Annnd we're back! Welcome to the finale of Eight Mercenaries and A Toddler and I'll Be Home for the Holidays. What a long and bumpy ride!

As always, a huge thanks to Bel for her beta work

Still don't own nothin'


Machines Don't Bleed

"Confront them with annihilation, and they will then survive; plunge them into a deadly situation, and they will then live. When people fall into danger, they are then able to strive for victory." – Master Sun, The Art of War

"Cowards die many times before their deaths; The valiant never taste of death but once. Of all the wonders that I yet have heard, it seems to me most strange that men should fear; Seeing that death, a necessary end, will come when it will come." - William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar

Prologue: The House of the Rising Sun

There is a house in New Orleans/They call the rising sun/And it's been the ruin of many a poor boy/And God, I know, I'm one…

The voices whispered and snarled in his ear, razor-like growls ringing in his ears. Blood rushed into his head, making the voices screech and the drums in his mind pound. He stumbled, striking tools from his desk as he did so.

My mother was a tailor/She sewed my new blue jeans/My father was a gamblin' man/Down in New Orleans…

He'd tried everything to get the hoarse voices out of his head, the voices that crooned and murmured and whispered awful, awful things into the night. They were the voices of the hungry, the voices of the thirsty who could not be satisfied no matter the bounty before them. These voices wanted to hunt.

Now the only thing a gambler needs/Is a suitcase and a trunk/And the only time he's satisfied/Is when he's on a drunk…

Music had drowned out the voices for a time, but they'd learn to fight back against the din, reaching to him in the silence between each song, growing louder and louder as they learned the pauses in the tempo. Record after record had failed him, and record after record he'd smashed in frustration and fury. There was only one left, and so far it had only kept to tethered to sanity by a thread.

The music swelled and crashed down like a wave, washing away the voices for an instant. He stood stock-still, blinking around his crowded, dirty workshop and trying to figure out why he'd come here. From the workbench the steel of a revolver glinted.

Oh mother, tell your children/Not to do the things I've done/Spend your lives in sin and misery/In the house of the rising sun…

He stumbled towards the gun, snatching it up. The voices gathered at the edge of his mind, biting and snarling, panting in an anticipation of his weakness.

Well, they couldn't feast on a silenced mind, now could they?

Well I got one foot on the platform/The other foot on the train/I'm going back to New Orleans/To wear that ball and chain…

It was his own fault, really—too much ambition, too much pride, to see what it was he was building until it was too late.

There is a house in New Orleans/They call the rising sun/And it's been the ruin of many a poor boy/And God, I know, I'm one…

But they couldn't use the damn machine without an Engineer.

The song came to a crashing, mournful crescendo, pulsing with raw emotion, rift with regret and resignation.

Delmond waited until the final chord had died. And then he fired.

The record had long since played its final song, but it continued to scratch away nonetheless, a dull, persistent humming in the background that scratched at Gray Mann's eardrums. He eased around half-built machinery and stacks of tools, eyes flicking from one corner of the room to the next. Behind him Giancarlo followed, silent save for the whirring of the mechanical half of his body. The cloying smell of death filled the air around him.

When he found what he was looking for, Gray stopped short.

Delmond Conagher, formally of Builder's League United, had died in the most ungracious way possible—what was left was him had collapsed where he stood, one hand still clutching a bloodied revolver, his brains splattered across the walls and floor around him.

Taken in the grisly scene, Gray wrinkled his nose. When he spoke, his tone was more annoyed than anything else: "Oh dear."

Giancarlo glanced from the body to his employer. His left eye, a bright red bulb, narrowed. "What is it?"

Gray arched an eyebrow, nonplussed by the sudden turn of events. "It looks like we're going to have to find ourselves a new Engineer."


Well. That escalated quickly.