I Left My Spleen In Metropolis
It was that rarest of nights, the kind upon which silence never lingered for long, and beneath every lull bubbled unfettered chaos. Ratchet looked out at his City from the balcony of the apartment, and peered down at all the lights and dark patches beneath, lazily wondering at all the secrets hidden in the vast labyrinth of alleyways and alcoves.
Somewhere, in the darkest depths of Metropolis, an old and rickety warbot was being blown to charred scrap over nothing more serious than a game of cards, smugglers lurked within the darkness to deliver their cargo and disappear like ghosts, and dogs fought over all kinds of meat, some less cold than others.
Some would flinch at the danger of it all, and yearn for nothing more fulfilling than peace and quiet, but Ratchet savoured the bustle of City life. He had spent a long time running, thinking that he could flee and eek out a living in his little garage, wasting years on nuts and bolts as life passed him by. That wasn't who he was, and never would be. He was never so alive as when staring Death in the face, and all he had gained looked all the sweeter for how tenuous it all was.
Some called Ratchet a hero, and perhaps he could smirk at the title, and hold his nose in the air and take pride in his accolades, but deep down he doubted he was anything of the sort. He was just a gambler, a thrill seeker, a flea-ridden troublemaker with a good aim who shot popular targets. The hero gig was good for action figure royalties, and hawking those weird video games the Earthlings enjoyed, but in practice it was just too much hard work.
Heroes had to be upstanding pillars of the community, they couldn't swear or break the rules, or be angry or selfish, heroes had an image to maintain.
"So why," he thought with a grin, "is Qwark passed out on our couch?"
It seemed that the good Captain was no more a role model than Ratchet himself.
Being so shamelessly immoral had its perks, and one of those was engaging in the occasional drinking contest. Clank may have objected, based on both the detrimental effect of cheap hooch on his circuitry and the fundamental foolishness of the idea, but the other three had no such qualms.
Ratchet had spent the afternoon warming up with squat thrusts, push-ups and the complete soundtrack to Rocky III.
Talwyn's preparations were far more informal, and after grimly informing her friends that this ain't my first dance, she changed into a red plaid shirt, rolled it to the elbows and began whittling down a beer bottle with nothing more than a hunting knife and a head full of bad intentions.
And Qwark? Well, before he began French kissing the sofa, he had done what he always did, brag about his prowess whilst simultaneously looking as lost and helpless as a three-legged rabbit being punted towards a cactus. He was the tallest, broadest and thickest among them, and yet after only two shot glasses he was slurring his speech, after five he was sobbingly confessing his undying love for them all, and by glass number seven had begun to get very intimate with the couch without even buying her dinner first.
"So," though Ratchet, "it's just the two of us."
He turned away from the balcony and walked back to the little table littered with bottles, cans and tiny umbrellas. One foot went in front of the other, and propelled his body in a straight line, so there were no worries there. Clank had not become a tiny silver blur, and no pink elephants had barged down the door and swallowed up his girlfriend. He was still in the game.
"You can back down at any time." Smirked Talwyn.
"Back down?"
"Yeah." She nodded, turning the small glass around and round in her fingers. "That way you'll still be sober when you hear my victory speech."
"It is very rousing." Nodded Clank.
Ratchet rolled his eyes and filled his glass to the brim, shucking back the fiery liquid and giving a roar of triumph. "WooOoHrRarGHHH!" He growled, pounding his chest. "Back went the head and down went the drink! Is that what you mean, Tal?"
She gave an indifferent shrug and performed the same deed in half the time, and with none of his theatrics. A worthy opponent, indeed. As they drank, and the bottle of vodka slowly began to get light and lighter, little Clank busied himself about the table, removing all their crushed cans and wiping away the droplets of robot-poison with an annoyed grunt.
Slowly, though, something strange began to happen. For as they drank and drank, the showboating died down, the grave stare lightened and all those mad jerks of Ratchet's tail became nothing more than a happy, carefree sway.
He wasn't drunk, though. He knew his limits and Ratchet was absolutely, positively not -
"Walnuts."
"Sorry, what?"
Yeah, Ratchet, what? "Walnuts." He repeated, in spite of the voice telling him that his words made no sense. "We should, maybe, I dunno, go out, and buy some?"
"Walnuts? Y-you want to go out, right now, and buy some walnuts?" Ah, Talwyn's grasp on the English language was beginning to diminish, that was something. Though what exactly that something was remained a mystery, because all Ratchet could hear was his own voice spouting nonsense.
"Lookie here." He mumbled, trying to rise to his feet and thinking better of it. "Walnuts make everything better, right, Clank?" The robot just stared, what was his problem? "Lemme tell ya', if we had walnuts when we were fighting Drek, or Vendra, or the fish guy..."
"Fish guy?" Talwyn yelped, raising an eyebrow.
"Yeah, yeah! Fish guy! Surly, mean, had his head in a, a, whatchamoocallit, a jar!"
"I believe you are referring to Lord Vorselon." Clank informed him, raising a finger and speaking very softly.
Vorselon? Part of that sounded familiar, maybe he was right. But then Ratchet kept remembering some guy with a mullet, who made a bunch of action movies and got in a whole heap of trouble for some angry phone calls he made to his wife. Angry guy with mullet? Fish in a jar? They were kind of similar, right?
"Say," he spluttered, "this Vorrislan, did he make any movies?"
"Movies, Ratchet?"
"Yeah, like that one about the guy with the cross, and they all whip him, and hang out, and everyone has a good old time? And then there was this pyramid and some guy has an rectile misfunction?"
"It's disfunction." Clank corrected him with a huff. "And no, Lord Vorselon, Doctor Nefarious' most trusted lieutenant, is not Mel Gibson."
"Oh." Pouted Ratchet, though, in fairness, he had started to have doubts about their similarities.
"You're drunk." Observed Talwyn, gloating a little.
"Drunk? Me? Nah." He waved away the idea and realised that, however slurred, there was some truth in his words. Ratchet's drunkenness had many stages, and his rambling nonsense was just the first. He could still see straight, still string together a sentence, and had not yet began prancing around the apartment with a lampshade on his head. He wasn't drunk, but he was getting there.
Talwyn, though, was showing her own weakness, with both the stammer in her voice, and the sudden height of her voice that was so unlike her practiced, soldierly stoicism. It was simply a question of who would fall first.
His girlfriend's hand closed around the neck of the bottle, and he smiled at the shake of her grip. The biting, burning liquid was poured out and they drank deep, blowing their lips and shuddering as it stripped their tongues raw.
"God." Talwyn croaked, trying to massage her throat. "Why'd we agree to do this?"
"Honestly, I can't remember." Ratchet confessed.
Clank's head swivelled between them, the washcloth was slung on his shoulder, and his little hands stretched out wide before him. He was preparing, as usual, to school the children. "If I may." He smiled. "You," his finger pointed to Ratchet, "were praising your skills in pacifying the Nether invasion, and Miss Apogee," his thumb motioned to her, "informed you that many others assisted in our victory. Offended, you passed off their efforts as toddlerish and claimed that your wrench could, with one swing, dismantle the entirety of the Polaris Defence Force."
"Oh, yeah, yeah, I remember now." Ratchet muttered, quickly pouring himself another drink, just so he had an excuse to look away from Talwyn's withering, furious glare.
"You, Miss Apogee, then made several crude remarks about the Lombaxes, and how theirs was the only army in recorded history that always marched backwards."
"Lies!" Talwyn shrieked with a dart of her eyes. "All lies!"
"No, Miss Apogee." Clank informed her. "That was a lie. Your heart rate is increasing and your pupils just dilated."
"Lombaxes don't run." Ratchet told her through his fangs, trying to shift around on the floor, but only serving to nearly knock the table over.
"Sure." She sighed.
"They don't!"
"Whatever." She snapped, rubbing her temple. "And you know what? Neither do I. I remember everything now, and I remember why I suggested this contest in the first place, to put that tail back between your legs where it belongs."
"That," Ratchet smirked, "isn't the only place you like my tail to be. And it's not going back there for a long, long time."
"Well, someone has a rather high opinion of themselves."
"Yeah that's kinda' my thing." He bragged, sniffing at the nearly empty bottle they had demolished with such speed.
"Really?" Talwyn snorted. "Well, unless your 'high opinion' goes limp after two seconds, it has very little to do with your thing."
Ratchet snarled, Talwyn grumbled, and the game suddenly felt a lot like a fight. Now, for most couples, the business of fighting was a very dreary affair, full of thrown plates, tears and lingering resentment that never quite healed. But a warrior like Talwyn, and an uncouth knucklehead like Ratchet had more direct ways of solving their quarrels. Often, they brawled, and once everything around them had been demolished and burnt to cinders, laid among the wreckage, and felt all their anger wash away. But neither drew their weapons that night, or punched or jumped about in mad, frenzied combat, for there was another way of putting their squabble to bed.
"Clank!" Barked Talwyn, hitching up the sleeves of her shirt. "Fetch the Livershrinker."
"The Livershrinker?" The robot gasped, looking between them both with apocalyptic gloom. "Miss Apogee, are you sure?
"Positive."
"But the effects of drinking it can be - "
"Just get it." She demanded.
Clank's tiny head shook and he scuttled away, hopping upon a chair and clambering up to the kitchen counter. A cupboard door squeaked open and his hand ventured behind cereal boxes, between vials of spice and closed around a tiny red bottle.
The Livershrinker, as it was commonly known in the darkest corners of the City, was banned as far as Ratchet's ship could travel, and he had no clue how Talwyn had acquired it. He posited several ideas, ranging from Satanic rituals to transdimensional communiqués with Agorian blood Gods, but she wouldn't reveal her source.
The drink inside that little bottle, barely enough to fill a glass halfway, had earned the need for such secrecy, and had been blamed for all number of calamities. A thousand years prior, a down-on-his-luck janitor tried some, blacked out for three months and awoke to find that he was the Emperor of Hoven. A pig, who found some dribbled in his trough, ate heartily and discovered that he was, in fact, a well respected political pundit, but that still didn't stop the oinking. Story after story, and the one unifying fact of each tale was that when you drink a dab of Livershrinker - bad things happened.
Talwyn's teeth closed around the cork, pulled it up and spat it out. She emptied two drops, both the colour of an oil slick, into their glasses and extended her hands, daring him to drink first.
"May the best Lombax win." He muttered, picking up his glass and saluting her.
"Don't worry," she grinned, "I will."
"B-but...you're not a Lomb - "
"Shut up and drink!" Cried Talwyn.
So he did. They both did. They reared back, let the smooth trickle of ale slither along their tongues and drip down their throat, and, as one, gave a terrible cry as a hammer descended from above and crushed both flesh and bone in its descent.