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thefandomlifechoseme · 7 months

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@mechtober

5. Backstory

He stares incredulously at Jack.

The audacity. The idiocy. The sheer inability to read a room.

Jack is human, evidenced by the way he clearly takes the outraged flicking of his tail to mean 'indecisive', probably due to supposed 'morals' or something. Humans are so absurd sometimes.

Every other Folk in the room clearly takes it to mean someone's about to get shot. They scarper accordingly.

He grits his teeth, and successfully doesn't flat out rip Jack's throat out, settling for imagining it vividly and more pointedly as the human continues to fail to read the room.

He breathes slowly, carefully. It doesn't help much.

The jobs were fine. He'd settled into a pattern. Go to X, kill/threaten/loom at/eat Y, go get paid by Jack.

Hell, even the patricide was fine. Only been a matter of time, really.

But this. Farce? No. He wouldn't stand for it. So what that Jack had been the old man's bit on the side. Everyone knew it. Didn't make him anything to Jonny.

No. He was done. And Jack was still talking. Incredible, really, that one human could be so inept and so feared, and yet here they were.

He breathed in. Breathed out.

Considered the good doctors offer once more. Knew full well it was the best he would get.

What was it she had asked?

Kill Jack, get one of his eyes for some of her research or something, meet her at her ship?

Jonny could do that. Jonny could absolutely do that. Jonny could also burn the place down while he was at it. All that alcohol, such a fire hazard. No one would bother looking into it. No one ever did. Would be fun. Cathartic too.

----

The casino burned behind him, and he turned to watch as it collapsed, just to ensure Jack didn't turn out to be one of those 'zombies' or whatever. They were notoriously tricky to keep down, and Jonny really didn't want to have to come back just because Death decided It didn't want to stick.

He hummed a song that hadn't been written yet, before he wandered in Dr. Carmilla's direction, deciding it was probably rude to let his ride get so badly ripped off so early in their acquaintance.

#the mechanisms #the mechs #mechtober 2023 #jonny d'ville #dr carmilla #one eyed jack #one eyed jacks

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hermits-that-craft · 1 year

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Never Go Marching Home

A/N As promised, here is a finished WIP thats been sitting in my drafts! This will also be posted on AO3, and a link will be in the reblogs.

Grian’s world ends when he’s three years old.

Maybe the statement isn’t entirely true. The first six months are nothing but pleasant, according to his father. Nothing but smiles and revelry as his baby sister is brought into the world and introduced to the family.

But then his mother got ill.

Her condition worsened over the year. Truly, his world does not end until a few months after he turns four. His mothers last breath within moment of his sisters first steps, toddling over to a mother who hasn’t had the strength to hold her since she was barely a few months old.

She dies surrounded by family, a proud smile on her face.

The next few years pass in a blur. Grian and Pearl are watched by a rotating roster of neighbours, friends and family as their father works long hours in dirty businesses.

First the mines, to pay off their debts to doctors who didn’t bother to treat their mother but were kept around anyways. Then the factory, when the mines were shut to build residentials on. Father would come home covered in soot and with little more than loose change, having been harangued by the funeral home for their mothers casket and grave costs on the way home. The paycheck never went far.

On Pearl’s 5th birthday, she is taken by Mother’s sister to live on the other continent. Grian is also grabbed, his bags packed while he was at school, but he runs back home before they can force him to board the blimp travelling to Canberra-Town.

Grian spends the next five years in a daze. Going from job to job as his father plunges further into debt to One Eye’d Jack, the only mobster rich enough to have more runners than sense, who runs the outer sectors of London-town. He’s barely old enough to attend a high school when his hands become stained red, stabbing someone to death in a rage he didn’t know he had.

The police ignore him, their pockets lined with Jack’s dirty cash. No crimes are committed in the outer slums, not officially anyways. Glorified runners and guns for hire, that's all the cops could be called, and a 13 year old with harrowed eyes and hollow cheeks is nothing to look twice at, even when another child lies dying beneath him. To arrest him is to go against Jack’s orders.

The runners bring Grian in for the kill.

He doesn’t remember much of what they said. Sam was a snotty nosed rich kid who told Grian he was his friend, but only enjoyed watching his pain, especially after Taurtis died of a treatable infection just days before. Honestly, Jack didn’t mind the killing. If Sam had any sense about him, he wouldn’t have taunted Grian with the vaccine for the infection, nor would he have boasted about owning the vaccine for months while Taurtis had withered away.

Grian got off lightly, beaten only to a pulp and not within an inch of his life. He doesn’t know if it’s because his father was favoured by Jack, or if there was some kind of sympathy in the heartless bastard anyways.

It was more likely that he knew Grian would do jobs for him if he was given some sort of favour. Grian didn’t want to think about what sort of jobs he would be given after killing some rich kid in warm blooded rage, but he knew it wouldn’t be long before they started to grab him off the streets to do them.

Three years passed in more of a daze, barely making eye contact with anyone and actively avoiding his father where possible. It’s not as though he doesn’t love the man, but seeing his father come home black and blue after loosing favour with Jack isn’t something he’d find particularly comforting, and Grian knows it wont be long before he looses him too.

It’s in this daze that he meets a few new friends.

Mumbo and Iskall are an odd folk. Between the way Iskall’s prosthetic eye glows even when the sun is brighter than it really ought to be, and the way the Mumbo seems to rust when it rains for more than three days in a row. He’d hesitate to call them the strangest of their bunch, as he’s seen the people they surround themselves with, but their nice enough and keep to their own trouble, and often times get him out of his.

He’s caught them with blood on their hands, hidden between broken street lights and maze like alleyways. Grian watches with curiosity as the duo kill people at random, with no clear rhyme of reason and never get questioned by anyone.

He almost convinces himself that they aren’t even real, but his father pales at the mention of them on one of the rare occasions that they actually speak to each other. That’s all the warning he needs to know these men are bad news, dangerous even. He doesn’t even have to pay attention to his father as hes told that the pair are worse than an oil fire, that they and their group will destroy everything.

Personally, Grian wouldn’t mind to see the old timbers of outer London go up in smoke. Fire and brimstone smell of something more than he could experience here. Of danger and excitement. His mother claimed he had an adventurous soul, and Jack calls him a devil in the making. He doesn’t know if proving Jack right would make his mother proud per se, but he sticks to Mumbo and Iskall like glue afterwards.

And when his father flees the city soon after Grian turns 18, leaving him an apartment on his own? Well, he just invites his new friends to live with him. Mumbo and Iskall come and go as they please, never using the front door if they can avoid it, and Grian’s family falls quickly from his mind as he surrounds himself with new friends and a life of relative ease, stealing from whomever he dared.

And when Iskall and Mumbo bring in the body of someone Grian had briefly met through them, asking him if he can watch the body for a few days while they dealt with the problem - Well, he agrees without too much hesitation.

And after a week of not seeing hide nor hair of Mumbo and Iskall as smoke covers the other side of the city and violence reigns in the hallowed halls of the ministers cabinets, the man awakes.

Grian wasn’t expecting the man who had a gaping hole in his chest to stand up and start walking after little less than a week, and all the bumbling man can do to make Grian stop shrieking is to slap a hand over Grian’s mouth until he looses his voice.

The man wears a gas mask of rusted brass and adorned with golden spikes, his eyes a hauntingly bright purple as he stares at Grian. Iskall and Mumbo enter through a window that Grian could just about reach and-

He does.

He races across the rooftops of the outer city, his mad dash closer to flying than it is to running as the pair who protected him now follow him, glowing purple eyes haunting his every step.

He doesn’t mean to kill Iskall.

He truly doesn’t.

But between the adrenaline wearing off and the slow horror that he fucked up severely, he lets Mumbo lead him back to his apartment, Iskall’s body thrown over the tall mans shoulder as though the corpse weighed nothing.

Grian can almost believe that the man is dead. Permanently.

But even though the man has a slit throat and a strange, green fluid leaking out of him in place of blood, the man winks at him. No one else on the street seem to notice. People close their curtains, usher kids inside already cramped apartments. Someone gives a frightened shout. Another screams a curse at Mumbo. A prayer is muttered just loud enough for Grian to hear. None of these people know Grian.

All of them hate Mumbo and Iskall.

Grian is pushed into his apartment by Mumbo, and Xisuma sits at the head of his table. Iskall’s body disappears into a different room. Mumbo does not leave it. Xisuma watches him, a mug of something steaming in his hands. He gestures for Grian to sit. Grian complies, knowing when things have to come to an end.

Words are exchanged. A deal is brokered. Xisuma leaves the apartment, an ice cold drink that was never so much as sipped being the only thing that even indicates that the man was ever there. Mumbo presses something cold and metal into his hands, Iskall still slung over his shoulder. The corpse grins wickedly at Grian, and winks before settling down.

Grian hides in his apartment for a few days, getting used to the feeling of a gun in his hands. Somehow, it’s not as heavy as he expected it to be.

He lets himself get taken by One Eye’d Jack’s runners.

Jack talks to him, weaves a tale of unpaid debt and never completing deals. Grian knows who Jack wants him to kill. He knows what he has to do. He can’t leave this world with someone who will look for him still yet left behind, after all. Xisuma is a good man - relatively speaking of course, as good as anyone can be in the slums and outskirts - but he will not have crew who have people who could follow them.

And Grian’s seen what the mechanisation process can do to a man. He wants to fly.

So when the bullet lands square in his fathers chest, he bites back the guilt. HIs fathers forgiveness is nothing on his mothers disappointment, but she's dead, of course. And he has a new life to lead.

The ships doctor has given him a prescription to give to Jack. And when the half ounce of lead was injected directly into Jack’s brain, well. It was only natural that the rest of the bar get caught alight by the mad bastards cigar. It was only natural that the outskirts of the city catch soon afterwards, for damp timber may smolder but gasoline goes up well even while wet.

And if Grian dies in his exit?

Well, its all well and good that there were new wings made just in time for him to resurrect. The mechanisation process is painful, even while unconscious. All the drugs in the universe couldn’t dope you up enough to experience the molten metal seeping into your bones and blood. Best to be dead and hope the process actually works for a change.

After all, no one is missing him back in London-town, all those who remember him there are dead or dying, burnt beyond recognition.

Save for a younger sister, waiting for him on the opposite side of the planet, still feeling mighty betrayed that he did not save her when he fled off that blimp.