine. Alright, Torse? You don’t get to complain about us saving you, or question how important you are, because you're mine. And as a Revington man who believes in the fairness of gentlemanly sport, that makes me yours, too.”
Torse is alive. Maxwell Gotch cups his hands around his face and Torse is so damned alive he’s humming with it, pressing his fingers to Maxwell’s pulse just to tune his iron heart’s resonance to its beating. “If that is what the wisdom of Revington dictates, then I’ll gladly agree to your terms.”
“Good,” Maxwell declares. “We’re agreed. You’re mine and I’m yours. That’s our deal.”
Quieter, pressed into the metal above Torse’s optics, “So stop leaving me, goddamnit. Stay.”
“I’ll stay,” Torse lurches to agree, as if it isn’t the most reckless promise he’ll ever make. As if it’s simple. Obvious. “I will stay at your side, Maxwell Gotch, my friend. I dread the alternative, I cannot stand the thought of it. I will stay yours... so long as you stay mine.”
He feels the soothing vibrations of those words, sees how Maxwell transmutes at their sound. Commits this alchemical formula to memory: Maxwell’s bright eyes curving into crescents, crow’s feet and laugh lines and a dimple in his chin, specks of brown painting his nose bridge, flecks of amber dappling his irises, a chipped front tooth in a wide grin, perfect hair nearly imperceptibly mussed.
Torse realizes it is that simple, it is that obvious. He will keep this promise because he could not live with himself if he broke it. He does not want to break it. There is nothing he desires more than a life where he keeps this promise, and stays with Maxwell Gotch.
“Perfect, great, awesome,” Maxwell laughs giddily against his faceplate. Torse is obsessed with this man and it’s becoming increasingly likely that Maxwell is obsessed back. “We should probably get back to the others before the giant demon bird flies in and starts killing everyone.”
“Oh, shit. Right. Yes,” Torse lurches upwards, hauling Maxwell with him. “We need to kill that fucking bird.”
“Gotta kill that bird!” Maxwell agrees, dusting off his pants. Is there something different about them? “And then probably my dad.”
“Yes, first the beast and then your father,” Torse nods. Stumbles. “Wait, Maxwell—“