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Maxwell Gotch, age nine, sees a red string tied to his hand. It leads nowhere, out into the sky before disappearing out of sight.
His grandfather's favorite employee/investment jokes it must mean his true love is the sky. They'll make an adventurer out of him yet!
His grandfather laughs just a bit too pointedly and dismisses such superstitious nonsense. A Gotch's first love will always be the ground. Whoever that string leads to will hardly be found on an adventure.
"Hardly," nine year old Maxwell agrees, jutting his chin out imperiously.
When he looks down again the string is gone.
-
Maxwell Gotch, age fourteen, sees a red string tied to his hand. It leads to the storm brewing on the horizon, off the coast of their vacation estate.
"It means you're gonna die soon," Hatwell tells him with a mean grin. "Means you're gonna drown here."
"Am not," Maxwell growls.
"You're cursed, Max, everyone knows that!"
"Shut up!" Maxwell jumps at him, knocking them both to the ground.
Samwell pulls them apart before anyone can get hurt. "You can't let him get to you," he tells Maxwell when he pulls him to the side.
Easy for you to say, Maxwell thinks sourly. Samwell has never had any trouble with his soulmate, he's already gone and married Isabelle.
"Lots of people have flickering strings, Max, you're not cursed," Samwell continues. "He just wants to rile you up."
"He's the worst," Maxwell complains.
"Everyone's the worst when they're seventeen. Let's get inside, I don't like the way the wind's picking up.”
Maxwell follows Samwell inside and goes to find Wealwell. His brother is practicing partnered stances with a suit of armor.
By the time the storm blows over the string has disappeared again.
-
Maxwell Gotch, age seventeen, attends his grandfather's funeral. He doesn't say anything except when Samwell asks if he's alright. Instead he hovers somewhere near the back of the room, not quite hearing much of anything.
Lord Kensington Cosgrove Mordecestershire speaks to Longspot in private about business. Professor Comfrey MacLeod has the decency to at least wait until after the ceremony.
Maxwell leaves early.
-
Maxwell Gotch, age twenty nine, sees a coffee stained deed and departs on the adventure of a lifetime.
As they pass into Zood he sees a red string on his hand that doesn't go away. Wealwell nudges him in a sort of your curse has lifted wink wink manner. It's endearing and annoying. His brother has never bothered with the whole string thing, citing it as silly superstition the same way lots of people who didn't have one did.
"If anything I'm soulmates with Standing," he says cheerfully.
"That's ridiculous."
"Now you're getting it!"
Maxwell gives him a friendly shove. Predictably it doesn't dent his brother's stance at all.
He takes a deep breath, staring out at the distance, as if he can find the end of the string just by hoping. Is it just hope anymore? Someone's at the end of it, right?
He'll find them. Eventually.
-
Torse does not seem to care that the string connected them. Maxwell looks down at the now nonexistent knot that's haunted him his entire life and finds the anticlimax disappointing.
"I think being avoided means not to try cornering someone, ja?" Freyja Ildisdottir, Senior Associate, has found the tallest stack of crates on board and claimed them as a throne. She seems very happy to look down at Maxwell and judge him for his life choices.
"Only if he has a good reason to avoid me," Maxwell grumbles. "Which he doesn't."
"I think that's maybe not for you to decide," Freyja says with a shrug that almost, but not quite, sends her toppling from her precarious seating. She doesn't seem to connect the dots between gesturing emphatically and her own balance being threatened. "I could duel him if you want!"
Maxwell sighs. "Books always end with 'they finally met and it made everything perfect!'," he complains. "No one tells you what to do after that."
"Oh, ja, and story books are perfect instruction manuals, everyone knows that."
Maxwell frowns at her. "You weren't this snippy during the interview."
"I have job security now! And dental." Freyja grins down at him, leaning far enough forward Maxwell steps to the side not to be landed on in the almost inevitable fallout. "I can say whatever I want."
"That's not what job security means."
"Are you going to fire me?"
Maxwell just sighs again.
-
Torse disanimates in Katur. Then gets possessed. Then gets almost ripped to shreds by the Straka. Then remains unconscious while they build an entirely new vehicle.
I always considered you a friend.
It's a long afternoon.
Maxwell greets an awoken Torse with a handshake. Torse goes for a forehead tap. It seems significant for someone who doesn't have a mouth to kiss, but maybe that's just reading too much into these things.
"Don't ever leave me alone again," Torse says, incredibly earnestly.
The words Maxwell, my friend still rattle in his head. Maxwell manages a smile.
"Trust me, I won't."
-
The strings mean a lot of different things depending on who's answering. True love is the classic. Nonromantic is also an option. Whoever the sun lion thinks completes you is a new one. Comfrey claims that if she had the time and uninterrupted focus she could mathematically calculate them. The most cryptic so far is just whoever has the most impact on your life, which when coupled with a gun in hand and Sylvio's general tone sounds incredibly like a threat.
He doesn't know what Zernians believe, but they seem… practical. Buttoned up. Not likely to buy into that true love nonsense.
He doesn't know what he believes. For most of his life it's been nothing but a so called curse, and even for non-flickering strings it's barely more than an old tradition. If one's soulmate is also egregiously rich it makes arranged marriages all the easier- if not, it's ignored in favor of business connections. To say Maxwell thinks it's some kind of sign from above is wrong. He never thought it would lead to much other than some form of closure. He just wanted to know.
Maybe there's something to be said about it, because Torse is- he's just-
(Maxwell leaves the ungentlemanly, rowdy thoughts deep in the back of his mind as to better focus on the topics at hand)
He hopes. Maybe, sort of. That Torse might have similar inclinations. It doesn't have to be because of magic or destiny, it could just be them.
…After the whole Zood is under direct threat thing. When they have time to properly establish the whole thing.
That would be nice.
-
Maxwell's entire fuckass family dies. All the annoying ones, at least. So do all the evil automata, and the Queen who isn't Ludmila. So does Comfrey. The last one isn't like the others, but she seemed content with going out with a bang, and who is he to judge.
Torse avoids most of the celebration happening in Zumhara. Maxwell avoids it with him.
"I did not think I would live to see Zern freed," Torse says.
"It's crazy how everything came together like that," Maxwell agrees. "Lucky the Biangle worked so well."
"That as well, I suppose." Though Torse's faceplate can't move, he looks contemplative. "To be more clear, I didn't think I would reawaken after the Queen's…" He trails off.
"Control," Maxwell says firmly. "It wasn't you."
"…Right. Yes. That." Torse pauses, looking out at the city. "Well. I would like to… thank you. For believing in me."
"What are friends for?" Maxwell asks. He holds out a hand, burying the immediate sting under layers of gentlemanly practice.
Torse takes his hand. Instead of shaking it, he carefully laces their fingers together. "Friends," he says slowly. "Is that what you wish us to be?"
Maxwell coughs into his free hand, ducking his head to hide the heat in his face. It's almost entirely without success. "…Not- exactly," he manages. "Is that- what you…?"
"Not exactly," Torse echoes. He ever so cautiously lifts their hands, pressing the back of Maxwell's to his faceplate in a fucking hot imitation of a gentleman's kiss. "If you're amenable to being something else."
Maxwell has never agreed to something so enthusiastically in his life.
~~~
Torse, one of the first of his generation, sees a red string tied around his hand. It leads without deviation or faltering to the Queen's palace.
His creators say nothing about it to him. He hears them speak to others regardless. A terrible omen. He will fall to the Queen's hand- a fate that brings ruin upon all around him.
Directly he is told only the story of the lion and the crow. Of a white string that connected them, until the crow became curious and followed it all the way to the lion's waiting jaws.
Torse understands perfectly.
Every attempt to snap the string fails.
-
Torse, the last of his kind, sees a red string tied to his hand. It leads to the great crow of ruin.
He pays it no mind, but to avoid aerial surveillance. There are always Naughtomata to destroy and scraps to recover and lands to traverse. To dwell on his future will only lead to the despair needed to fulfill it.
For the sake of his people's legacy, one now only he can keep alive, he must forge onward.
The Straka flies low, wingtips brushing the tips of jagged mountains. It crosses the plains in an eerily systematic manner. Searching.
Torse remains unmoving, though the lull in movement is hardly restful.
The Straka completes its search. Another working forge is destroyed, one of the last of its kind. Nothing left will be salvageable.
Torse charts a new course.
-
Torse, associate and debtor to Comfrey MacLeod, doesn't quite understand.
Sylvio Dufrense, an incredibly sinister man for reasons he also doesn't understand, explains in simple terms. To Gathians, the story of fate is romantic.
"It does bring up a good question of predestination," is all Onion St. Clay offers. He apparently finds it nothing more than a mildly intriguing thought exercise.
"We're all actors upon life's great stage," Dufresne adds, sweeping his arms out in a theatrical fashion that would be harmless if not for the knife currently in hand. "Who's to say any of us are truly the ones writing the script?"
"Your play is some type of thriller," St. Clay tells him, not unfondly.
"Oh, I excel at thrilling stories." It would be less ominous if not for his tone, which implies he's the inciting incident for every murder mystery he comes across.
Torse exits the conversation quietly. The only comfort he has is that the person at the end of his string lies in Gath. Chances are they'll never meet, that even if they do arrive in Zood it will be centuries before or after he's existed.
A small reassurance.
-
Maxwell Gotch is a good man. It would be much easier if he weren't.
"I think you're being stupid about this whole thing," Freyja informs Torse. She's the only other person on this ship that doesn't have a Gathie sort of view of it, but he should have known Zoodians are- well. Zoodish about these things. Even Zoodians who choose money and industry over resource sharing.
"You've mentioned a time or two."
"Master Gotch is annoyed you're avoiding him." Freyja gives him a stern look on behalf of her direct report.
"I am not- You know how these things go," Torse says, exasperated. "No one else here has heard of the crow or the lion."
"Oh. Ja. My favorite part was always the bird getting eaten."
"Then you should understand why I'm not speaking to him!" Torse snaps.
Freyja shrugs, unfazed. "I think you're being stupid," she repeats. "It's one of those… eh… circles, ja? You are told, 'oh, this man will be important in your life', so you seek him out and make him important. It's… what is the word-"
"Self-fulfilling?"
"A waste of time," she answers herself. "I am very successful and did not need any sort of magic string to make it so!"
"You have not stopped staring at the Captain Dawderdale for longer than thirty seconds since we arrived," Torse tells her.
Freyja glares up at him. "What does that have to do with anything?!"
Torse very carefully weighs his options here. "Absolutely nothing," he decides. "I don't know why I brought it up."
"That's what I thought," she mutters.
-
Katur is under siege. Torse tears cultists to pieces but it's not enough. Not nearly enough. Mordecestershire and the Eyeless Hand dim three of the beacons leaving the nameless beast- and all of Zern- rattling the bars of its cage to escape and wreak havoc unto Zood.
Torse looks at the golden engine. He looks at Maxwell Gotch. There are a thousand things to say and no time at all to say them.
I would have liked to spend a lifetime with you, he thinks. No matter how it would have ended.
Torse, for the first time feeling the weight of his destiny lift from his shoulders, places his heart in the engine.
-
Torse wakes up. It's not necessarily a bad thing.
Then the Queen takes over his head.
He watches himself attack Marya. Watches himself destroy his gold heart and escape to the Straka's waiting grasp.
Watches Maxwell arrive.
So perhaps his choices meant nothing at all. Perhaps they meant everything, and this was still always going to happen.
A terrible omen. A self-fulfilling one.
He should not have avoided Maxwell, some free part of his mind thinks bitterly. If this is to be the end, if his important choices and attempts at bucking free the chains binding him mean nothing, he wishes to have become closer with the brilliant, unwhimsical, delightfully buttoned up man destined to make it so.
The jagged mountains of Zern grow ever closer. He should have liked to show Maxwell his homeland. Liked to see it saved. Liked to spend a lifetime with such a wonderful man.
To die to his hand will be an acceptable second choice.
-
Torse. Wakes up. Now this just feels like a mockery.
So much happens after that. Truly, so much. He nearly pops off after just the sheer amount of what happens after that.
Oh. And his fellow Aganti Zernai are still alive. That's. So much. Too much to process while they're all actively getting ready to kill (save?) the Queen of Zern.
Maxwell is the one to summon them, to light the beacons. Key Boy. Torse will happily strike down any who dare tease him.
Skies above, Maxwell Gotch. Torse doesn't know what to think. He scarcely dares to hope for the future. He's never thought he could have one. But if he does… if he can look past tomorrow into the skies of eternity…
Maxwell asks at some point if he'll be alright, going into the battle against the Queen and all. Torse doesn't have to stop to think about the answer.
"My mind is my own," he vows.
And then, underneath that pledge, lies one infinitely more terrifying, yet more thrilling, than anything he has ever known.
My future is my own.
-
"You thought I would what?" Maxwell stares at him, incredulous.
"Kill me," Torse repeats with a sort of shrug. The action is awkward, but he doesn't think Maxwell will be able to interpret the more subtle clicks and frequencies used by Zernians. "That's typically how the stories about fate go."
"And you believed I would- myths aren't instruction manuals!" Maxwell says, aggrieved. "I wouldn't ever kill you!"
"I've since learned that," Torse reassures him, taking his hand gently. The gentleman fister still goes impressively red, even after establishing the whole relationship thing. "…If you were to take my life, though, I would find it an honor."
Maxwell sighs. "No, thanks. What is it that has my friends want to die honorably for my sake…?" he mutters to himself.
"Just a thought. I've lived with the impression you would my entire life."
"Of course you have." Maxwell sighs again. "Well. That's not going to happen, so I suppose we'll just have to live with each other instead."
Torse can't help but be delighted to agree.