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It feels less violent than it should, ripping his friend’s heart out.
It should be meaty and bloodwet, something he needs to sink his fingers into and yank, something furious, something brutal. The action is too methodic. Too big to feel so small, as simple as unscrewing a lightbulb. A few quick twists, and the light goes out. Maxwell holds the iron heart in his gloved hand for a moment, expecting it to pulse and beat. It’s stone-silent. Still.
It is warm, like the hood of a car that’s been running.
Driven by some impulse and feeling as though he’s still split in too many pieces, barely adjusted to leaving Gath for Zood and now stranded in Zern, Maxwell tugs off one glove with his teeth to feel the heart against his bare palm. Warm. Heavy. The way Torse’s hand felt in his.
There’s something scratched into the surface of the heart, and for a moment Maxwell wonders if it’s damaged, if that’s what went wrong. He squints at it, trying to read it in the murky light. So beats a worthy heart. XOXO, Marya
He hopes nobody sees him furiously wiping at his eyes. He hopes nobody sees him press the heart against his breastbone for a moment.
He especially hopes nobody sees him bring the lump of iron to his lips and press a firm kiss against it before he tucks it away in an inside pocket of his jacket.
Torse’s first night on the Zephyr, Max found him creaking around the captain’s quarters in what appeared to be mounting distress.
It was hard to read on his face, for obvious reasons, but Maxwell has plenty of practice reading other people’s body language. Knowing when another man is about to strike, or about to collapse. He was nervous, unsettled, jerking and juddering around the room and peering into drawers.
Maxwell lurked in the doorway, trying to decide if he should go get Marya or Van. This was, after all, an unknown entity rummaging through their stuff. “Looting the place already?” he said, projecting as much forced casualness as he could muster.
Torse seemed genuinely startled. Then genuinely embarrassed. More weird body language to read off a big cast-iron construct. “Apologies,” he intoned, voice mechanical like an old radio broadcast. (Maxwell liked it— warm like wax cylinder recordings, shiny and metallic like the marks his grandfather used to conjure from behind Maxwell’s ear.) “Professor MacLeod used to keep… that is, she was able to provide me with— hm. I have not needed to explain myself to new people in some time. I am…”
“Rusty?” Maxwell suggested, and then half-grimaced, half-grinned because he couldn’t tell whether the pun was a good idea or not.
But Torse liked it. He let out a sort of rumble that was almost a laugh. “Rusty. Yes,” he said. “My problem is this, Maxwell— my joints are stiff from my time spent disanimated, and Comfrey used to keep some spare lubricant with her personal effects so that I might remain in peak condition. I cannot seem to find—”
“Oh!” Maxwell said, remembering all at once the image of Monty, slathered to the gills in lube, wearing socks on his hands and entreating Crewmember Diaz to open all the doors on the Zephyr for him because his hands were too slippery. “I, um. I think we found it at Ramansu Power Station? But, um. Monty used all of it.”
“Oh.” Torse loomed in the captain’s quarters. Instinct told Maxwell to watch his feet to determine his next move, but it was clear Torse hadn’t decided on a next move. “Well,” he said.
And something made Max blurt out, “I have oil.”
“What?”
“I have oil,” he said again, reaching for the bottle in his pocket. “For… well, I use it in case I need to oil up before a fight. I mean, not that I fight, but I… it’s a, it’s a gentleman’s sport. It might help with your, ah, joints?” He held it out like an offering.
Torse looked at it but didn’t reach for it. “What is the purpose of this?” he asked. “For you?”
The way it makes the light bounce off the hard angles of his body, accentuating the muscle he’s put so much effort into. The feel of it on his skin, drawing a clean line between the seventh Gotch son and The Max. One stays oiled up, the other doesn’t. Easy. Lines don’t get crossed. His identities remain like Zood and Zern, twisted together but separate. Identifiable.
“It makes it easier to slip out of a hold,” he said to Torse.
Torse looked from the bottle of oil to Maxwell’s face. “What would be expected of me in repayment for your assistance in oiling my components?”
Maxwell nearly choked on spit. Assistance? He was kind of planning to hand over the oil and sprint away. But now that would feel rude. “Nothing,” he said. “You’re on the crew now, right? This is… what allies do for each other.” Maxwell would jump overboard before letting anybody on this ship touch his bare skin. “Here…” He held out a hand, watching Torse hesitate before extending one arm.
And then Maxwell was holding the crook of Torse’s elbow, staring down at the moving pieces that would chafe and scrape against each other. He poured some oil into his hand and carefully, like he was defusing a bomb, started to work it into the crevices beneath Torse’s exoplating.
Metal smells a lot like blood. There was something comfortable about Torse’s hulking presence, the easy way Max’s slick fingers could slip into each nook and cranny to distribute the oil, the smell of iron close enough to copper, close enough to sweat on barbells, blood on vinyl mats.
“So you’re a rebel?” he said, the need for nervous chatter increasing with every foray into Torse’s cast-iron frame, oiling up his wrists, his knees, his neck. “Me too, sort of. I’m rebelling against my father.”
“What did he ask of you?” Torse said, drawing slightly closer as Maxwell oiled the place beneath his mechanical chin, slicking up the hinge there.
“Oh, just…” Maxwell tried to focus on anything other than the easy way his hand slipped around the coils and couplings at Torse’s waist. “Real estate. He wanted me to follow him into the lackluster world of property dealings instead of funding eccentric adventurers like Comfrey.”
“Hm,” Torse said. “The Queen of Zern asked that I relinquish my free will, enslave my brethren and bring rust and ruin to my homeland.”
“Okay, you win.”
Something… softened, then, in Torse. It was strange how a creature with no distinguishable moving facial features could be so expressive. Maybe Maxwell was just projecting things onto him.
“It is not a competition, Maxwell,” he said. “I am glad you do not share this pain.”
Maxwell stared up at him. Swallowed. Said, “I’m going to do your feet now,” and he was kneeling down to oil up the joints at Torse’s digitigrade ankles when Pappy walked in.
Max froze.
Pappy played two more notes on his harmonica and took it out of his mouth, surveying the scene. Then he said, “Hell’re you two doin’ in me an’ Marya and Olethra’s room?”
There had been a viewing at Cadswitch Gotch’s funeral. The body, still and lifeless in a box, completely unreckonable with the man who used to scoop Maxwell up in his arms and lift him high before depositing him back safely on solid ground. Maxwell had not cried, but he had looked into the casket at the empty body and felt the ground shift and buck beneath his feet.
He feels like that now, staring down at the heap of warped metal that is Torse. His chest plating is torn open from the hit he took, and without any light behind his “eyes” he looks wrong. Diminished. Maxwell bundles him up and straps him to his back. The Queen wants him? She’s not getting him without going through The Max.
Maxwell glances over to see Van hefting Bert onto her back. She gives him a grim smile, looks at Torse’s empty shell hanging off his back and gives him an approximation of a thumbs-up with one of her tentacle tendrils.
“I told you I’d come to Zern with you,” Maxwell whispers, feeling foolish, as he reaches into the inside pocket of his jacket and clutches Torse’s heart. He has to believe that the crew can restore Torse and make him himself again. It’s all that will keep him going.
With the weight of his friend against his back, he begins to run.