Chapter Text
It’s horrible when it happens.
The first thing Torse thinks is that if Maxwell hadn’t said anything about it, all that time ago, their first time, it might not have happened.
The second thing he thinks is that he wishes he had been there.
Would Max remember speaking it into being? Would anything have changed if Torse had thrown himself in the way?
These are hopeless, despairing thoughts. They cannot change that it happened. That it’s horrible.
--
Torse couldn’t accompany the Zephyr II on its mission to Gath. In the first place, it was clandestine, their goal to discretely sabotage the largest Widow’s Breath factory in Eisengeist. Try though Monty might, he could not convince the corrupt legislature to entirely outlaw the production of the foul substance, so he had called upon the Zephyr to take matters into their own hands. Torse, while adept at mechanical sabotage, was too large and unwieldy to pass unnoticed by Gathie constabulary.
There were important matters to attend in Zern anyway. Foundries had begun in recent years to kick back to life, repairing the injured, rebuilding the lost. Once the most immediate salvage was managed, the question of how best to direct resources became a constant debate. As with Zinnia Gathborn and her ilk on Zood, there were those on Zern who believed that humans had no place in the rebuilding effort, or at the very least that they should not be given access to powerful equipment, lest they use it for ill.
Torse was disgusted by this bigotry. He used every power at his disposal to argue that if Zern was ever to maintain capacity for organic life again (beyond the springs of rust-grass and saplings which had begun coating the shores of its rivers like dust), that organic lives must help shape it. To his dismay, his opinion was often discounted because of the soft-skinned man who shared his bed. In the eyes of his detractors, Torse could no longer be objective in matters of Zernian autonomy.
So it was for the secrecy of their mission as well as the honor of the Wind Riders and all his human allies that he stayed engaged in committee debate for long days while the Zephyr passed through the biangle and off on its course.
When the biangle was due to appear again and the Zephyr to return, Torse waited on Zoodian shores, visor pointed skyward, anticipating the sight of a bloodied but triumphant airship.
The window of the biangle passed and the ship made no appearance.
It was not unheard of for such missions to run long. There would be another appearance of the biangle in two weeks, the true clock on the wall of his lodging read.
So Torse took the shuttle homeward to Zern and waited again. By day he continued his campaign to argue for the rights of organic lifeforms on his home planet, the need for stable housing for them, for reliable food sources, for their right to work alongside Zernians in the rebuilding effort. At night he returned to his home, the bed he shared part of the year with Maxwell, and waited.
Most Zernian abodes more closely resemble a tinker’s workshop than a human house. There is no need of a bed, a kitchen, a bathroom. Resources were still severely rationed by the Zernian Council, prioritized for the most crucial rebuilding efforts, so Torse had cobbled the human comforts of his home from scrap. It was not beautiful, but it was functional. He was most proud of their bed; mattress springs individually salvaged from deep within a foundry’s junk heap, canvas fabric sewn together by hand (a skill he learned from Ludmila, after a fashion). The mattress itself only covered half the bed’s steel frame, leaving the other half a bare rack with slots for Torse’s spikes to pass through.
He had no need to sleep, but when Max was away, he did sometimes lay there with hand outstretched, remembering the soothing sound of his sleeping breath.
--
Now at last the biangle is due to reappear. Torse returns to Zood and stands with gaze cloudward once more at the docks on the edge of Tabira City. This time, he is not disappointed. The Zephyr II slides into the sky with all the glory he has always known it to have. His heart sings and, despite himself, his crystal twitches in his chest. It is a conditioned response; Maxwell is almost always overeager to reunite after a long journey away. Torse yearns for him when they are apart but finds masturbating to almost always be subpar compared to the experience of being pulled and pushed by Maxwell’s fingers.
When the ship finally docks amid the blazing bustle of the desert city, the gangplank does not descend right away. It takes hours. Torse does not mind to wait, standing still in purpose among the commotion of a bustling morning city dock, but it is curious. Usually the crew is discharged for leave and the ship scheduled for refuel and maintenance as soon as possible. Usually by now he can hear Maxwell’s voice calling out orders, hoarse from the long trip but words tripping quickly out of him, ready to be done with it all himself.
The orders are called, but it’s not Maxwell who gives them. It’s the unmistakeable lilt of Vanellope Chapman. When the ramp descends off the ship, it is not the requisitioned crew who toddle off it, it’s just Van.
He hasn’t seen her for years. Tazgw’agwa’s magic appears to give her a preternatural youth, hair refusing to gray and skin looking dewy to the point of moisture.
She looks right at him, like she knew he would be there.
All these things, the delay in arrival, the delay in disembarkment, Van’s presence on the ship, should have clued him in. Perhaps years of happiness have lulled him into a false sense of security. It’s only when Van looks at him, weary even through a close-mouthed smile, that he knows something is deeply wrong.
“Van Chapman,” he asks, feeling himself wheedle and tense, “Where is Maxwell?”
--
Torse cannot feel anything but guilt. He should have been there. He should never have prioritized banal politicking over Maxwell’s safety. When he knew they were dealing with dangerous machinery, he should have insisted on coming along.
The guilt spirals. Just moments ago he was thinking about Max’s hands, his fingers, as sexual objects. He has never found his sexual desire for Maxwell something to be ashamed of, but just now it is repugnant to him that he could be lusting when Maxwell is…
“He’s not ready to see you yet,” Van tells him as they sit on the deck. “It’s not personal, you understand.”
Torse nods. He does, and he doesn’t. Loss of limb is not the same for humans as for Zernians. For Torse, it would be a minor inconvenience but ultimately surmountable. Maxwell will never be the same again.
The crew is somber as they unload cargo and begin repairs. The ship was relatively unscathed in the encounter—which was, all told, successful, if not without cost.
“For the first few weeks, you can still feel it. Like actually feel it like it’s there, like you could reach out and touch things. ‘Cept you can’t. And then there’s the pain. Phantom pain they call it, but it’s more real than any phantom I’ve come across.”
Torse’s eyes scan the deck. Maxwell must be in his quarters. Perhaps he’s laying flat and staring at the ceiling. Is he wearing a shirt? His jacket—the sleeve deflated on one side? Is he bringing his other arm over to scratch a bicep that no longer exists?
“Torse,” Van pulls his attention back. “You gotta know this stuff, mate. Because when he needs you, he’s really gonna need you.”
Torse tries to keep his mind on Van’s kind eyes. The tentacle undulating at her side draws his focus.
“Vanellope,” Torse says. If he could cry, he would. “I do not know what to do.”
Her eyebrows dip in sympathy and she hugs him. It’s vaguely slimy and very strong.
“No one does,” she says. “No one ever does.”
--
Torse waits on the deck of the ship until nightfall. He is greeted by Marya, Olethra, Ludmila, Freyja. The greetings are perfunctory and strange. The grim mood that hangs over everyone is obvious. None of the rest of them were injured, not in any lasting way.
Everyone else avoids the subject, likely instructed to do so by Van or Maxwell himself. Freyja is, in a way Torse finds endearing in this moment, quite direct.
“I failed our thane,” she falters, “I should have sacrificed myself in his place.”
“I am sure you did the best you could,” Torse replies. “At least you were there.”
Her eyes are drawn to something over Torse’s shoulder. He can tell what it is by the way she stiffens, shoulders back.
Torse turns to see Maxwell emerging from below decks. There are many changes to note at once. The jacket sleeve gently folded and pinned against his shoulder is no surprise. The gritted expression is to be expected. The burns and cuts across his cheeks not so different from its usual landscape. His right hand bears no glove, which is not unusual. It became more of an occasional statement than a necessary custom in recent years.
But the hair. Maxwell had worn it long since they became entangled four years ago. It was shorn now, closer to the length it had been when they met.
As Vanellope explained it, the team managed to enter the factory secretly enough, but once Ludmila started planting corrosive rustbots in the engines which powered the factory, an alarm sounded and awoke two massive security mechs, taller than Torse by a house. Maxwell, ever undaunted, stuck his arm shoulder-deep in the mouth of one of the beasts to plant a bomb inside it. The bomb was well planted, as was the arm, which came off with a snap of jagged steel teeth. Dazed and in pain, and with the rest of the crew fending off the other bot or finishing the mechanical sabotage, he had to drag himself one-armed away from the explosion, not quite managing to come away unsinged.
His hair was a minor loss, comparatively. The cut they had given him to salvage it was good. Clean, gentlemanly.
There are only a handful of crew still on the deck at this hour, sun long set and crickets chirping in the distance. All of them stop at the sight of him.
He sighs. “As you were,” he calls out, more fragile than commanding.
He approaches Torse and Freyja. Even his gait is different, without the swing of his arms to guide him.
“Torse,” he says plainly, “May I borrow you for a moment?”
It’s the first time in years that Maxwell hasn’t greeted him with his whole body, arms wrapped around him, face buried in his ribcage.
“Of course,” is all Torse can reply.
Max brings him to the bow of the ship, far from the rest of the crew. Tabira city sparkles and roars in the evening beyond.
“How fared negotiations with the Zernian People’s Committee?” he asks, hand behind his back, staring out at the night sky.
It is not unlike Maxwell to defer discussions of his own person like this.
“Well enough,” Torse answers. He tries not to look at Max too closely, attempting to match his energy and point his body outward as well. “They were convinced to agree to allow one foundry to hire human employees on a limited trial basis. Now comes the task of acquiring suitable sustenance and lodging for them before they arrive.”
Maxwell nods, curt and short. “Good. I am glad you were successful.”
There is not much to say to that. You too would come off hollow and wretched.
Obviously Max has something more to say. It takes a few breaths to bring him to it.
“Torse, I have missed you.”
He lets it hang in the air, have its own moment.
“But I am not myself. I need… time.”
He sighs and shakes his head.
“Chapman says I need time. It seems to me that no amount of time will heal this particular wound.”
Such a bitterness in his voice Torse hasn’t heard since Maxwell killed his father.
“So,” he clears his throat, still looking out and away, “I will be sleeping alone for the time being. Until something changes.”
Torse has borne many injustices and hurts in his life. It feels petty and childish to say that this feels worse than all of them. Usually Maxwell would have him up against a wall by now, breathing every desperate want he had saved up into Torse’s neck. This reservation, the way he was holding himself apart and rigid, was more akin to an earlier version of him, unavailable to all whimsy. Torse tried to mirror that too, to remember that Maxwell’s touch was a privilege, not a right.
“I’m not breaking up with you, to be clear,” Max blurts.
Breaking up with you. What a phrase. To be broken. To be fixed. To be together. To be apart. Torse is not keen on human relationship descriptors, but this one has particular salience here.
“I understand,” Torse finally replies. “May I stay on the ship? To be nearby, in the event that—”
“Yes,” Maxwell finally turns to him. It’s the first time a soft look has seeped into his weary expression. “Please stay. I’ll arrange a bunk for you. Most of the contract crew will be returning home, so there should be plenty of space.”
Torse nods, and apart from the spooling of rope and sounds of the world beyond, there is silence.
Maxwell’s face suddenly grows frustrated. He looks to his empty sleeve and back to Torse.
“It’s the damnest thing. I feel like I’m holding your hand.”
Torse reaches to his left hand, but Max pulls away.
“No, sorry,” he says, “I was just explaining how it feels. I don’t think I can—”
“That’s alright,” Torse interrupts. “It’s perfectly alright. I will be here, Maxwell. However you wish me to be.”
Maxwell blinks. He doesn’t seem to know what to say. They part without embracing. Torse thinks it’s just as well. A one-armed hug would probably only make the grief feel worse.
--
It is two weeks later that the door to Torse’s room slams open in the dead of night. Maxwell stands there, his ragged hair matted on one side, in nothing but his nightshirt. Though it is a cool night, he looks sweaty and breathes heavy.
The intervening days have been awkward at best. With the nonessential crew dismissed, the Zephyr on standby until, presumably, Max recovers enough to resume his post as bosun, (privately, Marya told Torse that no one had made him step down. He opted to do it himself, believing he was not fit for duty) the remaining bridge crew were aimless, performing lackadaisical repairs, getting sadly drunk and crooning mournful tunes, wandering the city streets at night. Maxwell seldom joined them, except when Van dragged him out during mealtimes. There were moments of jocularity, slim smiles that could be dragged out of everyone. And then Max would drop his fork or knock a glass off the table, and the grim cloud would return.
He and Torse have barely touched, aside from a graze here or there, Max learning how to lead with his left. Alone time, even without touching, would doubtless entail too much intimacy, open up a well of grief that Maxwell was clearly barely keeping in.
But here stands Maxwell Gotch now, as vulnerable as one can get.
He clears his throat. “May I come in?”
“My quarters are always open to you,” Torse replies. He is tempted to add an endearment, love or my heart, but leaves it off, a holding of emotional space should Maxwell need it.
He steps in and closes the door. Torse is grateful he does not have eyes so that his gaze cannot be seen to linger on the empty sleeve hanging at Max’s left side.
He stands there only for a second, takes a breath.
“I’m not ready to have sex with you.”
Torse understood that. He is not sure why it is being reiterated.
Maxwell approaches and sits next to him, stares straight ahead as he speaks. Torse has taken to sitting on the mattress as he might sit on the bed at home. It is better than hitting his head on the rafters.
“But I find myself… Frustrated.”
Torse wasn’t going to mention the visible bulge distending the shirt fabric. Again, he understood that distance emotional and physical was requested for the foreseeable future.
“It just doesn’t feel the same with the left.”
Maxwell looks tormented with every word he utters. A blistering blush across his cheeks, moustache twitching in a grimace.
The left. The forever lonesome half of a once great pair of weapons. Torse wonders if he could have appreciated it more, held it more often, given special attention to it while he could. Every part of Maxwell is fleeting in its mortal way, but in his strength he gives the illusion that he is invulnerable. Torse had not expected him to lose any part of himself, certainly not something so vital.
“I thought maybe if I could see you, be near you—”
His hand shoves against his groin, angry and brief, nothing pleasant. He can barely look at Torse, holding fast to that scowl on his lip.
“Hmm,” he groans under his palm, and suddenly releases and stands. “No, I’m sorry. It wouldn’t be fair.”
Torse catches his wrist before he storms off, pulls him around to standing between his thighs.
“I am not concerned with fairness at this juncture,” Torse hums, running a thumb from the center of Max’s rib cage down his stomach.
“Torse—” Max arrests his hand by the palm, its knives catching distance between them. “I don’t have capacity to be your lover now. I barely… It is purely physiological, you understand.”
It is almost insulting that Max feels the need to explain himself so. Torse well knows by now that Maxwell is plagued by an insatiable libido. A fighter aroused by fighting; a part-time Zernian resident with a paraphilia for metal men; a dominant with a full time profession in ordering around swarthy sailors. There have been many late-night occasions when Maxwell fucks into Torse’s hip in half-sleep, barely aware of himself yet still chasing release.
Doesn’t Maxwell know that Torse is always happy to be of service? That he has nearly reprogrammed himself for the express purpose?
Torse flexes his fingers, carrying his hand and Max’s down further still. “You may power me down, if you wish. My body is yours even when I do not wield it.”
They’ve never done that. The thought is surprisingly thrilling, though Torse knows he won’t remember what happens when his heart is removed. Would Maxwell clean him up first, leaving no trace of what occurred, or would he wake him immediately, cum splattered on his chest, crystal still twined around his ribs and throbbing?
He has found no good way to truly jerk off human genitals without his knives digging in somewhere. Max bears some permanent scars on both thighs from repeated injury under Torse’s grip.
Just now, Torse cradles him through his shirt, blades resting against his hip, inactive, inert.
Maxwell furrows his brow. “No, I—” he appears to go through a cycle of thoughts, considering the requst, and finally lands in a stilted voice on “Can we not talk? And just, get it over with?”
Torse nods, though there is so much he wishes to say. Don’t you remember I’ve done this before? When you come back from the fighting pits too torqued up to even kiss me; to keep you warm in frigid desert nights; the third or fourth time of marathon nights when you were still shaking with desire but could no longer speak?
It’s different now, of course. Maxwell closes his eyes, shoves Torse’s hand under his nightshirt, and grips his shoulder tight with his left (and only) hand.
Just get it over with. Torse knows what that means, how Max touches himself in the shower or nights when the Zephyr is over capacity and he has but a moment alone. Fast and light, as light as Torse can manage with his iron fingers. He is already hard, the conversation and shame no doubt adding to the arousal, and begins to leak, coating Torse’s worn plating and making it slide against him.
More things he could say, but won’t. I could do this forever, you know. I was forged in Zernian furnaces for everlasting endurance. I neither rest nor tire. I need nothing, no reciprocity, no softness, no words. Just to please you.
Max’s eyes are tightly shut, head turned into his shoulder, expression caught between pain and pleasure. Torse understands why it hurts (aside from the knives which brush against his thighs, scraping against the scar tissue in a way he is surely used to—it’s not that kind of pain); as intense and demanding as he can be, Maxwell is always attentive. He usually lavishes touch and attention on Torse’s every inch, nimble hands always working in concert. All he can do now is hold himself upright, squeeze tight against the rim of his chest piece.
Torse is surprised by how his own body floods, warm iron-red crystal liquid pooling in his gut. It’s not that Maxwell’s injury itself is appealing (if anything, Torse is horrified at himself for being able to be aroused when Max is clearly hurting, clearly disgusted with his body), it’s just being this instrument of relief. Torse had forgotten that romance was once alien to him—this is a clear mechanical process. Efficient. It feels good for his body to have a singular, uncomplicated purpose again.
Breaths heave and catch, and shameful though he might feel Maxwell cannot help but buck into Torse’s hand, leaking so much that fat drops of hot clear fluid fall onto Torse’s thighs below. The actual process of this is quite familiar, but the way Max moves is not. Get it over with, he had said. He’s moving like that, jerky, unconscious, almost devoid of lust altogether.
It will be over in seconds, surely. Another day, Torse might slow down to disobey, to prolong, to watch the flush creep along his neck a second longer. But what happens now is not for Torse’s enjoyment. He would have to take care of that after, alone, to satiate the well-trained organ in his chest, so long as he could bear the idea that he was getting off on something Max would rather not have shared.
He stumbles when it happens. Torse can tell he meant to brace but has not perfected his balance yet, falling into Torse’s shoulder and narrowly avoiding knocking their heads together. It’s almost a hug. But Maxwell yanks away too fast for that.
“Sorry,” he says, stepping back, smoothing his nightshirt over himself. It’s stained in an obvious way, but the halls are quiet and dead at this hour, so there should be no one to see it.
“No apologies necessary,” Torse replies.
They are both acutely aware of Torse’s crystal. He can’t hide how it snakes across the front of him and into every crevice, practically glowing with heat.
Max looks as if he wants to speak, but doesn’t. He smoothes his hair back, fingers stopping at his neck. The gesture used to be running his fingers through tumbling locks, now burned away on the same factory floor where lies his burnt and rotting arm.
Instead, he awkwardly nods and turns to go.
But hanging on the door, he stops.
“It helps,” he says over his shoulder.
Torse can see his jaw rotate, preparing itself for a sentence he seems not quite ready to say.
“To know that when I get the new one, it’ll feel like you.”
The half-glance he tosses at Torse is wet and conflicted, mouth quirking into a repressed sob. He goes without waiting for a reply.
And Torse—
He’s not proud of it. Maybe he should be holding the grief of that teary look, of Max’s shame, of his uneasy balance, above all else.
But he can’t help how tight the veins grip him.
When I get the new one.
They hadn’t talked about that yet. It was way too soon. Torse wasn’t even sure if he would want a replacement arm—Van had counseled him not to have any expectations of how Maxwell would heal and he was trying that, he really was, even though the thought that he would—that they could share, swap parts in the Zernian custom, was something that Max himself had brought up, and Torse with his infallible memory could never forget.
It'll feel like you.
Torse feels like an animal, rubbing himself into shape, using fingers covered with Maxwell’s cum to fuck himself. He might have had trouble imagining things once, dreaming up possibilities that he hadn’t personally witnessed. He had well learned that skill now. Visions of Max with an arm of iron, touching himself, never able to touch himself without thinking of the first iron hand he felt there.
Torse hasn’t coupled with another Zernian—well, for a long period there weren’t other sentient, available Zernians—in centuries. He hadn’t missed it, particularly. But then again he hadn’t had the option, really, and there was no physical pleasure to gain from it before his prosthesis. But there is something, some attraction he hadn’t realized, for his own kind. What would it be like to grip another hand of iron? To feel unyielding pistons thrusting in his soft center? It would be a new language of touch to learn for both of them.
It'll feel like you.
Torse goes faster, hand gripping his sculpted erection like Max likes, doesn’t even have to ask for anymore because Torse knows him exactly, down to the second. He stares up at the ceiling, the plain wood boards in the lampglow above him, while his mind supplies ever more images of the Maxwell who might be; would there be blades? Attachments? Would it be iron or steel or brass? Would it be cold at night and hot under the light of the sun? What would it feel like when Max fucked him with it?
It'll feel like you.
The veins of crystal tip just to the edge of cracking and Torse lets go, lets the tension snap and the substance wind back up into its resting place. He never breaks himself all the way. He saves that for Max.