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Zood has given Maxwell sweet dreams.
“Well, old boy, “ says Barney Ballast, nosebleed still gushing freely down his chin, “what say you to sharing a bit more of that good old feeling?”
“It would be an honor,” Max replies, before his knuckles make contact with the firm flesh of Barney’s abdomen. His opponent’s body yields only under great persuasion. Maxwell prides himself on the eloquence of his fists.
Barney wheezes in Max’s face, bent under the power of the blow but rising back up like a buoy until their noses briefly touch. He smells like sweat and blood, a potent tincture of iron and musk that Max can taste between his teeth. Taking advantage of his position as swiftly as a true Revington man, Barney headbutts Max with a wet, climactic crack. Max feels his nose break. Blood weeps down his face, wetting his lips, leaving a mark that will throb under his skin for days.
The grapple sends them to the dusty floor. Arms lock around shoulders, legs around hips. Firm muscle rocks against firm muscle. Barney, like Maxwell, has oiled himself up from head to toe beneath the clothes he’s no longer wearing. Max searches the well-fitted joints of Barney’s body for a handhold, grip slipping, nails biting in. He finally gets the man under him in a submission hold that leaves no space at all between humid planes of skin. The oil is hot from bodies and friction. The slightly distinct scent of the oil Barney uses has mixed with Maxwell’s own to produce a unique sillage. Every sense is saturated with the one, the other, the two of them together. A true, single organism.
“The beast with two backs, if you will. Eh, Maxwell?” Wealwell comments from his place in the audience.
The crowd, as one, grunts in unison and rolls their bodies lewdly. “Gimme the Haunch!”
“This is no place for a Revington man!” Maxwell cries.
“I say, old boy, I do believe you’ve gone and broken my ribs,” Barney Ballast observes with unalloyed delight from underneath him. Maxwell digs an elbow into Barney’s tender sternum, and Barney gasps.
The sound of shifting bone is almost metallic, and suddenly Max is standing before the broad side of The Zephyr, slamming his fist into its iron frame. It rings like a bell and dents beneath him.
“My ship,” Max mutters through his teeth. Blood drips from the deck in long, viscous sheets. The fan blades overhead are tacky with drying gore. Max wipes his face with the back of his arm. He can feel his heartbeat in every corner of his body as if he occupies a massive, throbbing machine.
“So beats a worthy heart,” Comfrey MacLeod says. Her voice has the tinny timbre of the decades-old newscast in which Max last heard it.
Torse’s hand closes over Maxwell’s shoulder from behind. Maxwell twists in his grip, elbow cocked back.
He wakes up in Zern.
Torse’s disanimated body slumps against him. The rumble and bounce of the mech as it crawls over the rust-ruined landscape rattles Torse’s many component parts. He’s become a thing to be moved by outside forces—gravity, gaskets, the goddamn Queen of Zern.
Max tilts his head back. The curve of his skull lands gently against the razor edge of Torse’s pauldron. Max clings to the sharp, grounding pain of it.
“Gotch,” Marya calls his name softly from the driver’s seat. “Are you awake?”
Maxwell lays a hand over his heart, still ticking double-time from the familiar dream. “Yeah.”
The mech slows and tilts. Max assumes Marya is taking them around a turn, but the winding-down of momentum doesn’t stop. She pulls over, yanks the parking brake, and hops over the back of the driver’s seat to crouch in front of Max.
“Up, up!” she whispers, slapping Maxwell on the shoulder.
“What—” Max watches dumbly as Marya slides open the loading door.
She looks at him with her massive, dark eyes, glowing in the gauntness of her pale face. She tilts her head, a silent Come on, and jumps down to the ground. Max secures Torse in his rigor mortis piggyback ride as quietly as he can and follows Marya out into the dark.
Zern glows malevolently even at night, permanent light pollution. Max blinks his stinging eyes in the red wash that turns this realm into a darkroom the size of the world.
Marya reaches behind Max and lifts a nearly-imperceptible weight from his burden. In her hands, she cradles the iron heart. Her thumb passes tenderly over the etching she left there. A sad smile softens her face.
“Now?” Max hisses.
“The others might stop us. So yes, now, while they’re asleep.”
Max breathes. Slowly, he sets Torse down and rolls his neck.
“I’ll cover the mech. Just in case,” he says, placing himself between Torse and the shell that keeps them alive in his homeland.
Marya nods. She kneels in front of Torse, whispers something Max can’t hear, and slots the heart into his chest.
The rest of the crew is perfectly welcoming, once Torse is up and walking around. Maxwell keeps close to him like a bodyguard as his companions wake one by one. Freyja in particular looks happy to see Torse, while Dawderdale seems wary until she takes her cue from Pappy, who tilts his hat and says nothing but an understated, “Good to see you up and at ‘em again, fella.”
“So it’s images of the Queen that make you go all…?” Olethra circles her hands in the air vaguely.
“Yes,” Torse replies. “My sensory apparati are designed to make long-distance communication possible with the other Aganti Zernai. The Queen of Ruin has appropriated this to her own ends. Control.”
“So what if we,” Olethra glances at Max, which he doesn’t understand why she would do, “blindfold you?”
Max coughs. He has something in his throat, is all. He doesn’t think about the image of Torse in a blindfold. Why would he? Torse wouldn’t be rendered helpless by something like that. He’d keep swinging, metal glistening, pistons pumping, a deadly weapon even at a disadvantage.
“I fear this would prove inadequate. My visual apparatus is difficult to obscure.” He gestures to the sharp, grated helm in front of his glowing eyes.
“Yes, no one is blindfolding Torse, not even if we want to!” Maxwell declares.
“What?” Olethra laughs, though nothing Maxwell said was funny.
“What’dya mean by that, Gotch?” Pappy asks.
“I mean what I say! It would be pointless. He—he just said that. You just said that, Torse. Back me up here.”
“I did just say that.”
“See? I listen. So, good. We’re all on the same page.”
“Maybe not all of us,” Marya chuckles. Max has stopped listening.
It’s a compelling question, and one that haunts Maxwell over the course of their next few days of travel toward the Corrodi court. What would it take to render Torse helpless? Other than dropping him out of the sky or controlling his very mind. How strong would the bonds have to be to tie his arms down so they could no longer use their keen-edged blades? What load-bearing wires might temporarily short out his unwavering vigilance?
A human body, Maxwell knows how to subdue. He has made rigorous study of the ways to pin a man of flesh on his back. Some ways are unsporting, but Max knows them anyway, if only to know what to avoid. A blow behind the knee, a pinch to the neck, those are perfectly legal in the right circumstances. What counterparts to a debilitating nerve might hide in Torse’s flawlessly efficient form?
If Maxwell knows Torse’s weaknesses, he can protect them from being exploited. His interest is purely selfless.
“Torse,” Maxwell asks as casually as possible one evening, “do you, ahem, feel pain?”
Torse tilts his head with a thoughtful, pneumatic hiss.
“Not in the way of Gath or Zood. I sense when my systems are malfunctioning or I am in need of repair. It is more of a…” He pauses. “Warning light. Possible to ignore in the moment if there are more pressing matters. Bothersome if persistent.”
“Ah, I see. Yes. Of course.” Max fiddles with his cuffs. “How bothersome?”
“Very.”
“More so the, the longer it lasts, yes?”
“Yes.”
“Mm. Mhm.” Max is grateful that his mustache hides the right clench of his mouth, biting his own tongue.
“I am built to withstand great amounts of violence without stopping. Unlike Gathie bodies, mine does not heal on its own. Nothing lasts long if it cannot sustain damage and be repaired. Thus, my internal alarms gain intensity over time until reset.”
Color rises higher in Maxwell’s face with every word. He can feel the flush spreading down his neck and, not for the first time, envies Torse’s implacability.
“Are you in need of resetting now?” Marya asks, concerned. “I did not know about that when I repaired you after the crash.”
“Sandy reset my sensors. But thank you.”
“Let me know if your warning light lights up, okay?” Marya insists.
“I shall.”
“Good.”
Not good, Max thinks irritably. That's none of Marya’s business, what a consenting robot gets up to in his free time.
Of course, to be a consenting robot, Torse would need something to consent to. There’s nothing, obviously. Max bites the fingers of his glove in frustration. He needs to punch somebody.
“Woah, Gotch! Put those away!” Marya exclaims, laughing.
“Hit the deck!” Olethra shouts before diving behind Monty. Monty crouches as if obscuring himself in thick foliage. Daisuke levels his gun at Wealwell’s head, for some reason.
“Yes, yes, alright.” Max laments that these people know him so well, even as a warm spark in his chest thanks them for the teasing.
“Lookin’ for a bout, Gotch?” Van hooks her arm around his neck, jostling him jocularly. “We all need to let off some steam now and again.” She punctuates the statement with a wry waggle of her tentacle arm. Max has not had cause to get out of a grapple with that thing yet, and he’s interested in the outcome.
“You’re on, bosun.”
Sparring with Van is a breath of cold, clear air. There’s no room in his head for those pesky ideas that he can’t look directly at; they sting his eyes like sunlight if he even thinks of trying. Better to keep his gaze on the ground. He needs his wits about him anyway, when he dodges a lightning flash of tentacles aiming for his face as fast as a full-bodied squid would snatch prey from the water. He ought to have kept those wits, he thinks, when he fails to duck the following mean right hook.
His back hits the metallic grit that covers the ground in Zern. The shadow of the mech crouching over them like a sentinel provides a stunning backdrop to Van’s grinning face.
“You can’t do nothin’ the easy way, can you, Gotch?” she sighs, kneeling on his chest. “Always making life harder on yourself.”
“This is a friendly spar,” Maxwell grunts, attempting to wriggle out from under her weight. “And would have been a more evenly matched one if I hadn’t left my oil on The Zephyr. I’m not properly lubricated.”
Van barks a loud Ha!
“You got that right. But I wasn’t talking about the fight. Come on.” She climbs off of him and holds her hand out. “Up!”
Max leaps to his feet in a single, efficient movement without use of his hands. Van rolls her eyes at his youthful spryness.
“Then what did you—?”
“Look. Every day above ground is a good day, right? Right?” Van knocks her knuckles into his bicep.
“Right! Yes, okay!” Max rubs his arm.
“Okay. So grab what’s in front of you with both hands and take it. Even if it hurts. Doesn’t mean it won’t feel good too, and Gotch knows we get precious little of that in this life.”
“Gotch certainly does know that,” Maxwell agrees.
“Yeah, I bet.” Her tongue presses against the inside of her cheek thoughtfully, a glance cast down at Max’s hands. “You didn’t show up day one with those scabs on your knuckles for nothin’, eh?”
“I— No.” Max flexes his hands into fists, feels the sting of barely-healing skin pulled apart by rising hills of bone. “No, not for nothing.”
“So use ‘em.”
Van blows once on her whistle, turning advice into an order. Maxwell is bad at taking the first and has too much experience following the second in the wrong direction. Instinct and training play tug-of-war with his gut.
Perhaps he’d know what to do if he had any idea what Van was talking about.
“Oh, Gotch, I’m glad I caught you,” Monty says, cornering Maxwell on his way back from relieving himself, which is a dirty way to win a fight. “I have something for you.”
“Alright,” Max replies skeptically.
Monty holds out his tube of lotion.
Max stares down at it, befuddled.
“Van told me you left your body oil on the ship,” Monty explains.
“Yes, I did. Um, I don’t think this is nearly enough to cover my significant bulk—” Max can see the incoming tone issue scolding, and pivots. “But thank you, Monty. It’ll do, in a pinch.”
“Good. Right. You don’t want any pinching, believe you me.” Monty chuckles. “Oh, I could tell you some stories. But I won’t. But I could.”
“Okay.” Nonplussed, Max walks away.
“Max,” Olethra comes up to him with a small basket in her hands. “Torse wanted me to give you this.”
Maxwell takes what’s being offered. It’s startlingly heavy. Stuck in the gaps of a wicker basket are several pieces of hardtack on wooden skewers, dripping with aioli.
“What… is it?”
“It’s an edible arrangement. Read the, the note.”
Attached to one skewer is a note that reads Love, Torse.
“This is your handwriting,” Maxwell says.
“But the note is signed—”
“Let me get this straight. Torse wanted you,” Max says slowly, “to give me an… edible arrangement with a note you wrote.”
“You know what, never mind. Give that back.” Olethra yanks the package out of Max’s hands, flushing red to the tips of her ears. She confers quietly with her mechanical frog, scribbles something on the note, and walks ten feet away to where Torse stands on the other side of the cockpit.
“Torse,” Olethra says, well within earshot, “Maxwell wanted me to give you this.”
“I do not eat food,” Torse replies.
“I, uh, I think there’s a note.”
“Gotch Love Torse,” Torse reads aloud. “Is this a cipher of some kind? Perhaps you should show it to Vanellope.”
“Everybody forget it!” Olethra takes her edible arrangement and climbs into the MechLeod. Maxwell does his best to ignore the sounds of laborious chewing.
When Daisuke gives Maxwell a significant look from under the brim of his hat, takes it off solemnly, and drawls, “There’s more’n one way to skin a cat. Different strokes for different folks. I might be mixin’ my metaphors a little there, but you get the idea,” it is the last straw.
“Alright, what is everyone trying to tell me today?” Maxwell demands. “There’s been all this, this wink-wink nudge-nudging and I can’t make heads or tails of it. Somebody spit it out, for Gotch’s sake! Wait, now I’m doing it, fuck.”
“Gotch,” Marya says bluntly, “we’re talking about sucking and fucking.”
The entire group explodes.
Over the chaos, and repeating himself several times in higher and higher registers, Maxwell demands, “Who— Who am I supposed to be sucking and fucking?”
Comfrey levels a hand at him. “Listen, Roywell—”
“He’s Maxwell,” Wealwell interrupts.
“Sorry, sorry, Maxwell. Wow. Little Maxwell’s in these big britches already? Damn. Anywho,” she continues, “there comes a time in every young person’s life when the blood runs hot and they discover inside themselves a desperate and profound longing to fuck a robot.”
Daisuke nods sagely.
“Your shit isn't universal, Comfrey,” Monty mutters.
“Well excuse me for trying to offer a confused kid some goddamn support, Montgomery.”
“I—” Speechless, affronted, befuddled, and a whole bunch of other adjectives he can’t think of right now, Max looks at Torse. So does everyone else, unfortunately.
“I can think of no body of flesh,” Torse says, “that I would rather suck and be fucked by.”
“Oh!” Maxwell wants to say something more than Oh! Maxwell says nothing more than Oh!
“Well, I’m gonna head out.” Daisuke lifts himself from his seat with an exaggerated old man groan, popping his hat on his head.
“I’ll come with you,” Monty offers.
“So will I!” Dawderdale and Wealwell say, eagerly and in unison. They glare at one another.
Van blows her whistle once, short and sharp. “Dawderdale, you and I are gonna scrub the outside of this mech ‘til it’s spick and span, you hear me? Wealwell,” she nods, “as you were.”
“Aye aye, Van!” Wealwell snaps a crisp salute, posture more precise than any sailor or windrider anyone in the crew has ever served with. Comfrey looks at Wealwell with an expression Maxwell can’t begin to untangle and refuses to ever think about again.
“Olethra,” Monty whispers. He beckons her toward the door.
“I’m good here, actually,” Olethra begins to say. She’s interrupted by Van throwing her over her shoulder.
Ghost Dog and Comfrey follow Pappy, Sandy follows Olethra, and Freyja says, “So are we not going to talk about Master Gotch sucking and f—”
“Unprofessional, Senior Associate Ildisdottir!” Max snaps. “Take the rest of the day off.”
“Yes, sir!” Freyja scuttles out of the mech as well.
The last person to leave the cockpit, Marya throws a wink at Maxwell as she hits a button among the controls. The windshield slowly darkens, tinting opaque.
“Thank you, Marya,” Max says into his hands, feeling more beleaguered than he ever has in his life.
“So,” Torse says into the silence.
With a heroic undertaking of will, Maxwell lifts his face from his hands and looks at Torse. Making eye contact with him is a generous way to put it, which may be part of why Maxwell has always been so comfortable in his presence. They can share a language without subtlety. Without tone. The closest thing to it Max has ever felt is the moment of certainty in a fight when both of you know a punch is about to land.
“So,” Maxwell repeats stiffly.
“I have made you uncomfortable.” Torse radiates regret and embarrassment.
“No! No, you haven’t done anything. Nothing that I—” Max clumsily drops the end of his sentence in pure shock when he realizes the words that are about to come out of his own mouth. Nothing that I don’t want. “Oh my god.”
“Maxwell—?”
“Torse, I’ve just realized something.” He reaches out and grips one of Torse’s metal ribs, shaking him with emphasis and failing to move the man even an inch.
“What is it?”
“I actually do want to suck and fuck you!” Maxwell laughs.
He feels something ping loose in his brain. It’s a sensation akin to the utter freedom of grabbing a man out of the air and cutting him to ribbons with a wind turbine. There was a satisfying distance to that, a part of Max freed from the kennel to roll around in suspicious substances until he got it out of his system. He feels the opposite of disconnected this time: well, well aware of his own body. These are his hands. He’ll do what he likes with them.
A rotating saw descends from Torse’s forearm with a ka-chunk and begins buzzing. Torse jerks the offending arm away.
“Apologies. I lost my composure.”
“Keep it.”
“What?”
Max bares his teeth. The expression contains all the discrete parts that, in theory, define a smile.
“Keep the saw, Torse.” Maxwell shucks his suit jacket and gets started on the buttons of his vest. “You’ll need it.”
Daisuke squints up at Van and Dawderdale, who are dangling in harnesses from the underside of the mech to reach scrub brushes deep into its nooks and crannies. He shuffles his feet a little, kicks a rock, and takes out his harmonica.
“How will we know when it is appropriate to return to the cockpit?” Freyja asks.
Daisuke lifts his lips from the reed plate and smacks them thoughtfully. “I don’t know. I’d say—”
Inside the mech, there is a metallic crash that shakes the frame and sends Van and Dawderdale scrambling for handholds.
“—not just yet,” Daisuke concludes.
Behind him, Wealwell throws up.
Maxwell and Torse crash through Marya’s new workbench. Max’s knees hit the floor and his bare ass hits the pelvic plate beneath Torse’s ribs. His fingers hook between the gaps in the metal. Torse is as hot beneath Maxwell’s hands as freshly-exposed bone. Within his iron ribcage, the power source of his clockwork life glows, flaring and dimming in time with the soft tick-tick-tick that is only audible when one is very, very close to him.
Maxwell’s humid breath wets a patch of condensation on the chin of Torse’s helm.
“An astonishing takedown,” Torse praises. The ticking sound gets louder. “But please be careful throwing yourself at my body with no warning. I am mostly made of knives.”
“Oh, really? I hadn’t noticed.”
The saw blade in Torse’s left arm is still whirring. That hand is on Max’s hip, and the combination of pressure and proximity to a deadly weapon makes him feverish. He presses into Torse’s grip and shoves him down harder against the floor. Max’s cock is heavy and flushed. The damp head, like his breath, leaves a matching wet mark against the metal.
“It is… pleasurable to you?” Torse asks. “The risk?”
Maxwell’s fingers clench and release. There aren’t usually questions involved, at least not after things have begun. The rules are laid out clearly in advance. Everyone knows what he’s getting into.
Maxwell hasn’t been hard without blood in his mouth since he was fifteen—the year he went off to school, got in a proper row with a snide bully from the rowing team, and spent the next several months deliriously recalling the sight of another boy’s tooth embedded in his knuckle night after lonely night. He discovered his fellow practitioners of the sweet science soon after, and his nights were no longer lonely at all.
“I—Well. It’s not exactly— Alright, fine,” Max admits. “Fighting turns me on. Winning a fight turns me on. Happy?”
“Yes,” Torse whirs.
“Oh. Good.” He sits back, squinting. “And you’re not just humoring me, right? Letting this man of flesh indulge in his squishy biological functions all over you out of the kindness of your heart?”
“My heart…” Torse says thoughtfully. His free hand reaches up to cradle Max’s jaw. “Companionship, love, pleasure. These things have been stripped away from my homeland and left to corrode like so much scrap. But we are built for them, Maxwell. Once upon a time, though few yet live to remember. I revel in sharing this act of rebellion with you. So yes. I am doing this out of the kindness of my heart. And in kindness I wish to have sex with you.”
“I want to hurt you,” Maxwell blurts. “That sounds bad. I mean in a loving way, like you said. Until it feels good. And I want you to hurt me too, of course. There’s no satisfaction in an unfair fight, that’s just not sporting. But you’re going to have to help me, because—” He gestures.
“Because of my, sort of, entire deal.”
“Exactly. I’m no Marya, but with your guidance, I’d like to…” Max feels his voice drop low, throaty with the full-body throb it elicits, “fiddle with your warning light.”
Tick-tick-tick-tick, Torse’s machinery speeds up. A vent in his neck hisses out steam.
“There is a sensor,” Torse lets go of Maxwell’s hip and shifts slightly, propped up on his elbow, “but it is in my back. I will need to turn over.”
“Hit me first,” Max demands.
Though it is by definition artificial, there is something so reflexive it can be nothing but primal about the moment of unstoppable panic that surges through a body at the sound of an extremely heavy metal contraption moving closer at speed. Maxwell gets an exquisite hit of this instinctive terror before the pain explodes across his solar plexus. The combination sends him surging into every atom of his own body. He feels his heartbeat under his fingernails; he feels pleasure spidering across his scalp.
Sure and precise as a surgeon, Torse lands his blow perfectly to brush the spinning edge of his circular saw against Max’s lips, slicing only deep enough to cut but not to truly wound. A blood-trickle kiss.
The wind is knocked right out of Maxwell. He rides out the silent scream of his paralyzed lungs with his hands wrapped tight around the jointed metal column that attaches Torse’s head to his body. There is no throat to squeeze, no airflow to constrict. It is a grounding but harmless pantomime of violence. Max’s head spins, thighs tightening, dick smearing.
“Maxwell,” Torse says. It might be concern or it might be endearment. Either way, Max nods.
“Turn over,” he grits out the moment he can.
Torse lifts Maxwell off of him and shifts to lie on his front. He’s never inspected Torse’s backside this closely before. It is mostly solid plating, a heavy surface to shield his more delicate parts. Max sees the outline of the compartment where Torse once kept the heart that now ticks in his chest. Iron heart, also good, he thinks.
“You will need a screwdriver and a plate clamp,” Torse instructs.
Luckily, Max’s fit of passion landed them among the detritus of Marya’s erstwhile workbench. Torse talks him through accessing his inner mechanisms. Maxwell has never been much of a handyman. He keeps his hands slow and steady as he loosens the screws keeping the plate in place, as much for his own benefit as Torse’s; there are two-foot spikes on either side of the cover that he could impale himself on with very little error.
“Like this?” Max asks. He slips the flat of the clamp beneath the edge of the plate and gently pries it up. Securing the clamp, Maxwell slides the sheet of iron out of place. There is a low groaning of metal-on-metal. This piece of Torse is thick and heavy, a solid and impenetrable weight.
“Yes,” Torse sighs. “You may put your hands inside me.”
Max reaches for the dark cavity. There is a depth to the soundscape coming from within that startles Maxwell with its delicate beauty. Torse is a gorgeous piece of work, a mastercraft. Max wraps his hand around a smooth piston pumping away within a protective sheath. At his touch, it doubles in speed. The red-gold glow from behind Torse’s visor brightens.
“Can you feel me touching you?” Maxwell asks. There are already small black streaks of grease on his fingers and palms. They’ll be much dirtier by the time they’re through.
“I feel— I feel,” Torse replies, or repeats, or loses his train of thought entirely.
Max takes the time to explore. He works his other hand in beside the first, cupped around Torse’s most vital pieces like he might scoop the whole thing out. Torse’s vents exhale steam again. Sweat trickles down Max’s forehead with the rising humidity in the cockpit.
“Behind the next fluid pipe—”
“Fluid?” Max hadn’t even considered that there might be a way to make Torse bleed.
“For shock absorption and internal pressure maintenance,” he explains hurriedly. “Maxwell.”
“Sorry. Yes. I feel the pipe, what now?”
“Behind it, there is a breaker switch. This will—” Torse makes a low sound. The ticking gets louder. “This will trigger the escapement in my emergency system to… to… It will hurt.”
“And I just flip it back when we’re done?”
“That will reset it, yes.”
Without further ado, Max slips his grease-wet finger into the narrow channel between pipe and switchpad. He feels out the hard edge and presses until it clicks. Torse groans.
“What is it like?” Max asks through his teeth, jaw clenched. He pulls his left hand out of Torse and fists his cock with it. He doesn’t look down at the mess he’s surely making, but he can feel grease, hot from Torse’s hardworking body—almost too hot, just on the right side of uncomfortable enough.
“Fear,” Torse replies. “Nagging worry. Climbing moment by moment to terror.”
Max’s breath leaves his body in great, heaving gusts. He jacks his cock as hard as a haymaker.
“Do you want it to stop?”
“N-n-o-o-o.” Torse’s response is chopped into discrete, microsecond bites of sound by something clicking rapidly in his head.
Max grips that first, thick piston again and rubs his thumb across the slick surface. He can feel the mechanism inside the sheath pumping, hard at work. Maxwell himself is quite literally hard at work as well.
“Torse.” A call to attention.
“M-a-a-a-xwell.” Torse sounds like a man speaking from the opposite side of a propeller. Max takes it as confirmation that Torse is here, present, as fully and completely as Maxwell is.
“Exhilarating, isn’t it?” Max laughs breathlessly.
A small trail of red catches his attention, rolling down the inside of his forearm. He frowns until another appears and he remembers the bleeding cut on his lip. Slowly, agonizingly slowly, Maxwell’s blood creeps down his arm, into the dip at his wrist, over the hill of his thumb knuckle, and into the deep, delicate interior of Torse’s body.
“That is the right word,” Torse agrees. The shuddering that breaks his voice apart travels down his neck. Max can feel the vibration around his hand, in the guts of the machine.
“Oh,” Max grunts as he comes, “fuck.”
Max has scooted too far up Torse’s body, so as to get a better angle to reach inside him, to avoid the inevitable. He spurts a second time when he sees it: his come spattering on those interior mechanical parts.
“Maxwell Gotch.” Torse says his full name as the lights in his helm become near-blinding, reflected off the walls and floor of the cockpit. The reverb register of his voice becomes one long, droning hum.
Max kneels over him, panting, dripping with several different fluids, and lets Torse suffer for just a little bit longer.
The piston in Maxwell’s hand becomes too hot to hold, and the vents at Torse’s neck burst scalding steam in Max’s face. He relishes the burn but, having come, has the presence of mind to slip his hand into the furnace-hot cavity once more—suffering just a bit longer himself—and reset the switch.
Torse stills with a gasp not unlike the one he let out when they first slotted in his golden heart at Ramansu. Max falls forward, narrowly avoids slicing his arms off on the razor spikes on Torse’s back, and breathes hot and wet into his neck. The boiling pressure release is not the same, but it’s close, and Maxwell thinks, all things considered, they’ve finished in a draw. Points across the board.
“There was, er, a minor accident with your worktable, Marya, but I’m sure it will be easy to fix,” Max says with a completely straight face, standing in front of the wreckage of the bench and trying to hide the worst of it with his body.
“Eh, you know, these things happen.” Marya shrugs. “Tell you what, Gotch. You help me fix the table you broke, and I’ll give you advice on getting grease stains out of clothing.”
“I beg your—” Maxwell can’t stop himself from dignifying her implication with a glance to check. He frantically tugs his suit jacket closed over the fall front of his pants, hands fisted in the fabric. “Not a word,” he hisses.
“You won’t hear a peep from me. I don’t need to, anyway. Van is hosing down Torse as we speak.”