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It starts, as most things do, with a fight.
The incendiary incident, as with most sparks, is unremarkable on its own, simply the catalyst for a brewing reaction, long to follow.
Everyone can see that Tim is upset. He hasn’t been with them for long, nowhere near long enough to learn his habits and mannerisms and tells, but it might as well be inked across his skin with the way he is acting. Jonny, with his strange inability to leave any of them alone when they’re upset, challenges Tim to a shooting contest.
It’s actually a reasonably good distraction. It’s something Tim clearly enjoys, something that will help get the anger out. It’s a good idea, to be honest, though nobody will ever admit that to Jonny.
It should be fine.
Except it isn’t. Nobody is entirely sure how it happens, not even those who were in the room, not even Aurora, but there are two important things to note. One minute, they are shooting. The next, Tim is staring at Jonny, at the gun he picked up from somewhere nobody could name.
Tim says something about home, about missing someone, about Bertie . None of them really know who Bertie is, save for Jonny and the Toy Soldier, since Tim has not gotten around to telling his story, but they can all guess fairly easily from his tone.
Nobody tells him that they understand, that they all lost people, that they all miss them. It wouldn’t help.
Maybe it should have happened, though, because what happens instead is the start of the spiral.
“Eventually,” Jonny tries to placate, not nearly as confident as usual, though this goes unnoticed by Tim, “you’ll start to forget about before, about home about everything but this.”
Ashes is fairly certain he means this to be comforting, an attempt to tell Tim that it gets easier. (They’re not sure if that is just another one of his pretty lies, to be honest.) Jonny is not good with words, though, not like he is with songs, and so it is the worst possible thing to say.
There’s a second of expectation, the whole world deciding to freeze as if it knows what is coming, certain Tim is going to shoot Jonny and leave, and that will be that. They’re the Mechanisms. It’s how they solve everything.
What happens instead is far, far worse.
“Just because you’re a heartless bastard doesn’t mean the rest of us have to be,” Tim snarls, and turns to leave.
Leaving him in the engine to die would have been kinder, a horrible cycle of burning and death and healing that never ends.
In the aftermath, Ashes and Brian will blame themselves, though they are not entirely sure why. Tim is still new. Nobody told him about the boundaries.
They think that maybe, nobody expected Tim to go that far, to be the one to finally cross the line. Tim didn’t normally do words. He did explosions and gunfire.
Of course their luck would have it that his words would be crueler than any death he could have enacted.
What happens in the direct aftermath is a mess. Aurora alerts the rest of them, and they get to pick up the pieces. She is the one who gives them the report, because Tim is still fuming and Jonny is completely incoherent when they get to him.
Ivy, who is in the library when it occurs, ends up with Nastya to deal with. She’s upset about something far smaller, but that’s not much compared to what else is happening. Ashes is attempting to keep Nastya from immediately murdering Tim, because that would be too much for all of them to handle, and Nastya has grown to be protective over Jonny in their many years together.
Someone, probably Brian, has the Toy Soldier go find Tim. They end up in the kitchen with tea that is probably burned, and the Toy Soldier lets him talk about Bertie, adding in its own few memories from then.
That leaves Ashes and Brian to handle Jonny. They’re most of the way to where he is before Aurora gives them the actual information of what had happened, and both of them stop short in the hallway for a second.
Jonny is a bit of a strange case. He doesn’t care if you kill him, burn him to ash or throw him into the void. He recovers from death and pain and all of it. He does not react anywhere near as well to words.
They’ve spent the better part of the time since Brian was mechanized trying to convince Jonny that people cared about him, and they were careful to keep away from barbed words that they knew would destroy him. It’s not Tim’s fault, not really, in the end. He didn’t know. That doesn’t really help them fix this, though.
In the end, after a moment of silent deliberation between the two of them, Ashes takes a seat on the floor next to Jonny, and Brian stays across the room. Jonny is curled in on himself, blood on his fingers and lips that they cannot immediately see the origin of, nails biting into his skin as he trembles.
“Hey, Jonny,” Ashes says, far softer than anyone ever sees them. He blinks up at them, like he is struggling to process the world around him. They carefully take his hands in theirs, and he starts to uncurl as they hum softly, waiting for him to react.
There’s blood spotting his white shirt, which is rumpled and grimy, and Ashes wouldn’t worry about it, because Jonny usually has blood on him, but they can see the crimson spots growing larger, and it isn’t hard to conclude that he tried to claw his mechanism out.
Again.
Hopefully, it’s something that will heal up on its own, or Brian can fix, because looking at Jonny, so small, trying to retreat into his own skin, they think a visit to Doc Carmilla might just shatter him at that moment.
Jonny is chewing on the collar of his shirt, glancing around the room nervously, though his gaze doesn’t really focus on anything but Ashes. They look back to Brian quickly, and he is standing there, fidgeting with a button on his shirt, and they know he wants to help, but they also both know that that isn’t what Jonny needs right now.
This has happened once since Ashes arrived, and the words came from the Doc herself, and they don’t know what they ever expected of her, the cruel bastard. That time, they learned that Brian talking to Jonny about his heart only made him more upset, so this time, he stays on the edge, worrying.
It’s hard not to worry about Jonny, sometimes, though that is another thing none of them will ever admit to the first mate.
“Why don’t you hate me?” Jonny asks Ashes, after too much time has passed. His words are hazy, though surprisingly well formed considering how he bit through his own tongue. “I can’t care about any of you back, so you should hate me.”
He says this like it’s some great debate point, like nobody can ever argue with him about it.
“I don’t fucking care,” Ashes says instead, because he is not going to listen to reason, and they don’t have the energy to argue this with him, not when he is on the edge of breaking into a million glass shards. “You’re still our first mate, our friend, our family.”
Brian is sitting with them now, a brass hand tangled with Jonny’s still shaking fingers, and Jonny leans his head into Ashes’s shoulder and tightens his hold on Brian’s hand.
Jonny looks like he is going to protest, so Ashes cuts him off before he can start. “You’re still our Jonny,” they tell him, as if it is this great revelation that will make the world make sense.
Brian nods along next to them. “You’re still ours.”
It’s enough to get him to stop shaking, which, in that moment, is more than enough.