Chapter Text
Torse comes to surrounded by bodies.
It is what he expected, when he felt the Queen’s control begin to devour him. He remembers his body, moving without his consent, acting without his input, stabbing through the golden heart, fleeing from Marya. He knew what it meant to be taken over. He knew all that the Queen would take from him, now that she had him under her dreaded thumb once more.
He should have used the fleeting moment of clarity to wrench his iron heart from his chest, to neutralize the threat he posed to his Wind Riders.
Instead, stupidly, foolishly, he used it on pointless words. “I always considered you a friend, Maxwell.”
Again and again, he made the wrong choices until choice was robbed from him entirely.
So to wake surrounded by broken bodies, horrifying as it is, is not a surprise.
The surprise is that they are Zernian, not Gathie.
Suspended on hooks, the remains of other automata hang above his head, wrecked and partially disassembled like so many broken dolls.
This is the Amphereon. In Zern.
He’s returned to his homeland at last.
“I have done something terrible,” Torse confesses to the dead.
“Yes,” a voice agrees with him. “But it is over now. Your mind is your own.”
He looks up to see the piercing gazes of two Corrodi.
“Fuck,” Torse growls, scrambling backward in a motion that only plunges him into a pile of discarded limbs, the rusted remains of other Zernai. He cannot be here. This cannot be real. “Get the fuck away from me.” He should be dead. He should be dead and safe from the corrupting, poison influence of the beings who killed his nation.
“Calm yourself,” the second Corrodi says, holding her hands up. “We are not your enemies.”
“I know who my enemies are,” Torse grates out, heart going haywire in his chest. Where is Maxwell? What happened to Marya? He holds a hand in front of himself, blades extended, keeping all his sharpest parts between him and the Corrodi Primarchs. “Whatever you want from me— my submission, or my cooperation— you will not get it.”
The first Primarch shakes his head, a disturbingly human gesture. There has always been something so uncanny about the way the Corrodi attempt to mimic those of flesh and blood— the delicate facial movements, the mannequin-like forms. As if the clockwork and iron and brass of home is not enough for them.
“We aren’t after anything of the sort,” he insists, holding his hands out, palms splayed. “Look, I’m Oxidius. This is Tarniss. We’re— we’re defectors, see? We aren’t fans of the Queen and all she’s done to Zern. We liked our home better before, before all her so-called ‘progress.’ You can agree with all that, surely, can’t you?”
Torse started shaking his head at some point and he isn’t entirely sure how to stop. This can’t be happening. This can’t be real.
“Most of the other Primarchs are still on Her side,” Tarniss explains. “We’re taking a risk here, reaching out to you. Pulling you out of that wreckage.”
“What wreckage?” Torse snarls, knuckle-knives out in front of himself, pushing back further into this corner so no one can attack him from behind. He was taught better than to leave himself vulnerable to attacks. He owes it to the dead to do better.
The Primarch who called himself Oxidius hesitates. “We witnessed an airship going down,” he says. “When Tarniss and I went to investigate, the only living being we found was… well, you.”
“No,” Torse says. “No.” Because it’s too awful. Because he cannot keep enduring this, cannot keep being the sole survivor. This is some mistake, some trick being played upon him. (And didn’t it feel like one, when he first arrived in Zood? When Comfrey MacLeod clapped him on the shoulder and invited him to travel with her rather than keep wandering alone? When she asked him what happened to the rest of his tribe, and his iron heart clicked and clenched in his chest before he finally stuttered out, They died.)
Tarniss is moving toward him, her face eerily mimicking those of flesh, articulated eyebrows drawing upward, shiny steel lips pushed into a pout. Torse has been around humans enough to recognize that the expression she’s going for here is concern. He draws his hands closer to his body. He cannot be touched. She cannot touch him. He needs to protect himself from her and her ilk, from Oxidius, from the Empress of Ruin herself, where is she?
She was in his head moments ago, sending impulses through his wires like he was a remote-control doll. Just another toy for Her Majesty to play with until it breaks.
She made him destroy the golden heart.
Worse, she made him destroy whatever fragile trust Marya and the other Wind Riders had for him. A stranger in an even stranger land, someone sharp and harsh and violent with a brutal history drenched in the sludge of machinery and spatters of spilled oil.
“The others,” he says. “The crew of the ship. They must have— they must have survived, must have walked away from the destruction, left me behind.” Why should it sting? It’s the most reasonable course of action. He betrayed the Wind Riders. They have no reason to believe he would not do it again.
More imitation-human expressions on the faces of the Corrodi Primarchs. They are uncomfortable. They pity him. He wants to shred their shiny bodies to pieces. Oxidius says, “I said you were the only living being, and… I meant it. There were bodies. There were… many bodies.”
What must he have looked like to Maxwell and the others, when first they found him? When he was disanimated and lifeless, unable to cover up his monstrousness with gilded words and polite mannerisms? They found him kneeling in the carnage he’d created, caked in gore.
Did these Primarchs stumble upon an all too similar sight?
(They died, he’d told Comfrey when she asked about his tribe. But he did not tell her the rest. He did not tell her that they were betrayed by someone beloved to them, did not tell her the way the Empress of Ruin took his mind and closed her fist around it. Did not tell her how much his own hands have taken from him. Did not tell her the details about why he craved a heart that could feel something besides rage.)
“They died when the ship crashed to the ground,” Torse says. Begs.
Tarniss looks so very sad on his behalf. “Some of them,” she offers.
“There was a man,” Torse forces himself to ask. “Gathie. Dark hair, a… a mustache. Did he… ? Did you see… ?”
The Primarchs shift uncomfortably.
“When we found you,” Oxidius says finally, “your knives had been plunged through that one’s throat.”
In Zood, Torse learned of oceans, of tides and tidal waves. He finds himself drowning now, sucked beneath the current with no ability to force himself back up. He does not need to breathe, and yet he’s choking.
Looking down, he finds his blades clean of Maxwell’s blood. These Corrodi, they must have cleaned him before reanimating him. It’s too much to fathom, those that he knows to be true evil washing the blood and viscera of innocents from his own hands. It’s like the switch from Zern to Zood, feeling the gravity flipping. This is wrong.
This is all so terribly wrong.
“Tell me,” he pleads, savagely grateful in this moment that everyone who ever loved him is dead and not here to witness him begging at the feet of the Corrodi, “was it fast? Did they die painlessly?”
Tarniss makes that same pitying face again, and Torse wants to tear her nose and lips and eyes from her head. “I don’t know if you Aganti Zernai believe in an afterlife,” she says, dancing delicately around his question, “but the important thing is that all those people… they’re at rest now.”
All those people. Vanellope, so brave, beating all the odds to be the Chapman who didn’t die in the middle of her journey. Daisuke, quick to shoot and even quicker with a word of advice or a piece of wisdom gleaned from his experiences. Montgomery, who saw Zood with the same kind of childlike wonder that allowed him to entrance a generation of children with his stories. Olethra, wide-eyed and curious and always leaping forward heart-first. Marya, unable to share in the delights around her because the one she dreamed of sharing it with had been taken from her.
Freyja and her devotion, Wealwell and his frivolity, Miryam and her aspirations— all gone. Lifelines snipped short.
And Maxwell— brilliant, determined Maxwell, someone around whom Torse felt he could finally confess his vulnerabilities, his bitter, selfish want for adventurers to choose him, to choose his cause, to choose his home to save. Maxwell Gotch, a good sparring partner and a better friend— a best friend, even. His best friend.
He died choking on his own blood, probably still trying to get through to Torse with his final breath.
Oil drips from his faceplate, and Tarniss lurches forward to wipe the drops away. He flinches, but she holds him still, using a piece of fabric to clean away his tears. It’s not an old engineer’s rag, something he or one of his tribemates might have used, but a clean white handkerchief. She dirties it, dabbing at Torse’s face. “It’s okay,” she says, hands too gentle, voice too soft. “It’s over now. We know it wasn’t you. We’ve seen the Queen’s handiwork too many times.”
He judders beneath her hands.
“Why would you wake me?” he asks. “What would be the point?”
“Like we told you,” Oxidius says, “we’re defectors. Rebelling against the Queen. You are Aganti Zernai, are you not? It seems your perspective and your experience would be extremely helpful in our cause.”
Yes. Of course.
Because the fight is never over, and it is all he has now.
Maybe it is heartening, to know that no matter how much sabotage Torse is forced to commit, he cannot kill the rebellion. It is bigger than him, and it will outlive him. (Because of course he does not believe he will see the Queen’s reign end during his lifetime. He is not so self-important and deluded to believe that. Every move he’s ever made has been for the future of Zern, a future he has no intention of seeing. For the children, Comfrey said to him once, when he explained this, and he had to tell her that children stopped being manufactured on Zern a very long time ago.)
Still.
The glow within him flares.
“Helpful,” he repeats, looking from Tarniss to Oxidius. “This is what you ask of me? To provide you with ‘helpful’ information about the ways in which the Aganti Zernai acted? Our methods? Our secrets?”
He growls and tries once again to get away from Tarniss, but he has backed himself into a corner. He has nowhere left to retreat, and she is still holding her handkerchief aloft in case he has any more tears to shed.
“Do you think me a fool?” he says. “You say you’ve seen the error of your ways? What, out of the goodness of your hearts? The Corrodi value so-called ‘progress’ over life, over comfort, over culture. Choosing to rebel against your own Queen is not a decision made lightly. More likely, you reanimated me in an attempt to glean actionable information about the Aganti Zernai. Pointless, I should say, as I am the last of my kind. I will give you nothing you can use.”
“We are on your side,” Oxidius insists. “Is it truly so hard for you to believe that, in your absence, your homeland has gotten better, not worse?”
It’s not better. It is not worse. It is always the same.
“We worked tirelessly for the Empress of Ruin,” Tarniss says. “And then, little by little, we realized what we were working toward, as we saw it all die— the sky overcome with smog, the ground barren and cold. We watched our world die, and we knew that we were helping to make it that way.”
Of course. It was the loss of beautiful and soft things— the loss of the view— that radicalized these Corrodi. Not the countless automata turned into undead soldiers. Not the hearts piled behind the Queen’s throne. Torse feels disgusted at them, then remembers that he murdered Maxwell, and the most disgusting person in this chamber will always be him. (Olethra, dead. Freyja, dead. Marya, who so believed in his old heart, who put so much faith in him. Dead. Gone.)
“We have changed,” Tarniss says. “Oxidius and myself. And… you realize we took a risk, bringing you back? We had no way to confirm you would not be seized by the Queen’s control once again. But that is how much we believed in you, and in your necessity.”
Always. Always a cause to serve, a function to provide.
“You are the last of the Aganti Zernai, are you not?” Oxidius says. “The lost warrior? We heard stories of you. That you had journeyed beyond Zern, that you would return with reinforcements. You’ve become something of a folk hero among the bots and automata who still resist.”
A folk hero.
His hands briefly stop feeling connected to his sense of motion, but not in a way that makes him fear the Queen taking over again. There is no higher will controlling his limbs; there’s just a lack. He feels disconnected, like a pile of parts rather than the sum of a whole. He is the metal that makes him up, not the collection of memories and betrayals housed within. He is a shell, piloted here and abandoned in the Amphereon.
“Yes, we heard stories about you,” Tarniss confirms. “But we don’t even know your name.”
There’s an old instinct of self-preservation that wants to keep it tucked away, but what would be the point? He doesn’t even feel like himself in this moment. What claim does he have for his name?
“Torse,” he says, voice crackling around his own name as if it’s a curse. “I am Torse.”
“Torse,” Oxidius says. “Welcome back to the rebellion.”