Work Text:
In many ways, Brian was the same as he always was.
Clink. Clink. Hiss. The workshop sounded like a steam engine as he made pieces of metal and wire into functions, improvements. His motivations were simple and good-hearted.
In many ways, it would end as it always had.
~~~
It wasn’t a bad world. No worlds were bad per se, but some were definitely worse than others. Or at the very least, less pleasant. This one was not that. Or, it hadn’t seemed like it. Brian had felt a strong need to get away from the other Mechanisms for a while. They had been staying close since Fort Galfridian and … the sun. Which had been more than welcome as far as Brian was concerned. He’d been so alone for so long…
But it had been long enough that the constant company was starting to grate on his nerves a bit, so he told them to drop him off on the next relatively pleasant (“No, not pleasant as in being in a state of constant war, Jonny!”) planet they came across. Brian had also had a sense — not so clear as to be a vision but a strong feeling — that he was meant to be on a nearby planet.
He took one of Aurora’s smaller shuttles. It was roomy enough for him to spread out and do his maintenance, but small enough that it lacked the sense of being wide, open, and alone. It was also small enough to linger above the clouds or in low orbit of the planet, unseen.
Before he left, Nastya came up to him, and the other Mechanisms lurked, pretending to not notice or care or be present.
“So you do not get lost again,” she said.
The device was elegant and complex with swirling wire that he guessed was as functional as it was ornate. A beacon.
When it was time for him to visit the planet’s cities, he left the beacon on his shuttle but brought a smaller device to trigger it if need be. It pays to be prepared. Or rather, it costs to be unprepared.
The planet seemed to have fewer populated areas than he would have thought for one of its size. But the more he looked, the more he could surmise why.
Ruins dotted the planet like a Seurat to make a portrait of destruction long past. A war maybe. Or several. The cities that still had people seemed to be built from salvage that had long since been built up into the new.
Brian easily fixed up one of his coms devices to catch the radio signals of the cities. At appointed times each day, a broadcast would come in:
“Brothers and sisters, siblings, and all! Remember the names! Phone towers. Electric trains. Film. Steam heat. Bioelectric lungs. Once these were the common of the common, but now we see! We understand them to be the most holy! Kerosene lamps! Cybernetic eyes! Electric toasters! These, brothers and sisters, siblings, and all, technology is a great feat of humanity! It is the holiest of holies. But we have seen what happens when the holy is left in the hands of the unholy. We have seen the destruction. Its remnants are what we are built upon for our beautiful cities! Brothers and sisters, siblings, and all, we must remember that, if the wires of the world are to remain untangled, they must be cared for by the most holy among us! Worship at the altars of your lightbulbs! Rejoice at the magic of your stoves! Leave the most complex to the most knowledgeable. Do not tempt fate by thinking you have power over the most powerful!”
The primary religion, or at least the one followed by those on the radio, was something called the Order of the Wire, which worshiped technology. That was interesting, he supposed. Especially considering he was literally technology himself.
But showing up and being seen as some kind of angel was so showy, and he wasn’t really in the mood for—
An alarm started beeping at the same time a shaking sound started from the engine. Brian quickly took a steady hand to the helm and tried to see what the issue was. More errors began to pop up, so he decided to move quickly and plugged into the shuttle directly to sort the data. This, as it turned out, was a mistake.
Error messages began flooding in not just from the shuttle but from Brian’s own systems. He scrambled to reach out and unplug himself, but his movement functions failed, his hand frozen inches from the plug as the shuttle plummeted out of the sky and towards the rust-covered ground.
~~~
Mori enjoyed the long walk from town to home. He knew of others who preferred to take Order contracts to get access to trams or took less-than-legal cars to get around. He had no disrespect for them, but he simply liked the walk. He could clear his head as well as find little bits of scrap to use. Oh, many considered scavenging to be a bad practice, but Mori never saw it that way. These were pieces of the past, and it felt respectful to give them new life. Besides, people needed access to what he provided, regardless of their supposed holiness.
All that said, he rarely found anything big. The dust storms could bring new detritus in or away regularly enough, but there hadn’t been one in a while, and he made this walk multiple times a week.
On this day, however, Mori saw a plume of red dust fluttering away from something shining with metal. He ran to meet it, hair flapping back in his haste. He found a large structure with an oblong shape and odd glass windows. He felt around the structure carefully — it was hot but not burning — until he found a latch. Crawling in, he found something so beautiful he thought it to be an angel. A humanoid figure made entirely from brass. It wore dark fabric in neat cuts around its chest, and a wool hat was to its side. It was completely still.
Now, a high Order official would warn to leave such magnificent machinery alone, that even to be near it could be an insult to it. Trying to repair it would be like playing at being a god.
But Mori was no high Order official, and, staring at its shimmering metalwork, he had to believe it had chosen him to help it. Nothing, he felt, could do it more honor than its repair.
He dragged it as gently as he could from the structure, untangling wires and finespun hair from fixtures. Adjusting its weight — it was terribly heavy, but he was so enticed that he hardly noticed — upon his back, he trekked back home to his workshop.
There, he laid the machine out on his cot and began to study what had happened to it. It was frozen in place, but gentle prodding showed perfect articulated joints. The detail was beyond anything in imagination. Silicon fingertips had finely inscribed prints. The smooth facsimile of the face had wire like hair growing a short beard that smelled of motor oil. Beneath the fine fabric clothing was just as finished work. The more he studied, the more sure he was that it would be beyond criminal to leave it unrepaired. After time out of the sun, its metal shell had cooled, but there was a faint warmth coming from the chest. Mori could almost imagine he heard a heartbeat coming from it.
He found a switch at the nape of the machine’s neck, but switching it changed nothing he could find, so he returned it to its starting position.
Eventually, he found panels that opened to rusted gears and dented metal, punctured oil reserves and frayed wires. With immense gentleness and as much respect as he could provide, Mori hammered straight metal and cleaned away rust, refilled oil and straightened wires. Through it all, he thought he heard a heartbeat, but he was sure it was his own quickened one he heard.
All his work done, he found a salvaged generator to hopefully recharge the machine, and eventually fell asleep next to the cot.
When he woke, it was gone.
~~~
Ever since the sun, Brian’s mechanism had been working strangely. He presumed it was so many things melting before they had time to heal, so it had begun to heal wrong. None of the crew knew about it except maybe Aurora because, contrary to popular belief, he was fully capable of lying when it meant he got his fucking privacy.
This in mind, when the shuttle went down, he half expected to be trapped, unable to move within it, even after his mechanism revived him. But when he awoke, there were only minor messages in his mind.
[Unknown power source connected. Disconnect?]
[Y/N]
[Yes]
[Repairs complete. Run at full power?]
[Y/N]
[Yes]
Opening his eyes revealed not the burn out shell of the shuttle nor the blinding bright of the sun but a small room. There was a workspace littered with scraps of metal and half-built machines that seemed somehow familiar. At the base of the little bed was a sleeping man with tanned skin and long curly hair in a muddy brown, lighter in some places with threads of silver. Brian’s first impulse was that something must have been done to him, but he felt physically better than he had since before Fort Galfridian. Deciding to wait on a full diagnostic, he moved quietly out of the workshop, neither killing nor waking the sleeping man.
He found his way back to the damaged shuttle and found it was damaged but not beyond repair (Aurora was damn hardy down to the last shuttle). The only thing that was properly damaged was the beacon. It hadn’t been sealed away since he hadn’t been planning to crash. It would need fixing.
A self-diagnostic revealed what he felt; he had been repaired very well, and his mechanism must have covered the rest.
Hmm. He should say thank you.
But Brian had no interest in being a prophet or a god or anything much exciting this time around. He found the trunk of supplies he brought was unbroken. (This was thanks to an incident where Ivy lost several books in a shuttle crash and insisted on improving the trunk quality until they were nearly foolproof for everyone involved). He pulled out the thick false skin he wore as a disguise sometimes. It would be a little tight or uncomfortable for a long time, but it was literally a second skin when he needed one.
~~~
The morning after the machine was repaired was almost like any other morning. Almost. Most mornings, Mori would not find little bits of wire that seemed to grow in length before his eyes nor gears that shed rust and sharpened their own edges. He thought first to tell a high Order official or to tell anybody . But he felt the selfish want to keep this magic visit to himself. He carefully hid the gleaming, living bits of metal in a drawer just in case prying eyes came to visit, locked his experience in his heart, and set about the day’s work. A woman from the city had come to him for a mechanical leg since she had lost her own to an illness. He was comparing her measurements to the salvage he had available when there was a sharp knock at the door.
Not expecting anyone, he warily opened the door and gave a skeptical look to the pale man in sharp clothes standing there. “Yes?”
“I’m here to work,” the stranger said with a smile. He had eyes that looked golden.
Mori gave him a second look over. “I’m not hiring. I can’t pay.”
The smile stayed. It looked sincere. “Oh, don’t worry about that. I’ve got money, food, whatever I need.” He patted a bag. “I’d be happy to share if you let me help out.”
There was something about this stranger that sparked an interest, Mori couldn’t quite place a finger on it. But he gestured for him to come in. “What should I call you, stranger?”
“Brian.”
~~~
Mori’s workshop was wonderful. At first, he had planned simply to show up, do some work, and move on. But Brian realized what had seemed so familiar about Mori’s work. He was making something very much like mechanisms. Not the mechanisms he and the crew had, but the ones he made once upon a time. Not quite immortality but something like rejuvenation. Something that blurred the line between machine and magic. He and Mori began to work together on projects, mostly prosthetics and adaptive devices, some cybernetics. Mori explained to him that it was all somewhat under the table, but not outright illegal. The only machinery that would go that far would be the making of automatons or robots. It gave Brian a private chuckle and reassured him in his choice of disguise. If everyone stopped making things out of fear of playing god, nothing would get made at all.
He wanted to stay there a while longer, he decided. In that case, he might need a few things.
~~~
“Brothers and sisters! Siblings and all! You must remember the names! Plugs! Naquadah generators! Refrigeration!
These are the wires that tie us together. But be wary. Do not trust machines that feign humanity. True machinery has no reason to stoop so low. The only false devil machine that would do so is the hidden organic! People masquerading as machine! It is an empty disguise. They will never truly be the pure spinning gears of magic and wire.”
~~~
Mori watched, not for the first time, the door. Brian had been with him a while now, and, true to his word, had not asked for food or money. He had joined Mori at the worktable and had the touch. He could create nearly anything with nimble fingers. Fingers that, when touched, were oddly stiff. All of Brian, Mori had found, was oddly stiff. He was no fool, Brian had hardly hidden the replacements he had.
They had been sitting next to each other, shoulders together when Mori first properly noticed the shine of his teeth. He took Brian’s jaw, neither rough or gentle, and tilted it slightly in the light.
“Brass?” he asked.
Brian nodded slightly, careful not to pull away.
Mori watched him for another second, studying the curves of his face, before he leaned in and kissed him. His tongue was made of metal too.
His eyes, his mouth, tongue, and teeth. He had bits of metal in him, beneath the skin too. He moved parts of himself like separate functions. His head would turn, then his chest. It was mesmerizing to watch.
And he sang. He found a broken bit of cord and strung it into an instrument Mori had never seen, plucking out a song about distant stars.
The only request Brian made was for his own workshop. He would make parts for Mori to use in commissions, he said, and he also needed the privacy.
“Don’t follow me in, yeah?”
“Promise me.”
So Mori watched the door. He heard soft humming on the other side and saw faint movement in the cracks of the wood. Curiosity burned him.
~~~
Brian had nearly forgotten how good it felt to build. It came naturally to him, even years out of practice. He needed nanobots, but that was no issue. He had them in spades. Behind the door of his private workshop, he plucked strands of brass hair, the regenerative properties of his mechanism in even the finest lock. He’d add them carefully to this part or that of an arm or leg or lung to integrate them into the metal. Infect, perhaps, but it would keep the part from falling into disrepair.
He’d also nearly forgotten the pleasure of a clever mortal. Mori reminded him somehow of his brief meeting of a very mortal Marius. A sparkle. A feeling of the future, a future with this mortal impossibly in it.
But the future had been quiet since his arrival to the planet. Maybe he just wanted the future to include Mori in it. His clever constructions and gentle repairs. His eye-rolling explanations of the Order of the Wire’s more religious followers’ strict spurning of the very thing they worshiped. His version of worship in use and repair and recreation.
~~~
Time passed, and hours at the shared worktable moved to hours shared elsewhere. On walks. On beds.
Brass teeth and soft tongue. Stiff beneath the skin and soft voices.
Perhaps years passed. Perhaps a beacon was repaired but disused. Perhaps, perhaps.
The private workshop stayed private. Until it did not.
~~~
The longer time went by, the more Brian’s private time in his workshop began to wear at him. Mori loved him. That was a foolish thing for him to do. He sat without his skin as he added bits of himself to a false lung.
~~~
Mori noticed Brian withdraw whenever he spent time alone. He had been so respectful up to then. He wanted to stay as respectful, but he needed to know. He needed to check.
It was supposed to help.
But when he pushed open the cracked wood of the door, he found, not his lover but the angel.
Bright brass. Skin like fabric draped over a bench. But he could not see only the beauty of the machine as he recalled seeing years before. He saw the rust stains in the metal. He saw the slats of the face making false expressions one panel at a time. A cheek moved before the corner of a mouth, eyebrows stuttering into place. Horror, maybe, or guilt molded across the angel’s face before smoothing into cool anger.
“Why did you come here.” It was Brian’s voice.
Mori did not always put stock into the teachings of the Order, but he knew that the machine had no reason to stoop to humanity. He stepped forward, silent, static only knew what his face looked like, and pressed a hand to the angel’s chest. The fluttering heartbeat was no machine. He withdrew.
“I told you not to look.”
“I know. I wanted to help.” He stared at the magnificent machinery in front of him. A man once, maybe, who had replaced all of himself to become more. Perhaps. Or a corrupted machine. It wasn’t right. His voice was small. “You lied to me.”
Brian looked pained, a fact which fed the uncanniness. “I did. But I only wanted to help you. Mori—”
Mori took a step back, stopped, walked forward. “You’re not an angel. You’re…” He didn’t understand how or why something like him could exist. “My love, you’re a demon.”
He put his hand against Brian’s jaw, not rough or gentle, and kissed him.
Then he left. As he walked out, he couldn’t bare to face him. He said without looking, “You need to leave here.”
~~~
Brian was furious. He was betrayed and devastated and angry. He did as Mori said and gathered his things together, leaving the finished lung. He stopped at the shuttle, long ago repaired, and mechanically put it all away. Then he made for the city.
The slaughter of the voice on the radio was just enough of a release that he knew he would not return to hurt Mori. He loved him, after all.
No future indeed. He returned to the stars.
~~~
Mori watched the door, ajar and empty. He didn’t know if he should regret, but he did. Turning away from the door, he came to the worktable and pulled out those bits of metal from when he first found … Brian, he supposed. The demon, he thought. The angel. They were just as shining as they had been that first day, just as alive. But they were just pieces of metal, after all.
He could not bring himself to close the drawer.
~~~
Bzzt. Clang. Bzzt. Clang.
Gunpowder Tim glared in the direction of the door. Aurora had started sliding it open and shut aggressively, knowing full well that she could outlast him in patience.
Bzzt. Clang. The door slid open, banging against the inner wall loudly. Bzzt. Clang. It slid back closed. Bzzt—
“Fine!” He swung himself out of bed, dressed in his jacket and nothing else. “I’m coming, I’m coming.”
The door stopped in the open position, and the lights in the hallway flickered on. Tim rolled his eyes and followed her into the hall. She led him insistently to the helm and spun the pilot’s chair until he sat in it.
That seemed to be it, and Tim figured that Aurora had just gotten lonely or had a cool galaxy that she wanted to show him. Normally, she would turn to Nastya for that sort of thing, but she was off with Jonny terrorizing some station, and the rest of the crew was off “helping” Raphaella with some planet wide study she was trying out. Tim had elected to stay with Aurora and get everyone out of his hair for a bit.
He tried getting up after a while, but Aurora activated the emergency staps and pinned him to the chair, so he stayed.
He chatted with her a little, but she was distracted. Soon enough, he found why. A little alert went off that a crew beacon was going off nearby. Aurora loosened the straps, and Tim checked whose it was: Drumbot Brian’s. They’d planned to grab him after a decade (a mere blip to them, really), so it was strange to see the beacon go off only a few years after they dropped him off.
Tim took the wheel, and the ship sped off in the direction of the beacon. They’d been more than a little late on picking up Brian last time, so it wouldn’t kill them to be prompt for once, especially since Aurora seemed worried about it. As they approached, Tim was surprised to see that Brian wasn’t on the planet anymore, but had gone a little ways into space. If the shuttle was damaged, that would explain it. Nastya’d be helpful in that case. It was always such a pain when the shuttles needed fixing. Finicky bastards.
When they were close enough, Tim slowed down the ship and turned on the radio. “Brian? Everything in, eh, working order?”
Aurora added some static, which would surely be more meaningful to the Drumbot than it was to him.
Brian took a minute to respond. “Everything’s fine.”
Tim waited a minute to see if there was anything else. There wasn’t. “Grand. I’ll open the docking bay for you when we’re close enough.”
Another pause followed by a curt, “Confirmed.”
It wasn’t like any of them except maybe the Toy Soldier to be so formal, which meant something was off. Maybe Brian was pissed off. Had a decade passed without anyone checking? It wasn’t impossible, but it might be surprising.
When Brian docked, Tim didn’t bother putting on pants, just strode over to the docking bay to see how everything was. Brian was stiffly climbing out of the shuttle and yanking with him a box full of something that clanged. What was surprising was that Brian had his skin on. He never wore it on the ship. Hell, he rarely wore it off the ship.
“Aurora SpTaxi Service at your service,” he said.
Brian turned his head in his direction, but just nodded. “Thanks.” and stalked off, stiff as anything.
Yeah, he must have been pissed.
~~~
Brian watched as Gunpowder Tim slowly made his way through “not my problem” to “is this my problem” to “Aurora will make me come check on you under punishment of nighttime electrocution” to finally coming to his door and plunking down to glare at him. The intricate gears of his eyes whirred with the force of the glare, but he didn’t say anything, just pulled out a gun and started cleaning it without looking. After all, his peripheral vision must have been better than the average mortal’s direct vision.
Brian ignored him for as long as he could, but the whirring, above all else, was distracting. How was it that such intricate pieces of machinery were so commonplace to him? Had he really forgotten how unusual it all was? How horrifying? Tim just had the eyes, and he was unnerving to mortals often. Brian barely had a shred of flesh on him. Brian had taken to wearing the skin around the ship.
“Either you start talking, or I start shooting. I don’t know who’s worse, you or the Aurora.” Gunpowder leveled the gun at him. “What happened with you?”
In the end, getting Tim to leave him alone would be worth needing to talk about things. “I met someone. I was close to someone.”
Tim raised an eyebrow. There were a handful of metal filaments in with the hair. He didn’t say anything and didn’t look sympathetic, which made it easier somehow.
“I don’t know what I expected. That he’d turn out mechanized in a few centuries? That he’d, what? Have completely gotten over whatever he believed? I hadn’t even done anything bad! Well, not until after. Do you know how rare that is? I was truly content to just help out, just be with him. I only lied because I thought it would work out.” Brian dismissed options to quicken his breathing or shake, and it left him giving an impassioned speech in monotone, oddly still. “He thought I was an angel.”
“Proved him wrong, eh?”
“Yeah. Apparently, there’s nothing more wrong to him than a human masquerading as a machine. Nothing more incomprehensible than a machine masquerading as human. I don’t even know which I am.”
If this had been one of the video games Ivy had saved in the Archive, there would have been a bubble popping up reading: “Ends: Feel Better. Means: Painful and Terrible Truth Telling!” But it was no game. Brian could only do what felt right in the moment. He had no idea if he would ever feel better.
“Do you want to…” Gunpowder Tim mimed firing the gun at a target.
“No.”
“Did you already—”
“No. He doesn’t— He’s just confused and mortal, and that is all he will ever be.” He shook his head. “But we were all that, weren’t we? Once?”
Tim frowned a little. “I certainly remember being confused. I think I still am sometimes. Life’s a mess. Death’s messier. Us, we’re as messy as they come.”
“I thought he could be like us, for a minute. I saw a —” he spit the word, “future.”
Brian wasn’t looking, but he could feel the eyes on him. There was the faint clink that was unmistakably Tim fiddling with his dog tags.
“I still think about him, you know. I’ve lived countless lives without him, and I don’t remember a lot of the time before, but I still think about him.” Tim’s voice had the roughness that he had instead of moist eyes. “He could have been with me in that pod, could’ve been here now, seeing all of this. But he wasn’t. ‘He did what young men at war are prone to do and died.’” The quote held a bitterness.
“The song’s not enough.”
“Sometimes, I really hate that fucking song. But I’m glad it’s there. I might not remember all the time. I can’t picture his face anymore, but I remember him being excited when I started learning the guitar, and I remember him when we sing that.”
“My — This person, he’s not even dead. What would I be mourning for?”
“Whatever you’re mourning for, you’ve been doing it all over the ship since you got back.” A hint of a grin came into Tim’s voice. “Besides, we specialize in music instead of therapy. We don’t even have to tell anyone it was you. Tell them it was some passing bird you met.”
~~~
Gunpowder Tim could not ever be described as a gentle person. He was only as gentle as a bullet that kills quickly. And rarely that. But he could take all the gentleness he didn’t have and put it into a song. Most of the crew were like that too.
Brian would be described as the most gentle of any of them. He tried to help people once in a while. He let himself care once in a while. So as the pair of them came up with a song for Brian’s person far away, the empty ship echoed with all of Tim’s absent comfort and all of Brian’s hurt.
And perhaps it helped. He hoped it did, though he’d never say it. Brian did stop wearing the skin around the ship, which was good enough for now.