Chapter Text
Nastya runs a hand down one of Aurora’s metal walls, smiling. It’s slightly cold to the touch, humming and buzzing with machinery, as familiar as the ticking of her own heart.
She ignores the trails of blood her fingers leave behind - Jonny will surely reprimand her about hygiene later, but Aurora doesn’t mind, and Nastya herself quite enjoys the bright splash of red. Pressing a kiss to her lover, she pushes herself up off the floor and straightens her belts.
As much as she enjoyed the Moon War, she missed her girlfriend; missed these small moments between them, uninterrupted by waves of bullets and blood.
Speaking of interruptions, she hears Jonny’s footsteps before she sees him. The prim tap-tap-tap of his shoes as he walks the metal corridor, making his way towards her through the hallway, rather than the usual vents.
He rounds the corner, and pushes his glasses up his nose when he sees her.
“Nastya,” he says, eyeing the smears of blood on the wall. “There you are. Your new arrival is giving us a few… Problems.”
“Mhm. Not surprising.” She grins, pressing her cheek into the Aurora’s panels and rubbing her thumb in circles against the surface. Jonny pulls a face of disgust at the blatant display of affection.
“He tried to stab Soldier in the throat. Pretty stupid idea, if you ask me.”
“He always was violent,” Nastya shrugs. “Only got worse after Tim died.”
A flicker of confusion passes across Jonny’s face at that, before he shrugs it off.
“Speaking of violence, how was the Great Lunar War?” Something strange happens in the middle of his sentence, his Cyberian accent slipping into something closer to Nastya’s own New Texan.
“You mean the Moon War?”
“Yeah, that.”
“It was good. Lots’a blood and death. You seem confused, though.” Nastya laughs, disguising her worry as she pushes herself off the wall and balances on her own two feet. Jonny frowns.
“Things just feel… a bit off, right now.”
This time, it’s Nastya’s turn to shrug. “Must be the new crew member getting to you. Been a while since anyone joined us.” She turns to leave, walking towards the sound of gunshots and screaming - pained or amused, she doesn’t know.
“Maybe.” Jonny says, and she looks behind her for a moment to see him staring at the bloodstain on the wall with an unreadable expression. She ignores it, and continues on her way.
When Bertie’s eyes snap open, it is to a metal man staring down at him, and the memory of Tim’s face, dead and lifeless, burned into his mind.
With a strangled scream - which is more of a sob, really, if he thinks about it - he lunges forward, up and out of the bed, clawing at the thing’s hollow throat. There is a table next to him as he pins it down, and he reaches up to scrabble around for something to use as a weapon - there .
A scalpel, small and thin, but it is sharp and it will do the job he needs it to.
Bertie digs it into the bronze plating around the thing’s throat, prying and twisting and digging, until one pops free and he can see the colourful wires inside. He pushes the scalpel down, down, down, towards the bits of colourful plastic, and there is no blood, of course there isn’t, it doesn’t have blood, not like Tim did before he -
No, don’t think about it, don’t think about the bullet, the blood, the crimson red hole in his throat, don’t don’t don’t -
A hand clasps around his wrist before he can slice through the wires. It is cold and solid, made of the same shining bronze as the metal man’s throat. Bertie looks down at it absently, noting the lack of warm, bright blood on his own hands.
The metal man smiles up at him, gently pushing him off of its torso. It stands, and lifts him with it, his wrist still held tight by its hands.
“Well I’ll Say, Old Chap, You Do Seem Upset. Would You Like Some Tea, Perhaps?” A familiar voice calls cheerily from behind Bertie, and he whips his head around to see the DrumBot, the strange wooden man he’d fought with during the Moon War. He nearly laughs at the absurdity of it all - a wooden man and a metal man, of course they’d work together - but when he opens his mouth, his tongue feels strange.
Bertie wiggles it around a little, hearing gears click. He feels small metal circles press together and slide over one another, providing just as much flexibility as his old one-
And then he remembers.
The Lunar Kaiser had cut out his tongue.
He’d talked his way into the Kaiser’s throne room, and he’d lost it for all he’d said - “A silver tongue, this one has,” he vaguely remembers hearing Nastya laugh, “Why not make it literal?” - then he’d shot the Kaiser and it all went dark.
He drops the scalpel to the floor, and begins to sob.
Jonny runs his tongue over his teeth as he works, and absentmindedly wonders who filed them down from their shark-like points.
Then he freezes, because that doesn’t make sense. He doesn’t have sharp teeth, he has ordinary Cyberian teeth, blunt apart from the canines. And yet every bone in his body is telling him to bite and tear and rip and rend -
And isn’t that funny?
Jonny has never been as violent as his crewmates; he isn’t against the odd shoot-out, or killing those who damage his ship, but he doesn’t actively yearn for blood. Or, he didn’t, until this morning, when he woke up pumped full of euphoric adrenalin.
No one on board even has sharp teeth, not even Nastya, a rare human from space-creature-riddled New Texas.
So why does he feel like he should?
Where is Nastya? Aurora transmits through the cable plugged into his hip.
Probably dealing with her new recruit, he answers, twisting a screw in her engine, and Aurora’s code recoils slightly from the message. He tries not to feel hurt - today has been weird for him, too, what with… everything, really - but she can clearly sense it anyway.
I apologise, it is just that Nastya is usually the one to do this, she hums comfortingly, and Jonny frowns. That’s odd. Nastya has never repaired the Aurora in all the years she’s known her, despite Jonny trying to teach her how on multiple occasions.
No, she isn’t. Not that I know of, anyway, he answers, and Aurora shudders, sharing his confusion.
I… Yes, that is right. My logs have no record of her repairing me. Something must be wrong with my systems.
I can take a look at them after this. Jonny finishes tightening a set of loose screws, and leans towards some worn-out cogs.
Later, when he checks Aurora’s systems, nothing is wrong, and they both share increasingly absurd theories about what happened, laughing.
That night, when Jonny falls asleep, he dreams of blood and gore, of his own voice laughing in maniacal delight as wars rage, him in the middle of it all. He dreams of songs, of death - several his own - of Nastya with his glasses, and he with her gun, of a familiar face with a set of mechanical eyes.
When he wakes up, he remembers none of it.
Tim feels mud beneath his hands, and a fire behind his eyes - his real eyes - which is odd, because he hasn’t had actual, proper eyes in millenia.
It’s also odd because his last memory is of his own final death, hurtling out of the broken window of a gunship, down into the fires raging below.
It’s weird, and it hurts, and he has no doubt that Jonny is somehow behind this madness, despite his final death happening several centuries before Tim’s.
The area around him is pitch black, and he can hear gunfire in the distance. His stomach growls, he can smell the faint scent of gas in the air, there’s grainy dust all over his clothes, and his shoes are filled with mud.
He’d know this place anywhere, despite his lack of true memories of it.
Somehow, he’s back on the moon.
He stands up, groaning, and hisses at the stab of pain from his stomach. He’s hungry, so he has two options; find the British side and hope they have some rations spare, or find a victim from one of the microwave attacks.
He can hear footsteps running into his tunnel, towards him. Maybe he has more than two options.
After all, does it really matter if his meal is cooked?
-
When Tim is found, hours later, he’s standing over the picked-clean bones of a soldier. The uniform could be British or Lenny, he doesn’t really care, and he doesn’t think the officer who finds him does either.
Her eyebrows raise when she sees him, alive and covered in blood.
“You’re alive.” She sounds mildly impressed.
“Yep.” He answers, rolling his neck and watching the flickering bulb of her lantern. It’s been an immeasurable amount of time since his eyesight was this dull.
“Well, I hate to break it to you son, but Bertie left to talk to the Kaiser weeks ago. Hasn’t come back.”
Right. Bertie. Sometimes he forgets that Bertie was a real person, and not just some character he and Jonny came up with for his song.
“Ah.” He eyes the laser gun holstered at the officer’s hip. “You got any weapons I could have?”
She raises an eyebrow at his lack of reaction, but gestures for him to follow her back down the tunnels, towards the rest of the troops.
Behind her back, a wicked grin carves itself across Tim's face.
This will be entertaining.