Archive of Our Own ^beta

He doesn’t remember where he came from. He has no memory of anything before opening his eyes in the wreckage of what he assumes must have been his ship, a pair of concerned steel-gray eyes peering down at him. Except for his name. Well, his first name. Brian. He doesn’t remember his surname. Maybe he never had one. He wonders if there are people who miss him, somewhere out there. He doubts it. He’s not an easy person to love. 

He tries not to dwell on these things. It doesn’t do him any good to wallow, trying to grasp at threads too invisible to see. And so he focuses on who he is now, and who he will be. 

The problem is, he has no idea who he is now, or who he wants to be. He has nothing but a body, a name, and a hole inside of him where a life, a home, a family used to be. He hides out the first few weeks, holed up in a spare room in the small cottage of the man who found him. Logan Lazarus, his name is. He’s a firecracker: tiny, explosive, and lighting up the space around him in bright flashes. Brian doesn’t quite know what to make of him. 

Eventually Brian decides that there’s no point in hiding. This is his world now, he might as well make an attempt to be a part of it. 

The town is small, dusty, and obsessed with believing in a god that clearly wants nothing to do with them. Brian doesn’t understand this religion thing. He doesn’t see the point in placing your life in the hands of some outside force that probably doesn’t even exist, when you could just as easily design your own fate. But the people here… see things differently. 

In his first month of scrambled existence in this place, there is a public execution. He doesn’t go, but he sees the crowds, the gallows. He sees the priest standing confidently in front of the people, waving a bible about as he screams justifications. Brian slips outside to hear what he’s saying, and regrets it immediately. The priest is rattling on about witchcraft and tainted souls and sickness in the mind, wrong choices and twisted paths, while the youth stands with the noose around their neck, eyes squeezed shut and mouth moving in a desperate plea. It makes Brian sick, and he turns away before he can watch the body drop. 

They don’t have technology here, in this little pocket of nowhere. They make and do everything by hand. Grow and cook their own food, collect and filter their own water, build their own homes, sew their own clothes. There seems to be nothing here but work. Work and stifling piety. 

Brian enjoys work, he thinks, but not this kind. He racks his brain desperately for what it is he enjoys about it, for even a hint of what he used to do with his time, but there’s nothing. Just that yawning abyss. 

He doesn’t like the clothes they wear here, either. Too many layers. Too many buttons and waistcoats and jackets and hats. He doesn’t like hats. He thinks they’re silly and pointless. Logan, however, loves them. He has a whole collection, each of them handmade and adorned with flowers. Logan loves flowers. He laments the fact that he’s never been able to grow a garden, as he can’t seem to keep the plants alive. 

Brian accepts this as a challenge, and sets to building him a garden. He throws himself into it with a passion he hadn’t realized he had, researching the best type of flowers to grow in this environment, all the different methods for creating life in the dusty ground. He’s not entirely sure why he’s doing this, but it’s something he can do, something that will help occupy his time as he learns to adjust. 

Logan is ridiculously pleased with this development, and watches him work with interest. He asks a lot of questions, oddly fascinated by every new thing he comes across. He wants to know everything, and is always delighted by each new fact he discovers. Brian can’t help but find it somewhat endearing. 

He prefers silence, but… he is grateful for Logan’s company. He can be a bit rambling and has absolutely no filter for what comes out of his mouth, but the more time Brian spends with him the more he realizes that it stems from a deep place of loneliness, and, well… Brian can’t fault him for that. And quite honestly… he’s lonely himself. His mind keeps screaming at him that no, he can’t get attached, he can’t, because what if he forgets again? What if he loses this life as well? He is terrified of that possibility, terrified that he will keep losing himself and everything he has again and again until there is nothing left. But when it comes down to it… he doesn’t want to be alone. He truly, deeply, entirely, desperately does not want to be alone. And it’s as simple as that. 

The garden takes up most of his time in those early months, and the moments in between he spends learning about himself, his likes and dislikes, his knowledge, his talents. It’s a slow process, but over time he builds an image of who he thinks he is.

He likes coffee. He drinks it black and bitter, and he drinks it strong. Logan gets him to try it with cream and sugar and something chocolatey one time, and he takes one sip and promptly declares it a crime against all things tasty and caffeinated. Logan just laughs and downs the entire thing, making Brian grimace and immediately excuse himself to find a mug of his usual poison. It quickly becomes the primary beverage that he drinks, and Logan often has to remind him to drink water if he doesn’t want to die. Sometimes he does want to die, but he never says that out loud. 

His memory doesn’t return as the time passes, no matter how badly part of him hopes it will. It frustrates him, despite his determination to move forward and forget about what he can’t remember. Sometimes he does get glimpses, brief flashes of faces, places, names. It’s never more than a vague idea that he should recognize something, that this something or other is something he knows. He keeps a notebook full of scribbled questions and theories about his past, and jots it down whenever he comes across something that seems familiar. He thinks he had a sister, once, but he gets the feeling he was still often alone. He didn’t want to be alone then, either. 

He goes on walks through the town, notebook and pencil in hand, seeing if he can jog anything loose. The townspeople give him a wide berth, none of them so much as saying hello. Which he’s fine with, he’s not sure he’d actually have anything to say if one of them tried to start a conversation. He often gets the impression that they’re a bit scared of him, which is ridiculous, but… he can kind of see why. He’s not exactly the smallest person around, all broad and tall as he is, and he’s told his resting facial expression is a frown. He’s also vaguely aware that he tends to look at people like he’s judging them, which he usually isn't. He just likes to observe, and if everyone else has issues with being looked at, that’s on them. He’s not one of them, he doesn’t have to follow their rules. 

On one of these walks, a priest joins him. Brian recognizes the man as the one who leads the executions, and he doesn’t even make an attempt to hide his disgust. The priest politely mentions that he hasn’t seen Brian at the church yet, and Brian responds coldly that he doesn’t go to church. The priest inquires as to why, and recoils when Brian says he doesn’t believe. He quickly recovers, however, and begins a speech about how that’s alright, as Brian comes from somewhere else, somewhere where their eyes probably had not yet been opened to the glories of faith, and how now that he is here, Brian can receive that gift. Brian snorts and says that no thanks, he’s fine. The priest tells him he’s going to hell, and Brian shrugs and says that at least he knows hell will have decent central heating. The priest never speaks to him directly again after that. 

It takes Brian about six months of adjustment before he realizes he needs glasses. In his defense, there has been nothing to indicate it until now. He wasn’t wearing a pair when he crashed, and it’s not like he’s been paying attention to his eyesight in the midst of all this. But eventually it does come to his attention that objects near to his eyes are not actually supposed to be blurry, and he mentions it to Logan, who drops what he’s doing instantly and drags Brian out into town to find him a pair of glasses. 

Brian isn’t quite comfortable with the amount of questions the local doctor asks, as a lot of them are along the lines of ‘have you worn glasses before?’ ‘have you ever been tested for farsightedness?’ and he gets tired of replying that he doesn’t know. He’s honestly impressed by the doctor’s ability to stay polite and calm while Brian gets increasingly snippy and practically squirms under his careful study. 

Eventually the doctor produces a set of three wire frames colored black, silver, and gold for him to choose from. Brian just blinks at them. He wasn’t expecting to have to make a decision here, and when faced with one his mind goes completely blank. The choice doesn’t matter, he knows that, but he can’t stop wondering what if it does? 

The confusion on his face must show, for Logan quickly leans forward and suggests the gold, because it matches his eyes. Brian nods, then freezes, something occurring to him. Logan asks him what’s wrong, concern clearly etched on his soft freckled face, and Brian looks to him and carefully, calmly, gently asks what color his eyes are. Logan startles, and it takes him a moment to respond, but eventually he tells Brian that they’re actually quite a lovely dark green. Brian thanks him, and tells the doctor that he’ll take the gold frames. 

When they get back to Logan’s cottage, Brian shuts himself in the washroom and stares at himself in the mirror. He hasn’t actually taken a moment to look at himself yet, and now that he is he’s overwhelmed by how much he simply does not recognize the face staring back at him. 

His face itself is pleasantly round, accented by a severe pointed nose and oddly gentle eyes that are indeed a rather pretty deep green. He’s got something of a scruffy beard that makes him look rough and more than a bit unkempt. He has scars, too, from getting caught in pieces of jagged metal during the crash. There’s one that crosses over his shoulder and a ways down his back, another snaking across his throat just below his jawline, and a third that slices under his left eye and just across the bridge of his nose. The whole picture is framed by thick dark hair that grows in soft waves just past his shoulders. He takes a moment to study himself, trying to find anything that looks familiar, anything that makes him think yes, that’s me, this is who I am, but there is nothing. With a sigh, he puts on the glasses and looks again. This time, he doesn’t try to look for anything in particular. And after a moment he decides that yes, this is someone he could grow into. This Brian will do. 

And so the days pass. They don’t go out into town much, which is fine with Brian, as he’s not a fan of the townsfolk and they seem to feel the exact same way about him. Logan, as well, doesn’t like to go out, which confuses Brian as he’s always so talkative and sweet to everyone he meets, but he soon notices the way the townspeople refer to him, the words they use in his presence, and everything starts to make a bit more sense. Brian doesn’t ask Logan about it, but soon enough the other man ends up ranting to him about it one day. Brian offers to build him a spaceship so the two of them can get away from here, he’s sure he could do it if he really tried, but Logan just laughs and tells him that while he’s sweet for offering, there really isn’t anything he can do. That doesn’t change the fact that Brian is convinced he could actually do it. They still have the pieces of his old ship somewhere, and he makes a vow to himself to try reassembling it as soon as possible. 

He’s not sure exactly when his feelings towards Logan change from grateful that I at least have someone to fuck I don’t think I can live without this man, but it doesn’t take him long to realize once it happens. Actually bringing it up is an entirely different matter, as he’s, well, a bit of a bastard, and Logan is… Logan is Logan. 

He paints. All the time. There’s a good half of the house that makes up Logan’s studio, covered in easels and paints and half-finished projects. Brian loves watching him do it, studying the way he effortlessly blends colors and shapes together to create something unique and beautiful. It’s one of the few things Brian doesn’t think he himself could ever do. He has not the slightest clue of what colors look good together or how to make them work together like that, and he would probably get easily frustrated with the delicate brush. Logan, however, is an expert, and everything he paints is perfect. He’s painted Brian a couple times, despite Brian’s protests that there are much better subjects for art. 

Logan bakes, too, fluffy sugary things with lots of cream and chocolate. There’s always a plate of them somewhere in the house, which Brian constantly finds himself snacking on despite his adversity to sweet things. The problem with this is that, while Logan is a master of pastries and all manner of treats, he cannot cook anything else. He tries, he tries so very hard, but eventually Brian forces him out of the kitchen and teaches himself to cook out of spite purely so he can have at least one decent meal. Surprisingly, he finds that he actually quite enjoys cooking. He likes the preciseness of it, the fact that there are specific rules to follow and specific ways to do things. He ends up cooking most of their meals from then on. 

In the end, he doesn’t actually have to tell Logan how he feels. Logan does it first. It’s not a particularly special moment, the two of them are sitting in the garden one day, side by side. Logan’s going on about how pretty the roses turned out, and without thinking Brian reaches out and plucks one for him. Logan takes it with a smile, then considers for a moment before tucking it behind Brian’s ear. Brian can’t hide the awkward flush that creeps into his cheeks at this, and Logan takes the opportunity to mention that he thinks he might be possibly just maybe a little in love with him. Brian tries to stumble his way through an explanation that he doesn’t think he deserves this, that’s he’s not easy to love, and while yes he feels the same way and would love a relationship he’s not particularly interested in the more physical aspects of that. Logan reassures him that that’s fine, he doesn’t care, he just wants to be with him in any way that’s comfortable for him. Brian informs him that he wouldn’t mind a kiss, and Logan obliges happily. And that’s the beginning. 

Brian does eventually get around to investigating what’s left of the ship he arrived in, sifting through the piles of metal and gears and oddly familiar mechanisms. He can’t figure out how to build a new ship out of it, but after several hours he manages to create a small gear powered machine that hovers a couple inches off the ground. When it’s complete he just sits back for a moment and stares at it. He calls for Logan, who comes rushing in at the sound of his voice, paint splattered across his front. When he sees what Brian’s made he freezes and watches its flight in awe. He asks how Brian did it, and Brian launches into an explanation of mechanics and science that seems to come from nowhere. The knowledge is just there, and he finds himself getting increasingly excited as he goes on about it. When he’s finished Logan just blinks at him and says darling, I have not a fucking clue what you just said, but I think we may have just discovered your true calling.

They spend the rest of that day, as well as the next couple, investigating how far Brian’s knowledge goes. Logan drags him into town so they can talk to the few people there who know anything about science or have any sort of mechanical prowess. Brian takes his notebook with him, filling the pages with information as it comes to him. At the end of the day he can conclude that whatever else he may have been in his previous life, he was definitely some sort of  scientist. And as it turns out, this town doesn’t have any scientists. It has some people who know some things about science, yes, but no one who actually declares themself a scientist. From what Brian can gather, this is because it is seen as ungodly, as messing with things only god should be allowed to play with. When Brian hears this, he takes it as a sign that yes, this is indeed his true calling. 

Logan clears half of his studio to set up a makeshift lab for Brian, shifting his easels and art supplies to one side, and moving a few tables and benches into the other. Brian brainstorms a list of supplies he thinks he’ll need for starting out, and they set out the next day to procure them. 

Logan’s twin sister Livia is a metalworker, and has a small shop just on the outskirts of town that she lives above with her six-year-old daughter. She’s one of the only people in town who treats Logan like a person, and Brian warms up to her the moment they meet. She’s fascinated by Logan’s explanation of what Brian can do, and even more intrigued by Brian’s description of his plan to build machines that will make the town’s work easier. He doesn’t particularly want to help these people in any way, but there are some people who deserve it. Like Logan and Livia and the kid. And Rhys, the bartender at the small neglected tavern, who Brian learns quickly is Logan’s ex and is always friendly to the both of them, often providing them with drinks and snacks on the house when they stop by. 

And so begins the next phase of Brian’s life. He spends most of his time in his new lab, experimenting with new things and relearning old things. He still takes notes in his battered notebook, refusing to get a new one no matter how stuffed the pages get. It’s… oddly nice, having a routine. He gets to wake up next to Logan, then work next to him almost all day, each of them occasionally crossing the workspace to check on the other. Brian goes over to Logan’s area when he needs to take a moment to think or is getting to restless to focus properly. He perches on the extra stool and watches his love work, not saying a word, just watching Logan’s hands and the colors. It relaxes him, helps distract him from the worries that still plague him on occasion. 

Sometimes he genuinely hates being human. He often finds himself anxious over nothing in particular, faint voices in his head telling him that he doesn’t deserve this and he will lose everything he’s ever loved and he will be alone there’s nothing he can do he will always end up alone. He doesn’t want to end up alone. It scares him more than anything. 

Sometimes he cries, hidden in a corner of the house, angry at himself for feeling like this and not knowing how to fix it. Humans just don’t make sense. They hurt and they hate themselves and there’s no reason for it and he can’t seem to find an answer to why and how to fix it. But eventually the more he thinks about it, the more he realizes that people aren’t that different from his machines. They both are made of so many small parts that must all work together to keep the thing going, and any one of those parts could break or start working wrong at any point in time. Figuring out exactly what’s wrong will always be hard, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t possible to put the pieces back together. He thinks he could build a person, if he tried. 

The cat isn’t something he had planned. She just follows him home one day, all dusty white fur and wide gray eyes that look so much like Logan’s that he can’t resist. They name her Astrid, and both Brian and Logan adore her. She comes and sits on Brian’s shoulders while he works, her tail curling around his neck and her demands to be petted often distracting him, but he doesn’t actually mind. 

He starts sleeping in more, because waking up before dawn and going to sleep after midnight is not helping his mental health, and also Logan has taken to whining at him to come back, because apparently Brian’s stomach is his favorite pillow. He grows his hair out as well, til it sweeps almost halfway down his back. He often forgets to put it up when he works, and can’t be bothered to once he’s busy, so Logan often has to come over and do it for him after watching him shake the hair out of his face for the thousandth time. 

The townspeople still keep a wide berth, minus of course Livia and Rhys. The two of them and of course Logan soon become what Brian considers his family in this place. Livia often brings her little daughter, who is absolutely obsessed with Brian and always begs to see his machines. He makes her a little metal butterfly for her birthday, one that actually flaps its wings and lifts off the ground. She adores it, and demands to know how it flies. He tells her it’s a secret, and she asks if it’s alive. He pauses at this, considering what it actually means to be alive, and informs her that he’ll have to get back to her on that. He’s distracted for the rest of the evening, thinking about life and death, thoughts coming into his head that mesmerize him but scare him just a little. He decides to lock them up and keep them in a box in the back of his mind for now. Until he sees a reason to bring them back out. 

He doesn’t forget about the garden, through all this. He still goes out and tends to it every day, often with Logan at his side. At one point the priest comes up to them and inquires about Brian’s scientific work. Brian responds as bluntly and coldly as he can, and as he was expecting the conversation quickly turns into how the priest is concerned for his soul. Logan pipes up that he thinks Brian’s soul is quite lovely, actually, causing the priest to look between them with narrowed eyes. Then his eyes widen and disgust becomes evident on his face as he informs them that he could have saved them, but now there is no chance for either of them to escape hell. Brian tilts his head thoughtfully and muses that he’s heard hell is rather a good place for spelunking, causing Logan to exclaim that oh he’s always wanted to try spelunking and what a wonderful opportunity that will be! He grins conspiratorially as the priest walks away, and Brian has never loved him more.

Their wedding, not long after, is a small and quiet affair. Rhys officiates, which is apparently something he can do, as he once was part of the church. There are only about five or six people present, including Astrid the cat, but that doesn’t matter. They don’t need a huge ceremony, as long as they can have each other. 

His name is Brian Lazarus now, and he finds he quite enjoys that. He belongs to someone, he’s bound to someone that he loves for the rest of time, and now he’ll never have to be alone. 

And then Logan gets sick, and it all starts to fall apart. 

He collapses one day, completely out of nowhere, while painting. He’d mentioned feeling off a bit earlier, but both he and Brian had passed it off as just one of those days. But then that afternoon, as the both of them are working, he calls Brian over, gentle voice turned urgent and sharp. Brian is by his side in an instant, just in time to see him collapse to the floor. Now, Brian has been comfortable in his place as a scientist for years now, and has recently delved deeper into some more medical aspects of the profession, but seeing his husband like that sends him into a panic attack on the spot, and he can barely get down to Livia’s for help. She, thankfully, is able to take control of the situation much easier than he was, and the two of them get Logan to the doctor. They wait impatiently throughout the examination, Brian pacing back and forth, ignoring Livia’s outstretched hand. Eventually they are informed that it seems Logan has developed a rare infectious disease, and he doesn’t think there is anything that can be done. 

It’s not fair. It’s not fair. This is Brian’s worst fear, and it’s coming true. Logan’s awake when they get home from the doctor, and Brian just falls into his arms and breaks. He knows he’s being selfish, he knows Logan should be the one breaking down, and Brian should be the one holding him, but his heart is tearing into a million tiny pieces and he can’t keep it in. Logan holds him and kisses him and tells him that it’s alright, that they still have time, he’s not going anywhere, but it’s not and he is and Brian is going to be alone and that terrifies him he doesn’t want to be alone- 

But they still have time. At least for now. And he isn’t going to waste that for one second. 

Neither of them leave the house for the next months, choosing instead to spend as much time as possible together. They talk about the things they had hoped for their future together. Brian tells Logan that he thinks he would have liked a kid at some point, and Logan says that he would have liked that too, someday. Brian barely even goes into his lab, despite the thoughts that are nagging at the back of his mind, trying to break to the surface. He pushes them back, refusing to think about impossible things. But sometimes, when Logan is asleep, he slips out of bed and into the lab, and he tests some theories. He knows that what he’s trying to do isn’t natural, that he’s playing with powers no one should ever have access to, but he pushes that knowledge deep, deep down. He can deal with the consequences later. 

It isn’t enough time. They have nearly an entire year together after the diagnosis, but it isn’t enough. Despite dreading and preparing for it throughout all this time, Brian isn’t ready to lose the one person he loves more than life itself. But there’s nothing he can do to stop it, and before he can come to terms with the thought, Logan is gone. 

Losing his love is when Brian loses whatever of himself he has left. He’s been holding it together for this long because he had Logan, he had someone to live for and help him pull his scattered pieces into something tangible, but now… there’s nothing. 

He gives up. He stops talking to people, he doesn’t have the energy to even acknowledge that he exists. He still talks to Astrid, strokes her silky fur and tells her how much he hurts. But she’s the only one. When Livia comes by to check on him, he screams at her until she leaves, saying things he can never take back. He drinks himself half to death every night, until Rhys refuses to let him into the tavern. And there go the only relationships he’s ever had in this town. He’s well aware that he’s destroying everything he has left, but he doesn’t care. He’s tired of pretending that he’s alright, that he’s ever been alright, that he’s not just a machine with too many pieces missing, held together only by the love and care of another. Except that love is gone. And he’s left… empty. 

And now there’s nothing left to do but end it. He simply can’t keep going like this, alone. He makes his way to his lab for the first time since Logan died, determined to get this over with as quickly as possible. Instead, he ends up spending hours going through his notes, reading through formulas and theories that he never got to test out. Because when it comes down to it… he doesn’t want to die. He’s terrified of leaving this world without having accomplished anything, without having done anything that matters. And then he finds it. Those notes he took in the last desperate days of his husband’s life, those thoughts that he deemed too impossible to pursue, but did anyway. The concept that both terrified and excited him when he first conceived it. It still terrifies him, looking at it now, but there are some fears even stronger. He doesn’t want to die, and he doesn’t want to be alone. 

Logan wouldn’t want him to do this. But Logan isn’t here. 

Once he sets his mind to something, he won’t stop until he sees it through. And he’s set his mind to this. As he makes the decision he can hear that priest’s voice in the back of his mind, telling him that he’s going to hell. He laughs. If he’s going there anyway, he might as well earn his place. 

There’s a small graveyard on the edge of town, barely anything more than a plot of sparsely grassy land with a few headstones popping out here and there. It is rarely visited, especially in the early hours of the morning, so Brian is completely alone as he makes his way through it with a shovel, peering at the names on the headstones and cursing because he forgot his glasses. Some people are afraid of graveyards, he remembers vaguely as he wanders. Ridiculous. The dead are dead, there is nothing they can do to you. He could perhaps understand the superstition if it was more about the fear of being by yourself in an empty place, but at the moment all he can think about is that he is here for a reason, he has work to do and he is not going to let idle thoughts distract him from that. 

Locating Logan’s grave takes a bit longer than Brian would have liked. He was there at the funeral, of course, so he remembers burying the body, but there is no order or organization to the layout of the graveyard, and no defining landmarks to be seen, so he doesn’t have a clear idea of where exactly it is. But he does find it eventually. He takes a moment to kneel before the grave, tracing the letters carved into the mossy stone. Logan Quinn Lazarus. His heart twists violently in his chest, and his breath catches. Goddamn it, he misses that man so much. 

He’s careful with the digging, using the shovel as delicately as he can so as not to damage what’s beneath. When he finally reaches the body, he stops and does the rest of the work with his hands, gently removing the dirt from around his love’s face. He feels sick when he uncovers the full body, seeing the lifeless skin, the hollow face, the lank hair, the simple white clothes they buried him in. It doesn’t look like Logan. It isn’t Logan, not anymore. But it was. And it will be again, soon. 

Brian fills the grave back in when he’s finished, but he lifts the body into his arms and carries it away. He lays it out on one of the long tables in his lab and covers it with a sheet. He doesn’t want to look at it, not until he has to. He can’t bear to see someone that was until recently so full of life and light all hollow like that. 

He’s not going to conduct the experiment on Logan immediately. No, he must first go through a period of trial and error, of failing and starting over and reworking his theories until he has it perfect. Logan deserves nothing less than perfect. 

His first attempt is on a mouse he found trapped in the mechanical mousetrap he made. Usually when he finds one he just takes it outside and buries it in the garden, but not this one. This one he takes back to his lab and slices open, determining which pieces are salvageable and which are not. He spends hours on it, surrounded by metal and organic material and Astrid, perched on the end of the bench and watching him with unblinking smoky eyes. He feels like she’s judging him. She probably is. He’s judging himself. 

He tries not to think too hard about what he is doing, because he knows if he does he will just spiral down a path of questions that he doesn’t want to know the answer to and answers that he doesn’t want to know the questions to. He locks his worries in a box in the darkest part of his mind, not allowing himself to dwell on them for longer than a second. He needs this. He doesn’t want to be alone. He’s terrified of who he will become on his own. He never wants to meet that person. And if he can do this, he’ll never have to. 

After a day and a night of nonstop work, of putting things together and taking them apart and twisting them until they were unrecognizable to what they were meant to be, he has finally done it. The mouse sits in front of him, rising to its feet in shaking, jerky motions. It barely looks like a mouse anymore, more like a hunk of misshapen flesh with some metal bits poking out, but it’s alive. It moves, it makes noise, it’s… wrong. Its movements are pained, unnatural. Its cry is distorted and haunting. It hurts Brian to watch it, and he quickly ends its misery. 

Back to square one, then. That’s alright. He can try again. He didn’t honestly think it would work the first time, anyway. 

This time he’s not going to try it on an animal. He can’t do that, not again. It felt wrong. But he doesn’t want to do it on a person yet, either. Or… at least not a whole person.

The town doctor has a set of organs in jars. Brian remembers seeing them when he went in to get his eyes checked. If he could just get his hands on some of those…

Some people would resort to stealing or tricking their way into getting something like this. Not Brian. He doesn’t see any reason to steal when he could simply ask politely. And what’s the point of lying when the truth is going to come out eventually? So here’s what he does: 

One morning, he heads straight to the doctor’s office, walking through town with a purposeful stride. He ignores the eyes that turn his way, the whispers that follow in his footsteps. He doesn’t care what they’re saying. He owes them nothing, and they owe him the same. 

The doctor is surprised to see him, saying that he hasn’t seen Brian around lately and hopes he’s doing well. Brian calmly replies that he’s not doing well at all, but thanks the man for asking. The doctor hesitates for a moment, but quickly recovers his polite demeanor, inquiring as to what he can do for Brian today. When Brian informs him that he needs a heart, that calm exterior disappears entirely. He stumbles through asking what Brian could possibly need a heart for, and Brian responds that he is going to attempt to revive it. The doctor just stares at him. Brian sighs and tells him that he’s not opposed to taking it by force if he has to, but he would prefer not to. 

After several more minutes of gentle coercing from Brian and blank staring from the doctor, Brian finds himself walking away from the office with a human heart in a jar. He’s aware that the doctor is mostly likely spreading the news of his visit to everyone in town, and they are probably all condemning him at this very moment. But he’s already condemned himself, so what does it matter if they do? He still doesn’t believe in their religion, he doesn’t think, but he knows that wherever he ends up after this, it won’t be anywhere good. 

Shutting himself in his lab for days feels like second nature at this point. The space has become so cluttered with his notes and supplies that it’s almost impossible to tell that there is anything underneath. It doesn’t bother him, he knows where everything is when he needs it. As long as he’s still in control of the space. 

This process takes much longer than the previous attempt, as Brian is essentially recreating an entire cardiovascular and respiratory system out of metal and wire. It’s delicate work, complex and tiring, but if it works, it will be worth it. 

It works. Brian almost bursts into tears when the heart begins to beat, slowly and unsteadily at first before settling into a rhythm. The blood substitute flows haltingly through the thin metal veins, and it works. It works. 

He doesn’t sleep that night. He’s too busy prepping for tomorrow, checking and double-checking his notes, weeding the garden, cleaning up the house. He can’t stay still, his heart is pounding and his mind is screaming because Logan’s coming home. 

He can barely keep his hands from shaking as he lifts the sheet over Logan’s body. His heart breaks a little at the sight of decaying patches on his angel’s skin, but he can fix it. He has to. 

He works as carefully as possible, hyperaware of his every motion and just how quickly everything can go wrong. He cuts into flesh, twists wires, shapes metal, every action executed with the utmost care. This is Logan, after all. 

The hardest part is determining which of the organic material can be saved and what can’t. In the end he ends up with about sixty percent original flesh and bone, and forty percent metal and wire. The decaying patches of skin had to be replaced, as well as some internal organs and systems. 

It doesn’t look like the Logan he married, but he’s still beautiful, in a new and unique way. Brian is vibrating with anticipation and nerves as he starts up the machinery, and watches his husband wake up. 

Logan’s eyes blink open, the familiar gray a little glassier than before. His head turns, slowly, and one word comes out of his mouth. Brian?

His voice is hoarse from disuse, his tone a little off from his reconstructed vocal cords, but it’s his voice. It’s him. It’s Logan. 

Brian takes his hand, softening his voice as he reassures Logan that he’s here, that everything’s alright, that he’s home. 

Logan’s eyes land on him, and he struggles with jerky motions into a sitting position. He stumbles through a question, asking what happened, why is Brian crying, why does he feel so strange?

Brian explains what he did as gently as he can, holding both of Logan’s hands in his, scared to let go in case he vanishes and leaves him alone again. Logan’s expression shifts between almost every emotion imaginable during Brian’s explanation, settling on disbelieving horror as he lifts his hands to his face, staring at the patches of metal and crisscrossing lines of stitching. 

Brian reaches out to touch his face, aching at the wrecked look in his love’s eyes, but Logan flinches away. Brian freezes. He opens his mouth to… say something, anything that will stop the other looking so very small and afraid, but Logan cuts him off before he can, saying that he can’t hear any more of this right now, and would really just like to be left alone for a moment. 

A ‘moment’ ends up being roughly a week, and Brian spends the entire time pacing through the house, antsy and broken-hearted, hating himself and trying not to think about it. He hasn’t slept in all this time, and is managing to stay on his feet only through black coffee and sheer force of will. He hovers outside the bedroom door, itching to turn the knob and peek in, but he can’t bring himself to do it. Until he hears Logan’s soft voice from inside, telling him that he knows he’s out there, and he can come in if he wants. 

Brian opens the door slowly, bracing himself to be met with disgust and terror, but what he finds is Logan, curled up on the bed with Astrid, looking much better than he had. He looks up when Brian enters, and gives him a tentative smile.

Brian sits on the edge of the bed and asks how he’s doing, not quite meeting his eyes. Logan admits that he’s not great, probably won’t be for a long while, but he’s adjusting. Brian nods, looks away, and then turns back sharply, words suddenly pouring out of his mouth as he explains why he did it, why he brought Logan back and why he’s not sorry, every pent-up emotion releasing itself in a rushing tide that rolls out of him and leaves behind the barest version of himself, a window open to the rotten heart of him. 

Logan listens, and when Brian is finished he takes his hand and laces their fingers together, staring at the contrast of smooth skin against ridged scars and plates of metal. He says that he understands, and that he still loves him, but he still needs Brian to understand that this is hard for him, and is going to continue to be hard for him, and Brian’s going to need to be patient with him. Brian promises he will, of course he will, he’ll do anything Logan needs him too, he promises. Logan holds out his arms, and Brian pulls him close and holds him tight. 

Logan asks him what he’s going to do with this knowledge, this ability to bring the dead back to life. Brian hesitates before saying that he doesn’t think he’s going to do anything with it. It was a mistake, he says, he should never have attempted it in the first place. He just didn’t want to be alone again. 

They pack Brian’s notes away in a corner of the lab, his formulas and machinery tucked somewhere where he won’t have to look at them every day and feel the urge to add to them, to see what else he can do. A part of him desperately wants to defy as much of the town’s natural order as he can, prove to them that there’s no point in believing in miracles and magic when he can do just as much as their god. He’s a little scared of that part of himself. 

He wonders sometimes, if he’s a good person. He likes to think he has a good heart, good intentions. And he does, he’s pretty sure. He started out his work as a scientist to improve life for others in this town, no matter how much he despises them. And even when he… when he was raising the dead… well, that was mostly desperation and ambition. But he didn’t so he wouldn’t end his own life, so he could at least try to save himself, and isn’t that worth something? Most people would say that it was still morally wrong, but do morals really matter if something is being done for the greater good? What is the greater good? He doesn’t really think there’s one set greater good, one goal that everything is trying to reach toward. He thinks the greater good is different for everyone, because human beings are messy and varied. And everyone has their own moral code, too, so really no one else can tell him that what he did was wrong, because what they deem morally acceptable might not be what he does. This is why he prefers his machines. 

Sometimes he wishes he could be one of those machines. He wouldn’t have to deal with a moral crisis then. 

He and Logan don’t go out much, anymore. He doesn’t say it outright, but Brian can tell that Logan is afraid of people seeing him like this. They’ve always seen him as something to look down upon, and now that he’s died and been brought back, they’ll see him as much worse. And it’s Brian’s fault. 

They still spend time in the garden, sitting amongst the flowers with their cat and occasionally Rhys and Livia (who both initially didn’t know what to make of Logan’s resurrected state, but have since adjusted). The garden can be seen from outside, which means that others can catch glimpses of them there, but never enough to confirm anything. 

There are rumors, of course, in town. Rumors that Brian Lazarus is a witch, that he’s been gifted unnatural powers by the devil and has been using them to do his bidding this whole time. Brian is offended by this, of course. He is not a witch. He does not do magic. And he certainly has not been doing anything for their devil. 

He still continues his work, but not on anything related to life and death and resurrection. He builds small things, helpful things, like a small bell alarm to help Livia wake up earlier so she can get her daughter to school on time. But he doesn’t throw himself into it as much, choosing instead to spend more time with his family. Logan teaches him how to paint, a little, as he can’t do it very well himself any longer, due to the unsteadiness of his patchwork hands. It’s not a perfect life, by any means, but it’s good enough for him. 

And then one morning, there is a knock on the door. Brian sets down his coffee with a regretful sigh and answers, forcing half of his unruly thick hair into a knot. 

It takes him a moment to recognize the young woman standing in his doorway. He hasn’t seen her around very often, and when he has she’s always been with her father, the priest. Yes, that priest. He can’t fathom what she could possibly be doing here, and when she tells him she needs his help, he almost bursts out laughing. 

She tells him she’s heard rumors that he can raise the dead. He asks why she cares. She says that her father is dying, and she wants to save him. 

Brian does not hesitate to tell her no. He won’t do it. He made a promise that he wouldn’t attempt such a thing again. She begs him. He refuses once more. He’s convinced that if he says no enough times, she will give up. But then she tells him that maybe if he does this, her father will see him in a different light. This gives him pause.

He doesn’t owe the priest anything, he knows that. He doesn’t need to accepted, doesn’t need anyone’s approval. But damn if he doesn’t want to prove that man wrong. He wants to show him that anyone can perform a miracle, if they set their mind to it. He wants to prove that what his beliefs deem unnatural and wrong might actually be benevolent and helpful. He wants to change the priest’s mind, force him to see things differently and not condemn those that see the world differently than he does. He wants to stop the executions, the prejudice. He wants to prove maybe a heretic can change the world. 

And so he does it. He takes a moment to gather his things, peeks in on Logan, who is still sleeping peacefully in their bed, and heads out to raise the dead once more. 

The procedure goes much more quickly this time, as the priest is newly dead and therefore does not have any rotting patches that need to be replaced. Brian waits with anticipation as the priest opens his eyes and blinks up at Brian. He opens his mouth to say something, but Brian cuts him off by simply saying ‘you’re welcome’ and leaving. 

Logan is waiting for him when he gets home, asking where he was. Brian can’t lie. He replies that he was just bringing the priest back from the dead. He tries to explain why, but is cut off by Logan shouting at him that he promised, he swore he wouldn’t do it again. Brian responds that he knows, he did, but he had good reason. Logan snarls fuck his reasons, he doesn’t understand what it feels like, how it is to live as something less than alive. Brian insists that he was just trying to make living better for the both of them, to which Logan replies that alright, maybe that was what he intended, and the effort is much appreciated, but this isn’t better. You can’t fix the world by breaking it, Bri. 

Brian tries to reply, to say something else, but before he can find the words Logan turns and storms out of the house. Brian slumps against the kitchen table, dropping his face into his hands and trying not to scream. He’s exhausted, emotionally and physically. He’s ashamed and terrified that he might have lost everything he has by trying to bring it back. He debates burying himself in a blanket nest in his bed with his cat and never emerging, but then he hears the scream. 

He’s out of the door in a second, because that sounded suspiciously like his husband, and close.

They’re right outside. Everyone. The entire town, from people he recognizes from past interactions to people he’s never seen before, is gathered just outside his house. Many of them are armed, with pitchforks and kitchen knives and even a torch or two. Leading them is the priest, leaning on one of the townspeople for support, still a little unsteady from his revival, but with a fiery determination in his eyes. Brian’s heart sinks into his shoes. It’s a witchhunt. 

But what draws his eye the most is Logan. He’s caught in between two of the townspeople, one holding each of his arms. They’re pulling at him, straining the stitches holding him together, and he’s screaming. Brian takes a step toward him, but the men just pull harder. Logan’s scream turns into a pained whimper. 

Brian takes another step, and a man in the front of the mob points a pitchfork directly at him. Brian isn’t fazed, and continues to come forward until he’s pressed right against the sharp tines of the pitchfork. He stares the man down, but when he speaks he’s addressing the priest: Let. Him. Go.

The men holding Logan have begun picking at the patches of metal on his skin, prying it apart while Logan stands there trying to look strong with blood trickling down his face and arms. 

Brian tries again, telling the priest that if he lets Logan go, he can have Brian. That’s what he wants, isn’t it? 

The priest just shakes his head and declares that he will have both Brian and his abomination, as they are both affronts to the god he remains determined to serve. Brian snarls that since the priest was brought back the same as Logan, wouldn’t that make him an abomination? The priest’s expression doesn’t change, and he replies that he will deal with his own unholiness once he has dealt with theirs. 

Brian growls, but before he can make any sort of move he is grabbed by more of the townspeople and forced to his knees, kicking and snapping at hands and bodies wherever he can. Someone slams their boot into his stomach, and he gasps, doubling over on the ground. He places a hand down for support, and a knife is immediately rammed through it, pinning him in place. He cries out, but bites it back quickly. He doesn’t owe these people anything, especially his pain. 

The priest is still talking, something about cleansing and removing the rot from a blessed space, but Brian isn’t listening. All he sees are the rest of the townspeople closing in on Logan, his husband, his love, his most precious work, and tearing him apart. They pull the metal from flesh, tossing the scraps down into the dirt. They slice open stitches, peeling back skin and scooping out artificial organs alongside organic ones. They dismantle him, piece by piece, while Brian watches. He screams, at first, until there’s not enough left of him to make a sound.

When they’re done, they separate the remains into two piles, metal and flesh. They take a torch to the flesh pile, setting it alight and burning it away. Brian can see the one remaining gray eye, sitting on top of the pile, watching him as it crumbles to ash. He feels tears streaming down his face, but he doesn’t make a sound. Finally, the crowd turns to him. 

The priest asks the people what should be done with ‘the witch’. Brian braces himself for hanging or being burned at the stake, and sure enough there are plenty of people advocating for that. But then a voice speaks out over the clamor, a familiar voice from a familiar face with red hair like Logan’s, the same color as the flames that had devoured him mere seconds ago. 

Send him back from whence he came. To the stars.

There’s a moment of silence, before the noise rises again, the mob agreeing fervently to Livia’s proposal. Eventually someone brings up the question of how, to which Brian defeatedly replies that he’s been attempting to build a spaceship for the past couple of years, and while he doesn’t have a full working prototype, he does have something that will work for this purpose. He figures that if this is happening, he might as well hurry it up. It’s not like he has anything left to live for. 

He tells the men holding him down where it is, and they go to find it. Brian’s left there, on his knees, a knife through his hand, a pile of ash and metal the only remainder of the life he had tried to build here. It doesn’t take long for the men to find the machine, something resembling a tiny spaceship that a person can easily be strapped to. It had been meant as something of a model for actual spaceship-building, but Brian had never gotten around to working on the larger project. 

He doesn’t say a word as they remove the knife from his hand and tie him to the machine with strips of leather. They tie the metal pieces that once made up half of Logan into a bundle and strap it to him as well. He stares straight ahead, not meeting anyone’s eyes. When the priest asks if he has any last words, he remains silent. And that’s it. They send him into the sky without ceremony.

He closes his eyes as he accelerates and ascends, climbing higher and higher into the sweet abyss. He doesn’t want to see the void that will claim him. He’s terrified, despite having resigned himself to this fate. He knows he should probably be reflecting on his life, on the choices that brought him here, on his regrets and unfulfilled dreams, but all he can think about is how much he doesn’t want to die alone. 

He’s not technically alone. He has a piece of Logan with him, and his machine. He always considered the things he built to be companions of a sort, but right now he can only see them as cold metal lumps that won’t feel a thing when he’s gone. There’s no one who will miss him. 

He wonders if they will tell stories about him, back in the town. He’d make a good story, he thinks. A cautionary tale, perhaps. If you stray from your path, you’ll end up like Brian Lazarus, the witch who died alone and burned in hell for all eternity. 

It’s funny, the fact that he’s going to hell is so ingrained in his mind at this point, despite his disbelief in it. He wonders if he’ll be alone there too. 

He feels it when the cold of space surrounds him, and breathing becomes a struggle. He doesn’t fight it. He awaits the moment when his heart stops beating, finally ending this sorry excuse for a life. 

It doesn’t come. 

He doesn’t remember where he came from. Well, that’s not entirely true. He remembers pieces of it, the town, the priest, the mob, and dying in the void of space. Mainly the dying part. Most other things are somewhat fuzzy. He knows there was someone he lost, maybe multiple someones, but he can’t remember a single name. The doc tells him that that’s to be expected, as while she did her best to recreate his brain neuron by neuron, there are probably a couple mistakes or missing bits. She also tells him that she may not have gotten his looks exactly right, either, as he was all but frozen solid when she recovered him, and it was kind of hard to make out the exact features. That’s fine with him. He’s never really cared much about what he looks like. 

His new body is hard to get used to. It feels awkward and clunky, despite being expertly made to be neither of those things. It doesn’t feel like it fits him, almost like it’s a container he’s been forced into. Or a suit that isn’t his color. And it doesn’t work the same. 

He spends the first couple days touching everything he can, testing them against his brass fingers. He remembers how these things should feel, the textures and character, but he can’t feel it. Everything just feels cool and delicate to him now. 

He’s strong, too. He figures he might be, being made of metal now. Just because he’s feeling crushingly lost at the moment doesn’t mean he’s not up to experimenting with this new self. He tests his strength out on himself, first, crumpling the metal and twisting himself into knots. It doesn’t hurt, not exactly, but it’s an odd sensation. Once he discovers that he can quite easily crush a human skull (the doc has some in her lab) in his hand with barely any effort, he quickly decides to learn to control himself before he touches another person (or whatever he is now). 

He still thinks the same, using the same patterns of logic and reasoning, but somehow his new brain is a lot smoother in the process. It was built for this kind of thinking, he guesses, which makes it a perfect fit.  He worries that maybe he’s been reduced to simple logic without emotional toll, but he quickly discovers that that is not the case.

His heart is still in there, beneath all the metal and wire and circuits and gears. It’s still flesh, and still beats the same as it always has. It’s the only organic piece of him that remains. He can still feel, but it’s a bit muted, as his brain can’t perfectly process the signals. He thinks it should give him comfort, knowing that he still has a heart, but it just feels… wrong, out of place, to have that beating red mass of muscle amidst the cool brass circuitry. 

He feels wrong, no matter how hard he tries to get used to it. For the first few months he wants nothing more than to tear himself apart and be done with it. But after a couple attempts it becomes clear that the doc’s claim that he is now immortal was the truth. And he hates it. But it makes sense, he thinks, considering what he’s done to others. It’s only fair that he feels what they did, being brought back from the dead as something different, something wrong. It’s a fitting punishment for the witch. 

The morality core is the worst part. He knows why the doc put it in, he knows what it means, and he can’t stand it. The worst thing about it is, he wouldn’t notice it if he wasn’t aware of its existence. It doesn’t change his personality, it barely changes anything about him, only the way he makes certain decisions. If he wasn’t aware of the two settings (Ends Justify Means and Means Justify Ends) and whichever setting he’s on at any given time, he wouldn’t notice that anything had changed. But he is aware of it, which makes him hyperaware of every thought he has and choice he makes, and consider how he would make it differently if he was on the opposite setting. It makes him feel a bit like his thoughts are being controlled, and he hates it. He can’t stand not being in control of himself. And then there’s the morality of the decision to actually switch the setting itself, which is a whole other issue. For the first couple of months he has a moral crisis every time he tries to make a decision, no matter how trivial it is. 

There are others on this ship, he knows, but he doesn’t know them. He sees them around, knows their names, and yet he can’t bring himself to speak to them. They’re like him, he knows that too, and yet they’re not. Each of them have only one piece of themselves that has been replaced, that is wrong. They can understand part of what he’s feeling, but not all of it. Never all of it. Among them, he still feels alone. 

It’s Aurora who first gets through to him. The starship. He can actually hear her voice, something he soon discovers only he, Nastya, and Ivy can do. It’s a lovely voice, musical and soothing. She makes a habit of asking him how he’s feeling, multiple times a day. He always answers her honestly, and she quickly becomes the person he confides in most, if there’s something he doesn’t want the others to know.

He doesn’t sleep anymore, and therefore has plenty of time to feel lonely and sorry for himself. He spends most of the nights plugged into Aurora, listening to her tell him stories of the crew and herself. He doesn’t need to charge, exactly, it’s more like… refreshing his systems. It becomes routine for Aurora to keep him company during this period. She sings to him sometimes. Her songs aren’t exactly traditional music, made mostly of binary code and frequencies unheard by human ears, but they’re beautiful, and Brian tells her so. 

Jonny comes to him one night, while he’s plugged in. Brian’s sitting with his eyes closed, but connected to Aurora like this he can feel the first mate approach. Jonny hovers in front of him for a moment, clearly unsure what to say. Brian opens his eyes and tells him that he can sit, if he wants. Jonny nods awkwardly and comes to sit beside him, fidgeting with his many belts. Brian introduces himself, aware that Jonny knows who he is but feeling that a more official introduction would help. The first mate reintroduces himself distractedly, then blurts out that Brian’s the opposite of him, did he know that? Brian asks him what he means, and Jonny stumbles through an explanation about his heart, how it isn’t right, how it works wrong. 

Brian can hear it, if he listens closely. That tick, tick, tick echoing from inside of the person beside him, a contrast to the steady thump, thump, thump of his own heart. He asks how it feels, and Jonny shrugs, unable to offer any description besides wrong. Brian admits that he gets it, that most of him feels wrong too. Jonny asks, tentatively, if he can feel Brian’s heartbeat. Brian is taken aback, but says that he can. Jonny reaches out and presses a hand to Brian’s chest, searching for the steady beat that he knows is there. When he finds it, he lets out a soft sigh, then collapses into Brian, resting his head on his chest so he can hear it better. Brian freezes, startled by the sudden warm load of flesh that’s been dumped onto him. He rests an awkward hand on Jonny’s head, barely even touching for fear of hurting him. And they stay like that for the rest of the night. 

He starts spending time with the rest of the crew after that, learning about them, their stories, their traumas, their fears, their loves. He finds more in common with them than he expected, and soon finds a comfortable place in the crew. He remains closest to Jonny, though. They are two halves of a whole, in a way, and they fit together differently than the others. 

He promises himself that he’s going to be better. If he’s been given a second chance, he is going to do his best to make the most of it. He knows there’s most likely no hope for him, but he is going to try. 

It doesn’t take him long to realize that the others aren’t aware of his morality core, and at one point he has to sit them down and describe to them how it works. He describes it as a switch, which isn’t entirely accurate but close enough. It’s not a physical object, more of a mental switch, a duality in his brain with two variations that he can switch between at the time of his choosing. Unfortunately, he forgets to mention this fact in his explanation, something he doesn’t realize until one lazy afternoon when Jonny is trying to get him to switch settings for whichever reason, and goes on a search to find it. 

Brian is rightly confused by the first mate’s sudden examination of his body, and asks him what he’s doing, to which Jonny replies that he’s looking for ‘the fucking morals button or whatever’. Brian blinks, then says that it isn’t a physical entity. Jonny just stares at him for a second, then accuses Brian of lying to him. Brian corrects him, saying that no, he didn’t lie, he simply forgot to mention that there isn’t a physical switch. Jonny scowls and calls him an insubordinate piece of brass, his favorite nickname for Brian. 

Life on the Aurora is complicated and hectic, but Brian manages to find his place. There’s a science officer position open on the crew, but he doesn’t take it. He’s afraid of what will happen if he allows himself to take up further work in that field. So they make him the pilot, which isn’t really necessary as Aurora flies himself, but he’s close to her and communicates with her better than the others (except for Nastya, but she already has a position as the engineer). 

His favorite thing about being a part of the crew, however, is the music. He can’t remember if music was a big part of his life before. Sometimes he gets impressions of humming while working, tapping his feet or his fingers along with a beat only he could hear, but he doesn’t think he’s ever played an instrument. Until now. He’s pleasantly surprised to discover that he knows how to play most instruments, the knowledge having been planted in his brain by the doc. ‘In case we end up missing any’, she says. 

He finds comfort in the music, in the narrative. It soothes him, losing himself in the songs and stories like this. It makes him forget who he’s been, what he’s done, how lost he is now. He can pretend he’s just another story, like his past is nothing more than a tale he’s been told, and all he is now is a story that hasn’t quite begun yet. He can tell the others feel somewhat similar, that the music and performance brings them each some form of peace. Which is something they all need, very much so. 

Brian makes it his job to take care of the rest of the crew, because they clearly aren’t about to take care of themselves. It gives him a purpose, and he takes to it with a fervor he didn’t know he had. He never took the time to take care of people in his past life, not even himself, and he destroyed every relationship he had because of it, leaving him alone and defeated. He’s not about to do that again, especially to the people he’s going to spend the rest of eternity with. He doesn’t want to be alone. Not again. 

On his first excursion planetside with the crew, he finds a patch of red flowers that he’s never seen before. They bring him a sense of familiarity, of home, so he picks a couple and takes them back to the ship. He finds himself a hat to decorate with them, something else that feels oddly fitting, and wears it with pride. The flowers die, but he makes sure to find himself new ones on every planet they visit. 

The octokittens are another thing he finds himself drawn to. At first it’s a simple fascination with them, a need to understand what they are and how they work, but it soon becomes routine for him to check on them whenever he can, play with them for a couple hours, let himself be at peace. He goes to them when he needs to be alone, but not completely alone. He never wants to be completely alone. 

He still struggles, most of the time. There are so many emotions he doesn’t want to feel and thoughts he doesn’t want to think. Sometimes he thinks that he did die in the stars, and this is his hell. He says so once to Jonny, who asks if that makes the doc the devil. Brian shakes his head and says that no, she’s in hell with the rest of them, and is just trying to make it better for them, in her own way. 

Brian sees the doc’s ‘fall’ coming a mile away. He watches her feelings toward the crew shift from love to disappointment and regret, and their anger toward her grow steadily stronger. He sees the situation from both sides, but ends up siding with the crew as it becomes evident that the best thing for all of them would be for her to leave. And he’ll always be a little sore about the morality core. Once she’s gone, he wonders if she’ll start over, try to find a new crew. He hopes that if she does, she finds people better than them. 

He knows who pushed her. He won’t tell. 

It comes to his attention early on that Jonny gets attached with roughly the same ease as a gambling addict rolling a pair of dice. For someone who is convinced he doesn’t actually have a real heart, he loves enough for someone with at least twelve. So when Brian is called to what was up until very recently the doc’s lab only to find a stranger lying on the table missing half of his face, with Jonny pacing anxiously in the corner, he isn’t entirely surprised. Nastya is there as well, sorting through the doc’s tools and supplies. She looks to him helplessly, which for Nastya means a mildly concerned expression. Brian looks to Jonny who explains that his name is Tim, he burned his eyes out blowing up the moon, and Jonny needs Brian to save him. Brian pauses, unsure if he heard correctly what Jonny wants him to do. His hearing is of course impeccable, but there’s no way he’s being asked to- 

Suddenly he’s being shoved toward the table, Jonny giving his all despite Brian being two feet taller than him and made of brass. Nastya comes to his side, depositing a set of tools in front of him and saying that she can help, she has a vague idea of the doc’s process, but her area of expertise is machines, so she needs his help with the more… organic elements. Brian freezes, staring down at the figure on the table, the metal and flesh around him, and his heart seizes, causing his systems to stutter. Not again. 

He’s remembering, another body, another room, a still image of his own hands streaked with blood and gore and scratches from the metal, and his mind is blank and he can’t think he should be able to think his brain doesn’t just shut down now- fuck. His mind comes into focus, and now he’s seeing possibilities spreading out in front of him, every possible thing he could do wrong, every possible outcome of saying yes or saying no or doing neither, and oh he didn’t know he could do that-

Nastya’s hand is on his shoulder and he realizes belatedly that he’s been trying to take a deep breath, despite being unable to breath. He feels like he should be trembling all over, but of course he’s completely still. He must have looked like he’d fried his circuits or something. Aurora asks if he’s alright in her soft, musical voice, and it grounds him. He closes his eyes, thinking. He hears Jonny give an impatient huff, telling him that now is really not the time to be having a moral crisis, and he replies that yes, he is aware of that fact, but it does not stop him from having one. 

Focusing on the morals helps calms him down, despite his hatred of the way his work. It’s helpful to have a logical thought process to follow.

He’s currently on EJM, which means he is willing to do anything at all, as long as he believes it’s for the greater good. What is the greater good, in this situation? Helping Jonny? Keeping Tim alive? Letting Tim die? He doesn’t think anyone would want to live as the Mechanisms do, somewhere in between alive and mostly dead. But saving a life, that’s for the greater good, is it not? But at what cost? He considers switching to MJE, but he’s not sure that would be any better. On MJE he cannot do anything he believes to be morally wrong, which the crew tends to think means he won’t do any of the things they enjoy, as in crime. But the thing about MJE is, it’s not someone else’s idea of morals he’s following, it’s his. And his moral code has never been… the best. Years with the crew have only corrupted it further. Despite these facts, he doesn’t think he can do this on MJE. It’s too similar to how he once raised the dead, and he can’t morally allow himself to do that again. So EJM it is, then. Now back to the question of the greater good. 

Before he can get any further he hears a noise and snaps open his eyes to find that Nastya and Jonny have already begun the process, or as close to the process as they can get based on guesswork and minimal prior knowledge. Clearly he had been taking too long. With a sigh, Brian decides that the greater good now is making sure these two don’t ruin Tim completely, and takes command of the situation.

The process is messy, despite Brian’s best efforts to clean it up. They have to piece a pair of eyes together from whatever scraps the doc has lying around and a couple of Brian’s backup wires, and then find a way to fix them in place without entirely reconstructing Tim’s face. The result is something of a disaster, a mass of shifting plates and torn skin, but it could be worse. Now all that is left is to wait for Tim to wake up. 

He’s miserable, Tim is, when he wakes up and realizes that this is his life now. Nothing less was expected, but it still comes and punches Brian in the gut with guilt. He can’t help but feel like it’s his fault, even though most of the blame is being put on Jonny. He’s furious with himself for ruining another life, but he won’t take it out himself, not yet. He needs to do whatever he can to remedy the situation, to provide both Tim and Jonny with what they need in any way he can. 

It takes a lot shorter than he thought for Tim to warm up to him. He’s quiet in his first couple months, just like Brian was, locking himself in the room they gave him and refusing to speak to any of them, especially Jonny. Jonny stays strong throughout this treatment, shrugging it off and pretending it doesn’t matter, but one night he comes crying to Brian, saying that he just wanted someone to stay, someone he wouldn’t lost for once. Brian holds him and says that he understands, and promises that if Jonny needs someone to stay, Brian will. He won’t leave, not ever, he swears it. After that, Brian helps Jonny try to get through to Tim, leaving him food outside his room, introducing him to the octokittens, offering him a spot in their card games. It takes him a while, but eventually he begins to come out more and more often, growing more and more open as he does. He’s actually quite lovely, when he’s not screaming at them all to rip these things out of my face and let me die. 

One time, while Brian is plugged into Aurora, closing his eyes and allowing himself to simply shut down for an hour or two as he often does, he catches Tim watching him. He doesn’t think much of it, as this is his time to not think about anything at all, and he simply closes off his systems for a moment, leaving what he needs to keep him alive but shutting down the rest. When he comes back to himself, he is covered in octokittens. He blinks, then looks up at the sound of a quiet chuckle to find Tim watching him still, this time with a soft, mischievous smile. Brian smiles back, relieved to see him relaxed like this. He realizes right then and there that while the new gunner most likely won’t ever be okay (none of them ever will be), he’ll at least be fine. And that’s enough. 

Marius and Raphaella come as a surprise. Brian and the others had come to a sort of unspoken agreement that they wouldn’t attempt to mechanize anyone else, so none of them were expecting new crew members, let alone ones who are somehow already mechanized. They simply appear on the ship while the crew is planetside, fully intending to raid it, and almost succeed, until Raphaella discovers the lab and gets distracted exploring it. The crew arrives back on Aurora to discover the two of them there, and Jonny promptly shoots them both dead. While they’re trying to dispose of the bodies, however, they suddenly find themselves with two very much alive and very certainly no longer corpses who are suddenly fighting to get free. Ashes drops the figure they’re carrying, a very disgruntled Baron Marius Von Raum (as he later introduces himself), who promptly looks up at the group from his spot on the floor and waves. After what ends up being essentially a very unusual job interview, the crew now has two new members. 

Not long after they’ve joined, Brian goes to visit Raphaella in her lab (once the doc’s). He doesn’t visit the lab often, or at least he hasn’t up until now for fear of a ‘relapse’ into his old patterns of ambition and consequences. But now that there’s an official science officer onboard, he feels compelled to at least get to know her and her methods. And he is utterly fascinated by her wings, and desperately wants to interrogate her about them. She greets him enthusiastically, all hello hello please do come in, it’s Brian isn’t it? I was just taking an inventory of the lab, let me clear this stool and you can sit down. She makes herself a cup of tea, saying she would offer him one but she assumes he doesn’t drink. He informs her that she assumes correctly, and he can see her physically biting down her curiosity. He tells her she can ask, if she wants, as long as he gets to ask her questions in return. 

They’re there for hours, shooting questions back and forth at each other. Raphaella asks him about everything, from his material to his thought processes to how it feels to interact with certain objects and life forms. He answers to the best of his ability, which is often quite well, and in return asks her about her wings, how they were made, how they connect to her organic material, how heavy they are, how the mechanisms that move them work. She responds with expertise, somehow without acknowledging whether or not she is the one who made them. She even draws him a couple of diagrams. He finds he really enjoys talking to her, and it soon becomes routine for him to stop by her lab as often as he can. He sits with her while she works, asking questions and occasionally offering suggestions, all of which she takes in stride. 

Sometimes Marius joins them. He doesn’t say much, which Brian considers somewhat unusual for him, just sits there and listens to them talk. It gives Brian plenty of time to observe him, and it doesn’t take him long to spot the quiet anger and sorrow that runs through him. It’s suppressed, and often hidden behind a smile or flippant chatter, but it’s there. It reminds Brian a little of himself, of the simmering ball of resentment he’s been trying to eliminate, resentment for himself and for the situation he’s ended up in. 

The other thing he notices about Marius is that he practically oozes music. There’s always a song coming from him, whether he be humming or singing or playing one of those violins that he seems to be able to summon at will. To some it would be annoying, but to someone like Brian, who recognizes the use of music as a way to hold back the tide, to keep from losing oneself completely, it’s a welcome background noise. It doesn’t take long for him to start adding harmonies whenever he can, drumming beats on the lab table while Raphaella berates the two of them for stealing her focus. She doesn’t actually mind it. She doesn't even mind Marius' habit of literally twisting off his metal hand and throwing it at her whenever she mentions 'needing a hand'. She always picks it up and lobs it right back at him, with impeccable aim. He finds it hilarious.

Brian’s not entirely sure how he ends up giving Marius medical training. It has something to do with the endless references Marius makes to being a doctor, to which Raph often point out that he is not. Brian, curious, asks what exactly she means by that, and she tells him that Marius hasn’t actually had any real medical training. At this, Brian turns to the violinist and asks if he would like some. Being immortal and quick to heal, the crew doesn’t actually need a ship’s doctor, but it would certainly be a way to pass the time. Brian himself wasn’t… entirely a medical doctor, but he does know a fair amount that he’s willing to teach. He knows that he’s a bit of an impatient teacher, but Marius is an enthusiastic student, and they actually work together surprisingly well. They develop an easy camaraderie, and it soon becomes habit, whenever they see each other in passing,for Marius to greet Brian with a bow and a "doctor", to which Brian tips his hat and responds with "Baron". It's something of an inside joke, although what the joke is neither of them know. 

          They do most of their lessons in Raph’s lab, and she occasionally joins in. Tim happens to walk by one day when Brian has most of the panels removed from his torso, trying to explain the shapes and functions of internal organs. He peeks in, decides he really doesn’t want to know, and leaves. 

Inevitably, the subject of his background comes up. Raphaella asks him why he never actually participates in her experiments, despite often giving advice and helpful suggestions. He clearly knows a lot, she says, but doesn’t seem to actually want to use that knowledge. And so he sits her down and tells her his story. 

As he lays it out, he wonders if it’s purposeful that he only really remembers the narrative of it. The doc said it was because she made some mistakes in his memory, but he can’t help but think that maybe she did it on purpose. It would make sense. And yet he wishes he could forget the things he can’t remember. It bothers him, knowing that there are details of who he is that he doesn’t know. 

What he remembers most is the dying. He finds himself describing it to Raphaella in almost lyrical detail, and she listens, for once no questions asked. When he’s done, she comes over to him and wraps her arms around him, propping her chin on his head and running her fingers through his hair. He presses his face into her stomach, letting himself melt into the feeling of being taken care of for once. 

Later, when she comes to him with an idea for a song, he listens. They spend hours in his room, workshopping it and bouncing lyrics off of each other. She asks if he wants to sing it, and he tells her he would prefer it to be her, if she doesn’t mind. She kisses the tip of his nose and says she would be honored. 

It feels… freeing, to hear his end sung. He’s heard the others discussing how telling their stories helps them be at peace with the events, but he’s never really understood it until now. The song reminds him of his worst self, but it also reminds him of who he’s become, someone he thinks he could be proud of. It’s funny, that it took freezing to death in space for him to realize that liking who he is isn’t impossible. Or maybe he just needed a purpose. 

He catches himself humming Lost in the Cosmos often, when he’s thinking or just feeling the world is too silent. He loves all the songs the crew makes together, but this one has a special place in his heart, being his song. 

And eternity goes on. Brian spends most of his time making music, telling tales with his crew everywhere they go. He enlists Raph and Nastya to help build him a garden on Aurora, artificial sunlight streaming down to keep his flowers alive. He helps design a pair of new wings for Raph, and waltzes her around the lab with them when they’re done. He starts cooking, too, after discovering that the majority of the Mechanisms have no idea how to make decent food. To quote Tim to Jonny: Just because the ‘brutal hymn of gunpowder’ is my favorite song or whatever doesn’t mean I want to eat your gunpowder casserole ever again. The only ones who actually know how to cook are the Toy Soldier and Brian, as well as somewhat surprisingly Ashes. When Brian asks them how they learned, they just shrug and tell him that ‘it’s basically food arson’. He can’t exactly argue with that. Marius expresses interest in cooking as well, and Brian ends up teaching him that, too. Jonny decides to sit in on lessons purely so he can experiment with putting every single one of their ingredients in his mouth, until Brian chases him out of the kitchen with a knife. 

He enjoys going planetside, as it gives him and endless array of new cultures and worlds to explore and observe, learning as much as he can. He wanders around often, taking notes on things he sees or wants to know more about. He runs them by Aurora when he gets back to her, sees if she has any more information on certain details. He does join the crew in their… preferred activities, on occasion. He lies, kills, cheats, and steals when he needs to. It doesn’t get to him, anymore, even the lying. He’s always considered himself an honest man, but he’s realized that it’s sometimes necessary to omit the truth. The only activities he refuses outright to join in on on either setting are the ones that are… a bit too physical for his tastes. 

He often finds himself set up as a prophet or an oracle of some sort, a role that he never imagined himself playing. He often doesn’t intend to take the role, it usually finds him and sticks to him wherever he goes. He doesn’t wholly approve of the term ‘prophet’, as what he does isn’t exactly prophecy, per se. It’s more of an inbuilt program in his brain that predicts possible outcomes for any given situation, based on reasoning and prior knowledge. What he’s doing is essentially just giving advice, admittedly in a slightly cryptic manner (he likes to make it rhyme). But his dislike of the title aside, he finds he actually quite enjoys the role. It lets him feel in control, twisting the narratives of the strangers around him for better or for worse depending on how they interpret his words. And personally, he thinks he deserves to be a bit dramatic. 

Getting stuck in a sun is not something he has planned, and he does not recommend the experience. It hurts, the heat levels rising beyond anything he was made to endure, his body stuttering and shutting down only to start up again in agony. He tries to focus on the science of it to distract himself, but he can’t think. When Jonny finally shows up and pulls him out, as soon as he finds his voice he shouts at the first mate, asking him how he could leave him like that do you have any idea what that felt like? Jonny looks like he’s been slapped, and Brian quickly calms himself down and apologizes. He’s still angry and hurt, but he’ll get over it. 

He has to repaint the name on his chest. Brian, originally done in loving detail by Jonny, Ashes, Nastya, Ivy, and Tim, respectively, in the earlier days. It feels like the loss of an essential part of himself, affecting him much more than it should. He doesn’t know then that what he’s feeling is foreshadowing for what comes next. 

He hears Jonny’s shattered scream only a moment before Aurora shudders and disappears into herself, leaving the necessary systems online but refusing to communicate. Brian rushes toward where he heard Jonny and finds him staring at the airlock door, trembling. When Brian asks what’s wrong, all he manages to say is she’s gone. Then he collapses, and Brian drops next to him, reaching for him as the others round the corner, questions flying. It takes nearly an hour and a large amount of gentle coaxing to get an explanation out of the first mate, and when they do, none of them know how to process it.

Nastya. One of the core members of their crew, gone. She’s just… gone. She left them, left Aurora. And she’s not coming back. That’s not- that’s not something any of them do. They leave, sure, sometimes a moment alone is hard to get on the ship, but they always come back. Always. They’re like a machine, they need all their parts to work properly. This is unheard of. It doesn’t happen. And yet it has. 

Aurora won’t talk to Brian for the first few days after Nastya. He knows he should give her time, that she’s angry and sad and needs the space to process it, but he worries about her. He begs her to say something, to at least let him know she’s not gone too. He places a hand on her walls, feeling the familiar hum indicating that she’s there, that she’s alive. He sighs in relief and touches his forehead to the metallic panels. She asks if he’ll tell her a story. He sits down against the wall and obliges, telling her all the stories he knows. He tells her about the crew, the things they get up to planetside, when she can’t see them. He tells her about the octokittens, their names and personalities and the things they each like and dislike. And he tells her this story, his story. 

There was a man, he begins.

Both good and true? She asks.

 He chuckles. Some might say he was good and true, yes, and he likes to think he was, but in reality he was a bit of a bastard who struggled to balance intention with ambition and often made everything worse by trying to make it better. 

He sounds like someone I would like, she says. 

You wouldn’t, he tells her. But thank you. 

Nastya’s departure is the beginning of the end, from Brian’s point of view. The crew manages to hold on for at least one more big story after she’s gone, but it’s clear they’re falling apart.

The thing about immortality is: it looks amazing on paper, not having to face that yawning abyss of nothing that everyone is secretly a little afraid of, no matter how well they hide it. But no one truly wants to live forever. It’s exhausting, watching millenia crawl by, civilizations dissolving and reforming, suns burning out, thousands of worlds ending and thousands beginning. It sounds fascinating when phrased like that, and it is at first, but even the most interesting things in the universe can become boring once you’ve seen everything there is to see of them. And there’s always a deep sense of loss, of knowing you won’t be able to live and love as vibrantly because you have absolutely nothing to lose. 

Brian is so very tired. He doesn’t want to keep going, doesn’t know how to. He died that first time in the stars, he thinks, and everything after has just been an extended purgatory. But… he’s not ready to go just yet. He can’t leave his crew, not when he can see them giving up on themselves more every day, and he can feel the ticking bomb of time about to go off. They’re going to need him more than ever when it does. 

He feels it, when Jonny dies. He’s tending to his garden, trying to coax a dying rosebush back to life, when his heart skips a beat. It’s barely anything, a faint stutter in the steady rhythm he’s used to, but it’s enough that he feels it. And he knows. He knows without needing to that something has happened to his other half, and he doesn’t hesitate to tell Aurora to find the first mate. He had said something about a bar fight before he left, Brian remembers, something about how he hadn’t had a good one in a while, and was looking forward to starting one. 

Brian finds him in a bar on some backwater asteroid, lying amongst shattered glasses and overturned furniture, a knife in his heart. He’s smiling, the kind of smile that Brian hasn’t seen since… ever. He looks ecstatic, like he can’t wait to see what happens next. A song comes to mind, something about Elysian fields and final homes. Brian kneels beside the body, giving himself a minute to see if it regenerates, though he knows it won’t. He reaches out and stroke’s the first mate’s face lightly, bending down to press their foreheads together so he can whisper a goodbye. He hears Jonny’s voice in the back of his mind, saying oh c’mon, don’t cry for me now, Drumbot. There’s been plenty of time for that already, and I’m fine. 

I can’t cry, Brian reminds that little voice. And I know. But I’ll miss you. 

He carries Jonny back to Aurora and sets him down with care in the bridge. Most of the others are already there, and he asks Aurora to call the ones who aren’t, please.

Ashes and Tim are the first to approach, Ashes shaking their head fondly, asking what stupid shit the idiot’s gotten himself into this time. Their face falls as they notice the wound on his chest isn’t closing, and they demand to know why it’s taking so long for him to come back. Brian hates how steady his voice sounds when he breaks the news that he won’t be coming back. 

Ashes lets out a strangled cry, and Tim appears to go through all five stages of grief in roughly two minutes. The gunner presses a hand against Jonny’s still chest, as if testing to make sure the ticking heartbeat is gone. He wails softly, falling to the floor beside the body and taking one limp hand in both of his. Marius appears at Brian’s side, shaking his head violently as Ivy comes forward and strokes the hair back from Jonny’s forehead, murmuring something to him in a voice to low for any of them to hear. Brian hears a gasp, and turns to find Raphaella with both her hands pressed to her mouth, shaking. He goes to her and wraps an arm around her shoulders. She asks him how, how is it possible that he’s gone? It doesn’t make any sense, she says, and Brian holds her tighter, knowing she’s questioning the science of it all to keep herself from breaking down. 

Marius starts laughing, a tearful, broken sound, but somehow joyful at the same time. He finally figured out how to do it for good, the bastard. 

They burn the body, setting it alight and tossing it out the airlock. It’s crude, but it’s the funeral he would have loved. Raphaella asks if they should keep the heart, but Tim shakes his head and says that Jonny would have wanted the damn thing gone forever. 

They spend the rest of the day huddled on the floor of the bridge. Brian sits in the center, Raphaella curled into him on one side and Tim on the other, Ashes on Tim’s other side with their arm around him, Marius spread across all four of their laps, head in Raph’s and feet in Ashes’. Ivy’s sitting with her back against Brian’s, her head tilted against Raph’s wing. They drink and laugh and sing, telling the tale of their humble first mate long into the night and through the morning after. Marius does a flawless Jonny impression that has them all cackling and sobbing in tandem. It’s Tim who finally starts singing Elysian Fields, voice hoarse and shaky from tears he cannot shed. The rest join in, softly at first but growing louder and stronger until they’re belting it out to the stars, a final chorus for the first of them to live, the first of them to die. If Brian closes his eyes, he can almost hear Jonny singing along with them, arms thrown out to the sides, head tipped back, grinning that blissful grin. The image makes him smile, and he sings louder for him. 

Once one of them is gone, it’s almost like a domino effect, the others starting to fall one by one. Brian wonders if it’s the knowledge that they can die, the belief and hope that if Jonny figured it out, so can they. Or perhaps it’s simply time. Maybe the universe has finally decided it’s done with them, and is ready to let them go. Either way, once one leaves, the rest soon follow. 

Ashes simply vanishes. One moment they’re there, and the next they’re gone. Tim comes running to Brian in what is most likely the early hours of the morning, asking if he’s seen Ashes. Brian says that he hasn’t, and Tim explains that he’s been sleeping in their room since Jonny, and when he woke up today they weren’t there and he can’t find them. Aurora can’t locate them either, and Brian feels a deep dread settle in him at this. Not Ashes too. 

Raphaella finds the note in her lab, scribbled in the quartermaster’s looping handwriting, resting beside her time travel research. It says, quite simply: I wanted to say goodbye. No one has to ask to know who they meant. 

There’s hope, for a while, that Ashes might show up again. Raph tentatively explains that her research wasn’t complete, and the experimental portal she built is faulty, but maybe it did take Ashes where they wanted to go, and maybe they can find their way back. Brian doesn’t say anything, but he knows they won’t. He sees what’s happening, and it breaks his heart. But at the same time it brings him relief. Finally. 

Raphaella blames herself for Ashes’ disappearance. She never admits it, but Brian can tell. She shuts down her time travel experiments and barely enters the lab these days. Brian sticks close to her, doing his best to cheer her up despite how miserable he himself is feeling. 

They’re sitting in the observation deck, staring out into the stars. She has her head on his shoulder, his arm around her. He’s humming quietly, the melody of Lost in the Cosmos slipping through his lips without his realization. She asks him if he’s ready to go. He turns his head to rest his chin atop her hair before admitting that he doesn’t think he is. He wants to, he really does, he’s so tired, but he doesn’t think he can leave the others behind. She tells him not to wait too long, she doesn’t want him to be lonely when he goes. He doesn’t tell her that he thinks he was always meant to die alone. 

He asks her if she’s ready. She replies that she’s afraid, but she feels as though she’s seen everything there is to see in this universe, discovered all the beautiful things there are to discover. He asks her what about that black hole she’s always wanted to explore? She pauses, and he can tell from the newfound light in her eyes that she has an idea, and that he’s about to lose her. He tells her he hopes she finds something new and exciting on the other side. She kisses both of his cheeks and his forehead, and thanks him for being her favorite beautiful thing that she’s discovered. 

He never sees her again. 

When Tim comes to him and asks him to set a course for one very specific planet, Brian knows exactly what’s happening. He’s been expecting this for a while, ever since Ashes. He sets the course without hesitation, taking them to the planet that’s built the largest gunship the universes will ever see. Tim strides through Aurora’s halls, announcing that he’s going on a rampage, and it is going to be glorious, even better than his first. He’s glowing with a light Brian has never seen in him before, a freedom, a casting aside of burdens that he’s carried his entire immortal life. 

Just before he leaves, Tim looks back at the crew, blows them each a kiss, and salutes them. They all gather on the bridge, watching him as he marches toward the gunship. There’s silence for about ten minutes, then a crackle of noise as the comms system of the gunship links up with Aurora. All that can be heard at first are the whirr of the engines and the echoes of gunfire as the ship lifts off and sets out on its rampage. And then Tim starts singing. 

It’s a war song, a battle cry, but it’s also a love song. A love song for a family, a home, peppered throughout by bursts of gleeful laughter. It echoes through Aurora, filling the space that has felt emptier and emptier lately, and the hearts of those who remain. Brian can hear the phantom Jonny that lives in the back of his mind laughing as well, cheering the gunner on with triumphant fire in his voice. That’s my Tim. 

Brian hears Marius let out a quiet, tearful gasp, and feels Ivy’s hands on his shoulders. He leans back into her as the Toy Soldier asks if Tim’s wearing his seatbelt. Brian tells it that he’s probably not, but it shouldn’t be concerned. He’ll be fine. 

As the song swells, Brian begins to sing along. Until it cuts out, and nothing can be heard but the sound of an explosion. 

Ivy decides to retire for a while, go spend time in a library. Brian, Marius, and TS check on her often, dropping by to see how she’s doing. They sit together and drink tea (those of them who can drink) while Ivy tells them about all the interesting books she’s found. They always walk away with stacks of aging manuscripts that are nearly impossible to read, but they can’t say no to Ivy. Brian and Marius read them out loud to each other, putting on the most pretentious scholar voices they can and purposefully mispronouncing half the big words. It’s nice to laugh, these days, when most of the time it feels like they’re just waiting with bated breath for one of them to drop dead. 

And then one time they go to check on Ivy, and find her library burnt to the ground. They search for her all over, until they find a surviving employee of the building who tells them that she stayed behind to try to save the books, and it’s highly unlikely she made it out. 

It’s how she would have wanted to go, Marius says, and Brian agrees. She wouldn’t have accepted anything other than dying amongst the books she loved so much. Brian says a quiet goodbye over the ruins, then leaves her behind. 

Marius leaves for a while, after that. He says he needs a moment to wander and think, figure out where to go from here. He promises that he’ll be back. 

Will you? Brian asks him, completely serious. Marius pulls him into a tight hug and promises that he will, he’s not going to leave for good without saying goodbye. He’ll fight the universe himself if he has to. And Brian believes him.

Brian and the Toy Soldier spend their time playing cards, painting murals on the walls, taking care of the fading starship as best they can. They can’t cook anymore, as there is no one left to cook for, and neither of them eat. 

Marius does come back, as he promised. Brian finds him standing outside the brig, where they’ve trapped all the octokittens after their taste for human flesh developed from a mild interest to a frenzy. Brian’s tried to feed them when he can, but there… hasn’t been much human flesh in stock on the ship since Jonny died, and Aurora’s so worn down now that it’s hard to take her anywhere. 

Marius grins at Brian, faintly. Told you I’d be back. 

Brian asks him what he’s going to do now, and he says that he thought he’d check on the kittens. I don’t want them to be lonely. 

Brian nods, and takes his hand, linking their metal fingers together and squeezing gently. Then he lets him go. 

When the octokittens are finished, all that remains is a single metal arm. Brian picks it up carefully, twisting off his own and replacing it. Now he’ll have a piece of those he loves with him, for however much longer he lasts. 

It’s not long after that the Toy Soldier suggests trying to write a new song. They haven’t played since Tim’s death, and the practice room lies covered in a layer of dust, the instruments of those they’ve lost untouched. Brian trails his fingers over everything, imagining the others there with him. 

Sitting at his drums feels wrong, without Jonny warming up in the background by blowing into his harmonica as aggressively as possible and screaming at the rest of them to ‘get in your places fuckers there are tales to be told.”

They decide to start with a song they’ve done before, just to warm up and see what they can do with just the two of them. It goes smoothly in the beginning, until Brian misses a beat. 

He stops playing. He’s never missed a beat before. He can’t miss a beat. It’s wired into him. There’s only one thing this can mean.

The Toy Soldier asks him if he’s alright. He asks it if it’s scared of dying alone. It tells him it was never alive to begin with. He nods, then rises, going to it and kissing its forehead. He tells it to take care of itself, and it tells him to say hi to the others for it. He promises he will. He doesn’t want to leave it alone, but it insists that if it’s time, it’s time. 

He stops just outside the practice room and leans his forehead against Aurora’s walls to say goodbye. She’s faded, after millenia of damages and rebuilds and the crew wearing her out with their shenanigans, but she’s still there. He apologizes for all the hurt they’ve caused her, and thanks her for being there for him every step of the way. She fondly tells him to get on with it, that he’s waited too long already. 

He’s thought about this, about how he wants to go. He’s considered the way the others went out, the fire and glory and violence that shuffled them off this immortal coil. Each of them went in a way that fit them, that felt right for their end. The only thing that feels right for him is to end it the way it began. Whence he came and where he would die. 

As he makes his way toward the airlock, he starts to sing. 

There was a man both good and true…

Was he ever good? He thinks he tried to be. He thinks he might have been, once. He can’t remember.

All alone and a-lowly… 

He’s always been alone, he remembers that. He’s had people at different times throughout his many lives, but they’ve all left. He always ends up alone. 

He continues singing as he throws himself out of the airlock, into that familiar abyss. He doesn’t breath anymore, so this time he stays conscious much longer as the cold tries its damnedest to seep through the metal and into his systems. He keeps singing, telling his story to the void that will claim him, letting it know that he’s not afraid of it. 

He wonders if he’s going to hell. He hasn’t thought about it in so long, the idea almost seems funny to him now. He doesn’t think either heaven or hell is the right place for a Mechanism. Maybe they’ll get their own place, somewhere only for them. He likes the idea of that. He thinks he hears them calling to him, their voices welcoming, telling him they missed him and they’ve been waiting. He hears other voices, too, ones he almost recognizes, ones he’s forgotten. I’m coming, he reassures them, as he feels his heartbeat slow, slower, slower.

This time, it stops.

He dies alone, in the end.

Lost in the cosmos lonely.