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Chapter Text

When his fingers get itchy, when he needs something to do and there is no one to kill in his immediate vicinity, Gunpowder Tim will disassemble one of his guns, meticulously clean every piece of it, and reassemble it carefully and precisely. Every now and again, he will go through the entire active Aurora arsenal doing the same thing—disassembling, cleaning, reassembling—an endeavour that can easily last a month. On particularly long trips, he will go through the entirety of his personal collection of guns which is large enough at this point that, if he stretches the process out and really savours it, it can last him well over a year, maybe two. And a year in which Gunpowder Tim is cleaning his guns is a year that the rest of the Mechanisms are able to get a good nights’ sleep, if they so desire it and if they shoot Jonny first.

It was about two months into a very thorough personal collection deep clean, and Tim hadn’t had an interruption in three weeks, much to his satisfaction. His streak was finally broken by a halting clang on the door to the storage bay he had long since claimed as his own armoury. The rest of the Mechanisms usually declined to disturb it unless they were feeling terminally bored. Given the crew contained Jonny d’Ville, though, this happened more often than one might expect.

Tim put down the piece he was currently cleaning—the barrel of a particularly nice Galfridian pistol he’d picked up from one of Hereward’s lot—with a gentleness and precision that belied the fury with which he rose from his workbench and stalked over to the door. He pulled it open with a murderous glare and a hand already on the gun at his hip, prepared to do great violence to a first mate with nothing better to do with his time.

It wasn’t Jonny. It was Brian.

Tim hadn’t seen Drumbot Brian in a while—no one had. He’d left the ship a couple of years ago while they were trawling through a 51st century Rigel souk, saying something urgent about a prophecy. They’d left him to it, flying on to the Trapezium cluster in search of some smuggler called Jauzah, who Ashes suspected of having managed to flee the City of Labyrinth way back when. They never did catch the bastard, more’s the pity, and headed onwards to find somewhere more suited for some sort of violent party. The Mechanisms always ended up finding their way back to the Aurora after all, so no one had been worried, and it seemed that Brian had managed that just fine.

Except for the state he was in.

“Bloody hell. You look terrible,” was all Tim could say at the sight before him. It was hardly clear that the man before him was made of metal, so covered was he in mud and oil, soot and blood, clothes in tatters and barely recognisable as such, hat long gone and hair a matted, wiry tangle. The scant metal surface left visible was scored and badly rusted.

“I need some maintenance,” Brian scraped out, his mouth barely moving. “I’d do it myself, but…” He lifted one arm clumsily and attempted to wiggle his fingers. Two of them managed to twitch up and down with an unpleasant screech. The others were motionless.

“That’s no good for maintenance, piloting, or banjo,” Tim agreed. He sighed. “Right. Did anyone else see you get on board?”

“Not yet,” Brian croaked. “Well, Ivy maybe… but since Nastya left, Aurora doesn’t tend to tell people about… coming and going.”

“Well, come in before Jonny sees you.” Tim hurried him inside and glanced both ways down the corridor before locking and bolting his door again. If any of the other Mechanisms caught wind of Drumbot Brian’s return right now, they would overrun his workspace in excitement, and the tranquil peace of gun-cleaning would be utterly ruined. Well, gun-cleaning was well and truly interrupted anyway, but Brian could be good company by himself.

The metal man stood patiently just inside the door while Tim looked him up and down, assessing the severity of the situation. It was clearly a major task before him, and not just cleaning either—Brian’s face, which was certainly capable of a fair range of expression that Tim had become familiar with over the millennia, was currently blank and somewhat distant. There was probably a story there that would have to come out at some point.

With some reluctance, Tim decided to pack away the Galfridian pistol, promising himself to come back to it later, and gestured Brian over to the end of the storage bay the furthest away from his workbench. He dug out a tarp from one of the many crates of random crud he kept around in case they’d be useful one day, and stood Brian in the centre of it.

“Right!” he said with a bright grin, a hammer in one hand and a saw in the other. “First things first.”

He’d need hosing down, but Brian’s most immediate problem was the giant globs of clayey mud that had stuck to him, gummed up his works, and promptly dried into place along with every horrible thing that mud contained. Tim wondered if he’d ended up in a trench somewhere as he smashed away at the caked mud with the claw end of the hammer. The coat was an entire lost cause, a leaden cocoon of fibrous horror that Tim cut off his body with brutal efficiency, along with his boots and some fraction of his trousers. It was only once he’d hammered and carved away as much as he could that Tim got out the pressure hose.

At some point in its impossibly ancient life, this storage bay had been used as a place to wash down objects that had been brought on board, smaller crafts or what-have-you. He’d found the sloped floor and drain of this part of the room a nuisance in the past, limiting the amount of space available for crates of random crud, but right now he was glad he hadn’t bothered to fill it in. He dunked a couple of buckets of water and detergent over Brian’s head before blasting him with the pressure hose, having him turn slowly under its scouring assault. Rivulets of black water and a surface layer of rust flowed off Brian’s body in a grimy stream and disappeared into the bowels of the ship. It took several minutes for the water to finally start running clear, Drumbot Brian worn and battered but once again resembling his usual metallic self.

When Tim turned off the hose, Brian stood there dripping and somewhat blank-faced. The soaked and tattered remnants of his shirt and trousers clung to his body in a way that might have been racy were it made from flesh, but upon his metal frame draped miserably, like forgotten laundry left out in the rain. Around him, the remnants of the mud piled in eroded mounds like a battlefield, studded with shrapnel, bullet casings, and what were probably shards of bone. Tim swallowed down the wild marriage of joy and horror the sight inspired in him, and put away the hose.

“Well then,” he prompted, turning back to the motionless Brian. “What’s your motion like now?”

Brian blinked as if waking from sleep, then lifted his arms, curling and extending his fingers experimentally. They creaked and groaned, but their range of movement was already much improved.

“Oh, thank you,” he said with some relief. “I can do the rest myse—”

“Oh no you don’t,” Tim growled, moving to block the way to the door. “You can’t just walk into my armoury needing maintenance and expect to leave with the job unfinished.” He pointed insistently at the chair by his workbench. “Siddown.”

Brian obeyed without protest and took the seat stiffly, hands in his lap. Tim joined him at the workbench, staring intently into Brian’s eyes, which were vacant and unfocussed. If anything, he looked dazed, or maybe even afraid. Tim sighed.

“Look, I’m not going to make you stay if you don’t want. But you’ll forgive me for saying you look like utter shit. This’ll go a lot quicker—and a lot better—if I fix you up properly. You going to be all right with that?”

Brian blinked again and looked at him properly. “Yeah,” he said softly. “Okay.”

Chapter Text

Gunpowder Tim opened up his toolbox and began laying out equipment on his workbench. He wasn’t sure exactly what was going through that mechanical head, but he wanted to keep Brian in the room with him, at least for the time being, so he chattered away, prompting the other man to respond whenever he went quiet. 

“Haven’t seen you this fucked up since we picked you up from that god-awful rust dump of a space station halfway into a stellar corona. Who fixed you up that time?”

“Nastya.”

“Ah yeah, Nastya, makes sense. Miss that mad shipfucker. How was that, anyway?” 

“Fine,” Brian murmured. He perhaps sensed that Tim was looking for more than single-word answers and hesitantly continued. “She… did a good job. But was… a bit weird. Said for her… it’s oddly. Um. Erotic.”

Tim snorted. “She would, wouldn’t she.” He smirked, and ran a finger suggestively down one of his screwdrivers. “And how do you know it isn’t for me?”

Brian’s eyes widened in alarm and he got to his feet. “I’m so sorry, I’ll go…”

Tim bashed him in the arm with a satisfying clank and sting to his knuckles. “I’m messing with you, sit down.” Brian gave him a reproving look and did so. “Despite periodic rumours among the crew, I don’t actually fuck my guns.” It pleased him to see that Brian was himself enough to roll his eyes.

Tools arranged how he wanted them, Tim took Brian’s left arm and laid it out on the table. He sliced away the ragged remainder of shirt up to the shoulder and studied the joins where upper arm met elbow met forearm met wrist, his eyes affording him a slight subsurface view of the fastenings and connections that held them together. With the care and precision of someone with all the time in the world, he uncoupled the arm from its socket, closing all the valves that regulated fluid transfer between body and limb, leaving only the primary nerve cable connecting it to Brian’s torso. Then, he began to take it apart, beginning with the panels of the upper arm, laying the components and screws out neatly like an exploded-view diagram. 

“This’ll take me a while. There’s a lot of pieces. And I’m very good at taking things apart, but putting them back together?” The face he pulled was part-grin, part-grimace. “That’s the tricky bit.”

“I trust you.”

Tim looked up for a moment, a soft smile creeping onto his face despite himself. “We’ve got a long trip ahead of us. No rush jobs here. I’ll put you back right.”

Brian’s mouth tweaked in a rusty approximation of a smile in return, though if it was possible for a metal man to look exhausted, he was doing a good job of it. Tim decided he’d pushed the conversation as far as it would go for the time being. 

“Hey. I’m just going to work in quiet for a bit—that’s how I do all my cleaning anyway, no bother for me. You ever feel like speaking up, just go ahead whenever you’re ready. Or give me a kick if you don’t feel like talking, up to you.”

He waited for Brian to give a nod of acknowledgement, and set to work in earnest. 

With the outer plating removed, the intricate interior mechanisms of the arm were revealed. Giving it shape was a sturdy steel frame, to which sets of narrow hydraulics for each joint were anchored, along with axles beaded with gears and wheels for smooth movement. In the spaces between, thin copper pipes carried hydraulic fluid and coolant, and hundreds of delicate wires spun out from the central cable that ran down the length of the arm, carrying instruction to every moving part or ending in thin discs that would sit against the surface of the outer plating when closed for a crude approximation of touch. There was enough space left over for a storage cavity in each of the upper and lower arm—one containing a specialised maintenance tool, and one containing a pair of emergency collapsible drumsticks, all of which Tim retrieved with a grin and added to the collection on his workbench. All in all, it would look rather beautiful were it not clogged up with dust and muck, steel surfaces pitted with rust and blue-green corrosion spreading like a bruise over the copper.

Though he allowed himself a small sigh at the sight before him, Tim was far from overwhelmed by its complexity. He simply took the task a piece at a time, disconnecting the hydraulics one by one, flushing the pipes and replacing the fluid, scrubbing the surfaces with grit and solvent until the rust could be wiped away, cleaning each individual wire and soldering them back into place as he returned the components to their home, oiling and polishing every moving part until each creak and groan of their movement was eliminated to his satisfaction.

If the experience was particularly unpleasant for Brian, he didn’t show it. He sat perfectly motionless, face turned a little away from Tim and eyes fixed on the middle distance. Tim afforded him only one or two glances as he made his careful way through the insides of the arm, but when he returned to the outer panels, he sat back with each piece so that he could keep one of his eyes on Brian while he scrubbed away the tarnish on the curved brass surface. The metal face, still without expression even to Tim’s practiced eye, might as well have belonged to a statue. He buffed both the insides and outsides to Brian’s usual warm shine, then turned back to the workbench to reattach them. 

Tim had been taking short naps as and when he felt like he needed them, but he allowed himself a few hours of sleep, head pillowed into his arms, before he began on the hand. He had never known Doctor Carmilla save for the dark stories the older crew told of her, and was glad of it, but he had to admire the craft with which she had constructed Brian’s body. He was reluctantly impressed by the elegance with which Brian’s hands were designed, the palms filled with tiny motors that drove the fine gears and axles running the length of his fingers, allowing for extremely sophisticated and delicate motion. The fingers themselves were filled with tool heads, picks and plectrums, and other useful gadgets such as, mysteriously, a can opener folded into the bottom of the thumb. Tim, prone as he was to losing his own guitar picks, felt a faint sense of envy as he pulled his goggles down over his eyes to enhance their magnification. 

Cleaning off the muck that had built up in the hand was one thing, but here more than anywhere else the gears had been brutally worn down, some missing teeth and some with entire segments sheared away. Moving methodically from piece to piece, Tim had resigned himself to having to spend a long time machining new parts. But he found that, as he scraped off the dirt and wiped them clean with a fine brush, whatever strange science that preserved and rebuilt the Mechanisms was beginning to kick in, and with every stroke he brushed the pieces back into wholeness beneath his fingers.

He could feel Brian’s eyes on him now, hearing the soft scrape of his head turning slowly to watch. He didn’t look up or acknowledge the motion at all, carrying on with his work as if nothing had happened, systematically cleaning every part until not a speck of dust remained under his keen gaze. He reattached the very last panel of the pinky finger, twisting into place a miniscule screw no longer stripped of its threads. Then he leaned back, stretched, cracked his neck from side to side, and finally turned to meet Brian’s eyes. 

“Welcome back! Want to give me a twiddle?” 

He wiggled his fingers and Brian mirrored the action, polished fingers drumming on the bench top with a pleasing clacking sound, with not a squeak to be heard. Tim nodded approvingly. 

“All right, now tap me out a rhythm.”

Brian narrowed his eyes at him but began to tap out a steady beat with his index finger. Tim narrowed his eyes right back.

“That all you’ve got?” he taunted. “Call yourself a Drumbot, huh?”

Brian’s eyes narrowed further and he began to tap out a blistering rhythm with all five digits. Tim nodded along, picking up the drumsticks and adding a counter-rhythm against Brian’s arm. They continued, building off each other in a metallic racket, until Brian looked like he’d be smiling if he had the facial mobility for it. Tim finished off with a drum fill across his limbs and, in a final flourish, playfully tapped Brian’s nose. 

“You’ll make my drumsticks dirty,” Brian complained drily. Tim just grinned at him and reattached the arm, then backed away to give Brian room to stretch and rotate it to his satisfaction.

“So, what next? Head? Other arm?”

Brian considered a moment before replying, “Other arm.” They switched places at the workbench and Tim began again. This time Brian watched from the outset—he still didn’t say much, but he was more of an active participant in his own repair, holding things as and when it was helpful, and making the occasional comment, to which Tim made sure to reply each time.

“You spent almost two weeks on my left arm,” he observed, as Tim wrestled with a pair of gears in the elbow that had almost entirely rusted together. 

“I did?” he replied. “I’ll admit I do lose track of time when I’m deep in a project. To be fair, your arms are very complicated.”

“It’s not that,” Brian protested, his voice mildly disapproving. “I know I was out of it for most of the time, but did you eat or drink anything at all?”

Tim snorted. “Nah. Never do when I’m in the zone. Go all the way to the galley? That would throw me off my rhythm. Anyway, ignore the need to eat or drink long enough and they just go away—it’s not like I need either to survive. And also! I napped!” The rather manic and strained manner of his voice probably didn’t lend any weight to his case, but Brian let it go with no more than a reproving shake of his head.

Partway into disassembling the lower arm, Tim discovered a fold-out corkscrew built into the wrist.

“Hm. I forgot I had that in there,” Brian murmured. 

“You little shit,” Tim griped. “You mean we could’ve opened that wine we found in the vents five years ago without Jonny trying to blow the top off with his gun?”

“We were finding wine stains in the mess hall for weeks afterwards,” Brian recalled in a tone that was almost fond. 

“You have nice hands,” Brian commented, when he was halfway through the right palm.

“I what now?”

“Hm. That came out weird. But… your hands. They are very nimble and precise.”

Tim raised an eyebrow. 

“I mean—I usually get to see them playing guitar. Seeing them work in another context is… nice.”

Brian looked away slightly, seeming embarrassed. Feeling just a little remorse, and not wanting Brian to retreat back into his brass shell, Tim kicked him affectionately in the shin with a muffled clang.

“Hey. You have nice hands too. I mean, I should know, I’m in them.”

Brian gave him a side-long glance.

“Okay, yeah Brian, that one came out weird too.”

Without saying a word, Brian leaned forward and snaked his clean arm around Tim’s waist, squeezing tight.

“Hey! Okay! Point made, you giant metal sap. Now gerroff, you’ll knock all the gears on the floor—and then how will I put your fingers back together?!”

It took around ten days for the right arm to be finished, though it felt like a fraction of the time doing it with Brian rather than just to him. After reattaching the arm at the shoulder, Tim stood up and paced around the room to stretch his legs, while Brian clapped his newly restored hands together and cheerily drummed them on the workbench.

“Well, two working hands—you know what this means,” Tim said with a wide grin.

“What’s that?” Brian looked stiffly up at him to find a guitar being waved in front of his face.

“Jam session!”

Tim’s workshop was usually a sanctuary of peace and quiet, with only the humming of the ship and the slide of metal against metal to accompany his silent contemplation of the delightful explosions each of his guns made. But he’d happily make an exception for a pair of guitars, each played by clever hands with perfect skill.

Chapter Text

They had run through several old songs and hammered out tunes for several new ones before Tim got back to work. Brian sat back, still picking on the guitar, with one leg propped up on Tim’s chair while Tim himself sat on the floor and began to take it apart. The legs were simpler than the arms and sturdier, though their workings were much the same. The feet, while sophisticated, were nowhere near the detailed complexity of the fingers, prioritising strength and stability over fine motion. Lulled by the guitar, Tim found himself sinking into the same kind of restful focus that came upon him when deep into cleaning his guns, with nothing in his mind but the task ahead of him and the stream of sound coming from Brian.

Brian, for his part, was also working in pensive quiet, picking out intricate melodies to which there were no words—some that Tim recognised from Mechanisms tunes or Brian’s own, some that sounded improvised as he went along, sometimes haunting and mournful, sometimes urgent and angry, his newly restored right hand arcing above his head as he attacked the strings.

Tim didn’t ask the source of the emotions currently being processed, just hummed along where it seemed appropriate as he worked, or tapped the floor with the edge of his foot, or just listened as the patterns of melody grew more fragmented and experimental, aggressive and agitated. Then slower and moodier, and then transitioning seamlessly into the entire fourteen-hour second movement of Corellio’s Omega Nebula Concerto for Solo Guitar in E Flat Minor, widely known in its time as the purest distillation of distress and catharsis in musical form, though Tim was astonished at Brian’s memory of it given that it had been millennia since they’d last heard a rendition. 

(And put the audience to great distress afterwards, in keeping with the theme—a memory that would usually warm Tim’s heart, though now only unsettled him).  

Tim listened in productive silence until the last of the ponderous closing chords decayed into silence, and Brian put the guitar carefully but firmly down on the floor by his chair.

“You done?” Tim asked.

Brian’s chest gave a mechanical wheeze as he took in a long breath and let it out again in a deep sigh. “Yeah,” he replied, his voice weary but somewhat calmer. “I’m done.”

Tim gave his thigh a couple of brisk slaps. “Right then. Swap legs.”

After taking a moment to wiggle his toes, Brian obliged and Tim changed sides, stretching out a crick in his neck before getting back to disassembly. Brian looked around the storage bay and tapped his thumbs together for a bit. 

“So, where is it that we’re going, anyway?” he asked.

“Would’ve thought you’d know, if you caught up with us,” Tim replied with a snort.

Brian gave the sort of embarrassed huff that usually preceded a good story. “Well, I knew I had to get off-planet and back to the Aurora, whatever it took. And I was already in such a state, so I switched myself to Ends-Justify-Means. It’s…” He gave a regretful sigh. “It’s all a bit of a blur after that—my memory circuits were glitching six ways to Sunday, but. Um. When they finally got themselves back in order I was in an escape shuttle, surrounded by bodies and covered in blood, and in visual contact with Aurora. At that point I figured I could switch myself back to Means-Justify-Ends, which would probably help with just… getting to a place where I could be fixed up. Point is, if at any point during that whole… thing I knew the direction I was going, I certainly don’t any more.”

Tim chuckled. “Fair enough. What happened to the shuttle, anyway?”

“I sent it back out into space. It’s the best I could do as a grave for those poor souls.” He gave another sigh and looked positively wretched.

“Oh Brian ,” Tim groused. “You know we’re always looking for spare parts.”

“It was the right thing to do,” Brian sniped back. “Anyway, you didn’t answer my question.”

It was Tim’s turn to sigh. “We’re going back to the Solar system,” he answered, trying not to sound too disgruntled, though he knew he wouldn’t be fooling his friend.

“Don’t you like being back there?”

“Why would I care about the Solar system?” He scowled, and leaned further into the framework of Brian’s calf. 

Brian managed to turn a minuscule tweak of the mouth and eyebrows into a knowing look. “Well, all right. Maybe not the star system itself. But we always swing by Earth on our way through. That usually perks you up, doesn’t it?”

He wasn’t wrong, though Tim didn’t want to get back into his own head just yet. Besides, his relationship with Earth wasn’t something that had ever been simple. “We always swing by the distant past,” he said eventually. “The Moon’s still there, all empty and waiting. It’s weird.”

“Mm.” Brian didn’t respond further, waiting for him to continue. Tim was almost irritated enough to stop there and leave him hanging, but he had to admit that there was something comforting about confiding in Brian, and he hadn’t been able to do so for a while. And it was that or have to put up with Marius trying to psychoanalyse him if he ever got particularly morose, and he’d take Brian any day.

Tim expelled a huff of air. “It’s… knowing that everyone I ever knew or cared about, everything that happened to them, to me… hasn’t happened yet. Everything is way too familiar for comfort and yet completely primitive. I can’t connect to it in any way and I really don’t want to, but that doesn’t stop me recognising it. It’s like… coming across an old acquaintance, only… they don’t know who you are. It’s… lonely, I suppose.”

Brian nodded and leant his head back in thought for a while. Tim leant his own head back down and carried on working, and stewed. If he was honest, trips to Earth weren’t so bad—aside from granting him a more rotten temper and an increased disdain for the planet’s inhabitants, it was no different from their other semi-regular haunts. But something about this time was making his skin crawl… he shook the thought from his head and tried to sink back into his empty working headspace, with little success.

Brian must have noticed him struggling, because a metal hand tapped him on the shoulder. “Hey,” Brian said, in amused indignation. “You saying you don’t know or care about me?”

Tim clonked him on the head with a spanner, but he also laughed, and his thoughts felt a little less heavy. Brian cocked his head to one side and adopted the most irritating of his expressions—an enigmatic one. 

“Tim, why do you think it is that my body—my Mechanism—breaks and degrades and needs repair, unlike any of the others?”

“Well, I suppose…” Tim trailed off. It wasn’t like he’d never noticed that—it had always struck him as odd, but he’d never thought there was any rhyme or reason to it. Just one more thing for Brian to be long-suffering about. “Huh.”

“After all, it’s incapable of being completely destroyed, just like any of yours.” 

“And it’s not like it can’t self-repair either—it’s been doing that the whole time I’ve been working on it.”

“That’s true.”

“So why did it need me working on it in the first place? I mean, you weren’t exactly Carmilla’s first, right? So she must’ve known what she was doing. I don’t get how she fucked this up.”

Brian nodded. “I think she did know what she was doing,” he said softly, and Tim looked up at him in confusion. Brian’s face was distant, and somehow terribly sad. “It’s a curse, but I think it was meant as a gift. Because of how she found me, lost and alone in the darkness of space, she made it so that, in my times of great distress, I’d need to seek out help from a friend. I think… I think it’s so I wouldn’t be lonely.” His eyes dropped down to meet Tim’s own. “I know who you are, Tim. You’re my friend.”

Tim put down his tools and took one of Brian’s hands, warm flesh fingers closing around cool metal ones. He realised he hadn’t noticed the empty space Brian’s absence had left in his life—he never did, not until his return and the ache of a missing piece sliding back into place. “Brian,” he murmured, leaning his head against the other’s thigh. “I’m really glad you’re back.”

“Yeah. Me too.”

Tim rested there a while, feeling as laid bare before Brian as Brian was before him, a weight building behind his eyes with no means of escape. He shut them, focussing on the smooth brass surface beneath his cheek until the feeling passed and he could risk speaking again without his voice catching. 

“...Well.” He swung himself up again and knocked a couple of times on the surface of Brian’s leg. “I’m glad we had this lovely moment of connection now. Because at this point I’m going to have to start working on your pelvis.”

Brian snorted. “Way to lower the tone there, Tim.”

“Oh, I’ve barely started,” he replied, mouth stretching into a sly grin. “Don’t you worry. I’ll make sure to polish your Olympian spear most thoroughly.”

It was Brian’s turn to clonk him over the head with a spanner. “Actually shut up.”

Chapter Text

Despite Ashes’ occasional protestations to the contrary, Tim has never and will never dispose of any one of his boxes of random crud. Half of it he can fashion into makeshift explosives at a moment’s notice; the other half could serve as a projectile or spare part, or be easily fashioned into such in a pinch. So no, Quartermaster O’Reilly, he shall not be “clearing out his junk” for the sake of somewhere to store more gold bars. The inherent chaos of millennia of stashing away whatever useful-looking bobbins he came across lent creativity to the mind, joy to the soul, and always something to fit the bill whenever he had any sort of particular need. Could he remember why there was a pair of dress trousers and some mildly scuffed parade shoes in amongst his undetonated land mine collection? Could he hell—but the important thing was the relief with which Brian pulled them on and went for a potter about the room while Tim reset his workbench.

Tim watched Brian out of the corner of his eyes as he ran his gleaming fingers over crate tops, peered up at the highest perilously stacked piles, and bent over to peer into open containers—though was polite and sensible enough not to touch any of the contents. He spent a while looking up at the collection of guns Tim had mounted on the wall—mostly old favourites for the aesthetics or sentimental value that didn’t see much use any more—studying them as if the shining instruments of explosive death would tell him more about their keeper. 

Something in the way he moved around the room, freer with the motion of his limbs than he usually was, made Tim wonder if restoring the freedom of his movement really had been Brian’s first priority, not just a way of easing in to what would surely be the trickiest pieces of work. He wondered whether, should he find himself inside a lifeless metal frame, he too would value the movement of his arms and legs over the clogging up of his insides. It seemed like a rotten choice all round, though, and he was determined that it was one Brian wouldn’t have to suffer the consequences of making for much longer. He massaged his temple, where his head was beginning to ache, and finished laying out his tools. 

By the time Brian circled back around to the workbench, Tim was leaning back against it, arms folded but relaxed. 

“Well, no more putting it off. Time to crack on with your noggin.”

Brian ducked his head silently, and sat on his chair again as Tim gestured for him to do so. Tim himself hopped up to sit on the edge of his workbench, and directed Brian to sit with his back to him.

“Hair first,” said Tim. “You ever remember going to a hairdresser’s?”

“Vaguely,” Brian replied. “More in relation to subsequent hairdressing that I have witnessed than my own personal experience.” 

Tim started to rummage through the tangled mess on top of Brian’s head as he spoke, separating out chunks of matted copper wire and starting to bend them free of each other. “Was it always long? Well, long-ish—I guess you wear it longer now than when I first met you.” Brian’s ability to grow his own wiry hair and beard was no more or less mysterious than the rest of the Mechanisms’ innate control over their own hair length and other minor cosmetic features. But as far as Tim knew, Brian kept no images of what he’d looked like before he’d been mechanised. Perhaps his appearance was truly nothing like it had been when he was alive. After so long in this body, would he even remember his old one?

“My hair… I honestly don’t remember,” Brian replied, a melancholy way of confirming Tim’s suspicions. 

“Well, whether you ever had the experience or not, I’m going to need you to lean your head back and pretend this machine oil smells like… floral shampoo or some other swanky salon shit.” Brian smiled and tilted his head back as instructed. Tim dug greased-up fingers into the tangle, clawing out the remnants of dirt, teasing out the individual wires from each other until bunches of his hair stuck out, kinked and twisted but mostly separated, like some strange copper dandelion. The strands were thicker than a human’s, but not so thick that they couldn’t be rolled around a screwdriver and straightened with a few quick tugs, then wound up in coils that Tim heated with a blowtorch until they fell back into their usual loose, springy curls.

With the hair once more neat and tidy and easy to gather into a rough bun to keep it out of the way, Tim had Brian turn to face him. Still perched on the edge of the table, with his feet propped on the chair either side of Brian for balance, he began the work of removing the panels of Brian’s face. 

There was something about the limbs that had allowed him to abstract the process a little—to imagine that he was taking apart a beautiful, complicated machine, learning its parts as well as he knew his guns’ and handling them with as much care. He did not treat people with such gentleness—it had been so long, he wasn’t sure he could remember how. 

But with Brian’s face before him, watching him with patient stillness, even with its inner workings bared he felt confronted by the reality of what he was doing. He flexed his hands, which traitorously threatened to tremble, and swallowed down the instinct to wilt before Brian’s gaze, unblinking and trusting, glass and metal meeting glass and metal. 

Those eyes had to be cleaned as well, of course, carefully levered out from his face and the residual grit wiped away from the surface and sockets. Tim gave a sympathetic shudder at the thought of how irritating he would find such a situation himself. His eyes already ached enough, these days. 

He slid the first eye back into place, and was about to replace the other when he was possessed with a wild notion. Instead, he reached up to one of his own, parting the shutters that passed for eyelids and popping it out with a click. His vision fritzed for a second, flattened out, and a little warning cropped up in the corner of his eye that read “DEPTH PERCEPTION LOST”. He ignored it, holding both eyes up in front of him, side by side.

“Look! Same eyes!” 

It wasn’t quite true—his seemed to be slightly more intricate, with denser facets of lenses and gears glinting inside the glass-bound orb, but it was clearly a development upon the same design. Brian gave a gentle scoff that came out more like a metallic creak. “They were going to be mine,” he confessed. “An upgrade, I suppose. But the doctor never got the chance to install them. It was fortunate that we had them to hand. I don’t know that we could have built you a Mechanism from scratch—certainly not without Raphaella on the crew yet.”

“Fancy that,” Tim murmured. The story wasn’t new to him—few stories were to any of them, after all this time—but it had its script just like any of their performances. “I guess I would’ve died.”

“I imagine so. For my part, I’m glad you didn’t.”

Tim didn’t answer, just gave a chuckle and reached up to fill Brian’s empty eye socket. Brian’s eyes whirred and blinked, readjusting themselves, and he let out a soft noise of surprise. “Tim, isn’t this—”

“Can’t hurt, can it?” Tim replied breezily, slipping Brian’s eye into his own face. His vision went in and out of focus for a moment as the eyes recalibrated and the feeds synched up, complaining about asymmetric focal length and data rate irregularities before settling into a reluctant partnership. He noted with interest that his vision was a shade or two more sepia in hue. The headache that had subsided just a little upon removing the eye returned, pressing against the inside of his skull. He ignored that too. “It’s just the lens bit, I doubt there’s any of our spooky immortality tech in there. But we can swap back if it doesn’t work out.”

“No, it’s…” Brian’s hand went up to the exposed cavern of his face, fingers ghosting around the edges of his eye socket. “Thank you.” 

Tim nodded, and moved on to removing his jaw. 

Neither spoke again for the better part of two days as Tim disassembled and cleaned his way down to the neck, dismantling the complex system of pumps and bellows that somehow produced Brian’s voice, and leaving in place the electronic emergency backup speaker in the back of his throat. 

“Sound check,” he said, tapping on the speaker grille.

"Amidst the mists and coldest frosts he thrusts his fists against the posts and still insists he sees the ghosts," came the response, tinny and high-passed to shit and yet somehow even more clipped and precise than his usual tenor. 

“Show-off.” Satisfied, Tim began to scrape some sort of black gunk out of the insides of the vocal bellows with an expression of distaste. “This is utterly disgusting, Brian. How does this even happen?”

Brian shrugged, the pistons of his neck and shoulders visible as they scraped up and down. “I honestly couldn’t tell you. Except that it would appear to be the consequence of spending two months at the bottom of a trench.”

“Well, there’s your problem,” Tim shot back blithely, noting the new information even as he pretended not to acknowledge it. What had happened to Brian to put him in that situation? And what in space could have stopped him from getting out until now? He pondered this for several more hours, troubled, as he wiped down the insides and outsides of Brian’s vocal cords and oiled them thoroughly. Then he slotted them piece by piece back into their place in the airway, reconnecting them to the spray of slender wires that were his nerves.  

“Try that.”

Brian inhaled, exhaled, and began to sing this time, the lilting verse of his old prophecy to Gawain. Tim watched the strange brass-and-leather bundle twitch and send shivers down the wires as air passed through its chambers. He tracked its motion up to the shifting elements of Brian’s mouth, still visible with the plating of his cheeks and jaw not yet reattached. It was odd to hear his voice, so familiarly human, emerge from the pumping and whirring contraptions that rattled before him. 

Brain finished the verse without issue and, obligingly, Tim sang the reply. “I hear what you say and I’m listening…”

“A good sign.”

“But Hanged Man, your words make no sense.” 

“Are you sure you fixed me right, then?”

“Brian.” Tim shoved at one of his shoulders, and the components of Brian’s face arranged themselves into what would probably be a smirk were it complete.

Tim began to replace the facial panels, grateful for the fact that the brain was completely and seamlessly enclosed. Any damage to that would be far beyond even his ability to repair—perhaps the only one of them who could have done so was Nastya, long gone into the void. Brian was on his own in that respect. But following the thick cable of a thousand wires that ran like a spinal cord down from the cranial case, through the neck and into the dense machinery of the chest cavity, Tim could see a growing corrosion, getting worse the further down he looked. 

Tim hopped off the bench and gestured for Brian to sit there in his place. Now stood face to face, he reattached the last of the jaw plates and gave the coppery fibres of whatever was up with Brian’s beard one final vigorous brushdown, but left the neck open as he moved down to the chest. He removed the final tattered remnants of Brian’s shirt, then the front panels of his torso—simple in design but etched with his name and whatever other engravings that had managed to stick over the years, some still visible through the corrosion: flowers, feathers, constellations, a small, meaningless geometric shape that Tim recognised as his own handiwork from a few centuries ago. Why that one hadn’t faded away he had no idea. He set the panels gently to one side.

As he’d feared, whatever corruption was hinted at in Brian’s throat only worsened inside his chest cavity.  The strange, bulky systems that passed for organs in Brian’s body were coated in black grime, and through warped seals and rusted pipes leaked yet more of the stuff that Tim had scraped out of the vocal bellows into a bucket earlier, where it still sat, congealed and sullenly reeking. This was a mad leap beyond simply lying in a trench for two months. Something more had happened here. Something bad.

He paused to take in the sight, considering how to approach the situation, and some of his disquiet must have shown itself in the tensing of his eyebrows, as Brian looked up and caught his gaze with a sympathetic nod. 

“You’ll probably have to take it all out in one go,” Brian told him, sounding not entirely surprised at the horrific state of his own insides, and simply resigned. 

Tim nodded in reluctant agreement. “Won’t that… I mean, are you okay with that?”

Brian tilted his head neutrally. “It will put some strain on my systems, but my heart has enough resources in reserve to survive losing the organs for a bit. The worst that could happen is that it will stop beating for a while, and I’ll black out until you—”

“Brian, I’m not about to—”

“Most importantly, Tim, yes. I am okay with that. In fact, I think it is likely the only reasonable way to proceed.”

Tim sighed. “Well. Do your damned best to stay alive, then.” With more aggression than was strictly necessary, he tugged a thick pair of gloves out of one of the drawers in his workbench and pulled them on. “I won’t appreciate missing the company if you cark it halfway through.”

“I understand.”

He started on one of the many piston cylinders, edged with air separation and filtration chambers, that made for lungs—twisting, unbolting, and tugging firmly until it came free. He’d put down a tarp by the workbench, and carefully laid the machine down upon it, where it continued to leak thick black fluid. Soon it was joined by another of its kind, and another, and a small bioreactor, and several gyroscopes, and seven different chemical storage cylinders, and the various parts of a coolant system. 

“It’s a hell of a time to ask,” Tim said, mouth around a screwdriver as he wrestled further apart the stained and tangled forest of nerve wires so he could get at the secondary power source nestled in Brian’s abdomen. “But is this painful for you?”

Brain was quiet for a few seconds. Tim looked up in consternation. “Brian, I know you’re on no-lying mode, don’t you dare go silent on me.”

“It’s not that,” Brian said quickly. “I’m trying to work out how best to answer.”

Tim frowned, but proceeded. The americium radioisotope generator was a bulky thing, the size of a pineapple and heavy with shielding, hot to the touch even through his gloves. He lifted it carefully from its housing.

“It’s all just signals,” Brian said finally, as Tim placed the generator down and returned to him. 

“How d’you mean?”

“That’s what pain is, in the end. Signals from your body telling you that something’s gone wrong. So in that sense, yes, I feel pain. But… it doesn’t come with all the hormones and emotions it would do in a human body. It’s not frightening or distressing—it’s not even particularly unpleasant. Just data.” 

“Hm,” Tim said, levering out the lubricant generation system. “That’s convenient. All of the information, none of the stress.”

“Hm,” Brain echoed. “I suppose that is a blessing, and I am grateful for it. But the converse also applies. Touch may not give me pain, but neither can it bring me comfort or pleasure. Nor can sight or hearing spark any kind of unconscious reaction of joy or fear. And my air filtration systems can identify millions of chemicals in the tiniest of concentrations, but I couldn’t ever describe it as approaching any experience of taste or smell.”

“Oh Brian.” Tim removed his gloves and stroked the side of Brian’s open torso with a thumb, knowing even as he did so that it would have no soothing effect. Aside from the wires, all that now remained inside was a tube of dark metal quite unlike any other part of him—completely untouched by the black rot that had surrounded it, its surface was perfectly clean, slightly textured and featuring a small circular window of thick glass. Through it, a dim yellow glow revealed a viscous, translucent fluid inside, and the steady pulse of the beating heart within. Tim took in the sight, then shuttered his eyes.

“I think I get it,” he said, mapping the edges of the opening with his fingers. “I can see every last detail of anything I look at, but it’s not enough to make it seem real, is it? Not like I’m connected to anything I’m seeing. I need to feel something too—the recoil of a gun, that sharp stab of smoke in my nostrils. I need things in my hands.” He reached out to the heart chamber, its surface slightly textured and warm to the touch. “I don’t know how you manage, Brian. How do you stay grounded without any of this?”

“It’s hard to understand how much feelings come down to body chemistry until you don’t have any to work with any more. I have to do all the emotional heavy lifting myself.” Brian chuckled softly. “Don’t get me wrong, I can quite easily tie myself in all sorts of knots over the conceptual things—morality, philosophy, poetry, love. But when it comes to my experience of the world around me—stars, music, the presence of a friend… I have to choose for myself what to feel about them. I've had a lot of interesting discussion with the Toy Soldier on the matter. And I decide that these things mean enough to me to want to continue experiencing them, so... that's what counts as a pleasant sensation for me, I suppose.”

He leaned his head forward slightly so that his brow met Tim’s. Resting his forehead against the cool metal, Tim reached both of his hands inside Brian’s chest.

“May I?”

“Of course.”

Tim cupped his hands around the cardial cylinder, feeling its warmth seep into his palms like a mug of tea. He ran his thumbs over the rivets that sealed the window, then down to the series of dials below that read out the internal conditions. He felt each join where external pipes met the chamber, the difference in material between it and the valves that currently closed it off evident to his fingertips even without visual data. Pressing the heel of his hand against the curved surface, he could feel the infinitesimal vibration of a pulse, steady as a clock. He felt his own slow to match it.

“My heart is in your hands,” Brain murmured, his volume low enough for the hiss of speaker noise to give it the sense of a whisper.

Tim bristled and his fingers tightened reflexively in a burst of irrational anger at being caught at gentleness. He tightened his fingers around the chamber, imagining the force needed to rip it free of the casings that held it in place. “I could just pull it out right here,” he growled. “It wouldn’t take much.”

“Will you?” Brain asked.

“...Would that hurt you?”

“I suspect it would be very unpleasant for me. I try to avoid that circumstance, where possible.”

Tim let out a breath. “I won’t, then.”

“I know.”

Tim’s fingers resumed their exploration of the chamber. “It’s different from the rest of you,” he mused. “Denser, harder, a little more roughly cast but well-crafted all the same. I like it, it feels nice to the touch. Some sort of tantalum-tungsten alloy, if I had to guess. Very hard to break.”

“Hm.” Tim didn’t need to open his eyes to know that Brian was smiling.

“It’s not Carmilla’s, is it? She’s the one who put you in it, but it’s your making, isn't it?”

“It is. That was a very long time ago.”

“And look! Not a thing wrong with it. It’s served you well, all this time.”

Brian didn’t reply to that, and they spent a few more minutes in silence before Tim’s eyes flickered open again and he drew back, once more feeling as if his was the chest pried open and laid bare to the world. He cleared his throat and turned to his toolbox, rummaging absently as he toyed with a foolish thought. 

“Does… did Nastya leave a repair mark or anything, when she fixed you up that last time?”

Brian cocked his head. “Not as such. She left me an engraving. Still there, actually.” He indicated a spot on the back of his left shoulder, where Tim could see the initials ‘AHP’ carved within a stylised circuit diagram, just about visible through the surface corrosion. “But everyone’s given me engravings at some point or another.”

Tim nodded. “See, I was wondering if you’d let me do this…” 

He retrieved a wafer of copper from his supplies along with a fine etching tool, and increased the zoom of his eyes as he began to engrave small, simple letters into its surface. After a minute he heard Brian laugh at the text that was taking form, the first sound he’d made in this entire time that seemed truly happy. 

“Yes,” he said, simply. “Go on then.”

Beaming, Tim took up a precision welder and carefully attached the plate to the casing around the cylinder containing Brian’s heart. He leant back to examine his work.

Beneath the glass window and status dials was a small block of text, unlikely to be seen by anyone ever again except perhaps for Brian himself, whenever he next opened himself for maintenance. It read:

“BRIAN’S HEART
NOT BROKEN
BY GUNPOWDER TIM”

Chapter Text

Scrubbing the inside of Brian’s chest cavity was hard work but relatively straightforward. The organs, though—they were a struggle. The black sludge was resistant to being washed off with water, so Tim tried ethanol next, then acetone, then chloroform, and was left with a bunch of ruined cloths and a headache for his pains. He scooped some of it onto a piece of scrap metal and tried burning it off, which only served to give him a different, more unpleasant headache. Eventually, he just went at the stuff with a metal scouring pad, scraping as much as he could off the surfaces into the bucket as vigorously as the delicacy of the machines would allow him, gritting his teeth until the ache subsided and left him only with a dull pressure behind his eyes. 

He dismantled the organs as much as he dared, but it soon became evident that as much of the black he managed to remove from the outsides, yet more seemed to come from the insides. As he patched up cracks and resealed joints on painstakingly cleaned components, he saw more of the stuff emerge from seemingly nowhere, extruding from the ends of disconnected tubes and seeping through the mesh of filters with no source he could identify. The bucket continued to fill with its malevolent stench, and Tim grew more and more disturbed.

He glanced up at Brian, who had returned to the chair and was sat in a slump, looking down at his work with a hollow expression. It had been hours since he last spoke, and he made no motion or acknowledgement of Tim’s attention. With an infuriated grunt, Tim got to his feet and stalked over to the other side of the room. He stood facing the wall, fists clenched, trying to calm himself down, until he couldn’t take it anymore, and grabbed the nearest crate, overturning it with a yell of fury. A load of esoteric tools from fifty-odd star systems ago spilled onto the floor, and he aimed a vicious kick at the nearest, sending it smashing into the wall. He followed up by unloading a pistol into it, feeling the recoil kick its way up his arm again and again until the gun clicked empty and the unfortunate tool in question was a twisted, smoking wreck.

A little calmer, he returned to the tarp, where the most recently repaired and cleaned organ was leaking a thick, black puddle. Suddenly exhausted, Tim sat down beside it and stared at it listlessly. For the first time in this whole project he found himself at a loss. 

He wasn’t sure how much time had passed when finally, in a soft crackle, Brain spoke again. “I don’t think it can be stopped.” 

Tim came back to himself and looked up at Brian in alarm.

“It would be like trying to hold back a supernova, once its time had come.” There was something ominous in the way Brian said it, flat and final.

“I told you I’d fix you,” Tim insisted. “I said I’d do the job properly.”

“There’s no fixing this, Tim.”

Tim scoffed, incredulous. “Why the fuck not? What the hell is this, Brian?”

Brian turned his head away, thinking. Tim repositioned the offending machinery so that at least it wasn’t leaking in the direction of everything else, and picked up another. He held it over the bucket and began to thoroughly ruin another scourer at it.

“I tried to stop a war,” Brian said, after a few minutes of quiet. “It didn’t work.”

“Of course you did.” Tim sighed, and continued to scrape tar-like globs into the bucket. “I’d be sympathetic, but Brian, this keeps happening to you. I don’t know why you keep insisting on doing this to yourself. Maybe you could stop trying to stop things, start enjoying them for a change.” There was nothing like a war to lose yourself in, Tim thought to himself. Just like a supernova, there was no holding back the blood and fury once it began, so why not dive in whole-heartedly?

“It’s not that. At least…” Brian’s head tilted to the side slightly, his gaze somewhere distant. “The failure hurts. It doesn’t stop hurting. But I live with it. I always have. That’s not it.”

Tim bit down the urge to demand the answer from him, determined not to drop his patience now that Brian was talking, really talking. In fits and starts, Brian slowly began to tell his story.

“This time… the details of the conflict are pointless and depressing. They wouldn’t even make a good song. It just… happened as it always does. I did my best to do the right thing, but in the end I found myself on that battlefield anyway, watching everything go to hell. I was shot down in one of the trenches. I lay there in that churned-up muddy ground amidst the chem-shell run-offs and spilled blood, waiting for my frayed wires to knit themselves back together. Nowhere I hadn’t been before. Nowhere I wouldn’t be again, I was sure.”

Something about that phrasing made Tim furrow his brow, but Brian had hit his stride by now, and Tim was not inclined to interrupt him. 

“No one noticed when I fell except for a young man. He was a friend. Well. More like an Oedipus, a Mordred—an unfortunate young soul of my acquaintance, a soul with great hope who was doomed by the hatreds and failings of others. Perhaps he saw digging me out of that mire as the one good thing left to him that he could do.” He gave a bitter chuckle. “He couldn’t even do that, of course. He was shot where he knelt, dead eyes looking into my own unliving ones.”

Unbidden memories of his own trenches came to Tim’s mind, the gritty, clinging cold of the moon-mud and flashes of Bertie’s scared young face as torchlight passed across it. He clenched his jaw and pushed the visions away as the ache behind his eyes intensified, covering them over with the searing thoughts of gunfire and detonations that he had long ago decided that he loved more than anything else in the world.  

“And that’s when I felt it,” Brian said. “Something different. It had been so long I’d forgotten what it was like. To look into the eyes of a dead thing and feel the instinctive mortal terror that death will find you too.”

The ache grew too much to bear, and Tim lowered his temple into his hands with a groan.

“It shook me. I couldn’t move, not even to look away. We were buried by the debris of battle before I had to watch him rot before me. But even then, I couldn’t move for weeks, I was so troubled. I was frozen there.”

He wanted to lift his head and tell Brian to stop, agony scraping the back of his eye sockets, but the words stuck in his throat as he met Brian’s steady gaze. The metal man took in his expression and nodded slowly in understanding.

“You feel it too.” 

It wasn’t a question. It was a truth. And as if it had unlocked whatever was tying him up, Tim sprang over to the bucket, scrabbling at the edges of his eyes where the sockets clipped into skin, and pried the whole front of his Mechanism free, to feel something thick and viscous drain from inside his face. He didn’t need his now disconnected vision to know that what poured into the bucket was the same foul black stuff that already half-filled it. The sensation was horrific, like throwing up from behind his eyes. His stomach tried to follow suit, but with nothing inside it for months now, all that came was a dry heave, leaving him curled around the bucket, retching and gasping into the foul miasma until the convulsions passed. Hands still shuddering slightly, he snapped his eyes back into place. He could feel some of the residue still smeared down his cheeks, but the pressure headache was gone, at least for the moment. He sat back, panting.

“We’re winding down, aren’t we?” he said very quietly, once he had caught his breath and his vision had rebooted. “Whatever that stuff is… it’s the end for us. Isn’t it?” Now that he had said it out loud, it seemed obvious to him—the conscious effort it took to focus and zoom his eyes these days, the steady ache in the depths of his skull that had only been getting worse for a while now. Oh, the Mechanism still ticked away, but it was beginning to weigh heavy on him in a way it had never done before, and an unsettling dread had begun to stir inside him, the sort of thing that made him want to lock himself away and clean his guns for a year until it passed. He wondered if the rest of the crew had felt it too—denying its presence in their own ways, isolating or acting up, hiding it all behind their usual irritability and viciousness. 

Brian nodded. “Whatever we’re filling up with, it will eventually grind us to a halt. I don’t think it’s the cause, as such. It’s the… manifestation, I suppose. Our mortality catching up with us at last.”

Tim chuckled, baffled at the strange sense of relief he felt. “I hope this means we properly die, then,” he said. “Couldn’t stand just getting slower and slower until I stop, but never actually… ending.”

“I’ve been there,” Brian replied. He too seemed a little more present and relaxed, as if broaching the subject had released some pressure valve inside him. “You’d be surprised what you can get used to. The black of space. Hanging from the gallows. It’s familiar to me. It wouldn’t be so bad.” He paused for a while, his airily philosophical demeanour turning harrowed again. “To be quite honest… it’s the actual dying I’m not so keen on. That… that I’m afraid of. For all we see it, for all we cause it, we don’t really know a thing about death, do we? Maybe it’s just an end, an oblivion, and that would be fine by me, but… if there is anything to come after, some judgement or reckoning for all we’ve done with the near-eternity given us… it’s not going to be pleasant. I’d rather float off into the black. At least it would be an endless nothingness I chose for myself.”

Tim took a moment to absorb what Brian had told him. He supposed it was a consequence of immortality that the Mechanisms rarely talked about fear with one another, and certainly not their own. After all, when you’re capable of surviving anything the universe can throw at you, it becomes an emotion that doesn’t see much use, shrivelling away until you forget how to feel it. Or how to recognise the constricting tightness that crawls up your throat and creeps down your back. 

“So what, you’re scared of hell?” Tim barked out, trying to make sense of the cold feeling seeping through his limbs. “Now that’s something I’ve done before. Do you really think there’s anything they could throw at me that’s worse than what I’ve seen? What I’ve done? This life, this bloody, pointless existence, it’s hell enough already. If that’s where we end up, we’ll fight our way out.” He wasn’t lying—there was no manifestation of pain or violence that could scare him now. But he could still feel it in his mouth, dried out from terror, something he couldn’t bear to consider for how much it disturbed him. And yet here was Brian, wide open before him. It seemed only fair that he opened himself up as well. “The thing is that… it’s the thought of heaven that scares me.”

Brian took a few seconds to react. “You’re afraid of being forgiven?” he asked, uncertainly.

“It’s… it’s what it would take to be there, isn’t it?” Tim mumbled back. “In order just to… exist there, I’d need to confront everything I’ve ever done in my life. Really face it. And regret it and—and move on. I just… I don’t think a soul could survive that. Give me hell any day.”

Brian continued to gaze at him quizzically, until his eyes widened ever so slightly in a flash of insight. “Bertie?” he ventured.

“I wouldn’t be able to face him. Couldn’t look him in the eye.” Tim gave a humourless huff. “Not that I think it at all likely, but just the thought of it, you know? If I can’t get oblivion, then give me hell.”

“Oh Tim.” Brian lifted an arm, and Tim wordlessly shuffled across the floor until he was slumped beside the chair, head resting at the level of Brian’s waist. Brian draped the arm around his shoulder and pulled him in. His other arm reached out to the workbench, where he found a bottle of machine oil within reach and lifted it into the air before them as if giving a toast. 

“To merciful oblivion, then?”

Tim reached for the nearest bottle of solvent and clinked it with Brian’s. “To merciful oblivion.”

He could have quite happily stayed there a day or two without moving, but needing to replace the organs for the sake of Brian’s heart, combined with the reluctant acknowledgement that their time as itinerant immortals was coming to an end, left him with a novel sense of the passage of time and a corresponding sense of purpose. With a second wind of motivation, Tim cleaned and mended the cases and fastenings of the organs, replacing them one by one in such a way that, even if they were filling up with black tar again, at least it wasn’t leaking everywhere. It wasn’t something he could fix, but he found he could accept it as good enough. 

Quickly enough almost to take him by surprise, Tim secured the last internal canister in place, and gave the whole set one last brief wipedown before carefully closing the case of Brian’s chest, screwing it in place, and giving it a brisk pat. “There. All done. Ready to go out with a bang.”

Brian shifted his arms and twisted his torso back and forth a bit, taking a few mechanical breaths before re-engaging his vocal chords. 

“Thank you,” he said, in his normal warm tenor. “I feel better. Better than I’ve felt in a very long time.”

Tim beamed at him.

“Although…” Brian added. “When you said this would be quicker, you were lying through your teeth.”

Tim gave an amused snort. “So what if I was? I had you all to myself for months. My genuine pleasure. And you feel good, right?” 

“Yes. Good as new.”

It was ending, and Tim didn’t quite know what to do with himself. 

They shuffled around the room together, Tim rooting through his stuff until he found a spare shirt and waistcoat that fit Brian, who finally looked like himself again upon buttoning them up. After a little further searching, they agreed to pass on trying to find him a suitable hat. “Oh, I’ll check my quarters,” Brian said cheerfully. “Aurora always seems to turn one up whenever I’ve ended up losing it before.”

“That’s sweet of her.”

They finished their lap of the workshop and Brian lingered by the door, not quite ready to open it. Silence fell between them, the first in all this time that felt somewhat awkward. 

“So…” Brian began, though he didn’t continue.

Tim shoved his hands in his pockets and gave a lopsided shrug. “Yeah, see you. I guess I’ll go back to cleaning my guns now.”

Brian gave a disbelieving laugh. “Oh no you won’t. We’re going to the galley. I’m going to make you some food, and we’re going to have a drink with our crewmates.”

Tim made a few obligatory noises of protest, but Brian flung an arm around his shoulder, a gesture he returned, giving in without much complaint. “Oh, I suppose we could do that,” he conceded, opening the door to the rest of the ship. As they stumbled out of the storage bay together, the rumbling of the ship’s engines changed its pitch and the lights in the corridor flickered in greeting. 

“Thank you, Aurora,” Brian said, patting the corridor wall affectionately. “I’m glad to be back too.”

Tim felt a rush of emotion and, unable to do anything else, began to sing. “Raise your cups!”

“Raise your cups!” Brian echoed with a smile.

“To this sordid affair, for today we drink…"

“...tomorrow we fight!”

Still singing, Gunpowder Tim and Drumbot Brian left the workshop behind, and went to join their crew.