The bottle chattered against the highball glass for a moment before Gearshift set it back down on the bar. At this rate, he'd end up slopping bourbon everywhere if he didn't get a hold of himself.
"Why does magic have to be so... so complicated?" he muttered, resolutely not looking to the right. It was over there, waiting. Taking a deep breath, he forced the muscles in his neck to unclench. As he arched his back, his head lolled back until he was staring at the ceiling. Things looked just as bleak up there, but at least it was a change of scenery. "This better work, or that unicorn is going to have a very bad rest of his life."
Gearshift sat back up suddenly and lunged for the bar. Before his nerves could get ahead of him again, he snatched up the bourbon and poured a generous helping into the ice-filled glass. Just as his heart began to pound once more, he lifted the glass and emptied it in a single pull. Fumes crept up into his nose, and he fought back a cough. It wasn’t the finest bourbon, after all. Not even close. Times had been tough since…
His eyes drifted right before he could stop himself. There, in the corner, the tank caught the dull light and tried its best to twinkle. Inside, what might be part of a mane emerged from the murky fluid to caress the thick glass wall before drifting out of sight again.
That did it. Gearshift coughed, spraying cheap bourbon across half of his bar. Holding his hoof to his mouth, he slid off of the pitted aluminum stool and cantered in a half-stumble across to his sofa. A sofa that just happened to be as far away from the tank as the room would allow. “No. No! This is totally nuts!”
The viscous, opaque fluid in the tank swirled again, and within it, Gearshift swore that he saw something moving. His hooves were aching sharply, and it took him a moment to realize that he was gripping the sofa’s arm with enough force to make the wood creak. “Okay. Okay, calm down. I’m… well, I’m just not going to do it. That’s all there is to it.”
But it wasn’t all there was to it, and he knew it. ‘Just one week,’ the unicorn had said. One short week in the tank after the years of scrimping for bits and doing the unsavory work of gathering the necessary ingredients. He’d been a mechanic twenty-seven years, but suddenly he’d found himself breaking into warehouses full of herbs and foul-smelling chemical concoctions. At first, he’d left bits on the floor for them, but as expenses rose, he’d just mentally tallied up I.O.U.s before abandoning it altogether. Anyone who knew what he was going through would understand, after all.
Gearshift reached up over his head and took the framed photograph down from the wall. In it, he was smiling. He couldn’t even remember what that felt like anymore. Not that anypony else would have even noticed the smile, relegated as it was to the lower, right hoof corner. The rest of the photo was taken up by chaos.
Iris was wide-eyed and grinning like a mad pony, her mane was flying out in every direction. Half blurred, she was an unrecognizable smear of indigo to anypony who didn’t know her, but that picture was the best pictorial representation of anypony that Gearshift had ever seen. Iris was a study in motion and joy. She was a pony of action and hard to pin down. Here, a friend had snapped this shot as she’d leapt through the air to wrap Gearshift in a crushing hug. Not pictured was how she’d taken them off balance and they’d flipped neatly over a guardrail, tumbled down a small hill, and then ended up in a moss-filled creek.
Also not pictured was how they’d laughed until they’d cried about it, or how they’d dried each other off, or the kisses that they’d shared later that night.
If there was one thing Gearshift understood as a mechanic, it was how individual parts meshed together to make a more complete whole. That’s how it was with Iris. They just fit together right. He grounded her, while she inspired him. She was his laughter and he was her strength. Together, they were an unstoppable force.
Or rather, they had been.
The photo blurred momentarily. Wiping his hoof across his eyes, Gearshift set the frame face down on the sofa. After a moment, he put a pillow over it. How could he have been so stupid?
It’s not like he’d never been wrong before. It’s not like he was some kind of genius. He was just an earth pony who was good with a wrench, but she’d believed in him and all that he did. When he’d proudly unveiled the new glider he’d invented, she insisted on being the first one up in it.
“Untested!” Gearshift slammed his hoof into his leg, relishing the dull ache the impact left. “Idiot!”
It had taken them hours to get the wreckage out of the gorge. Being Iris, she’d insisted on something dramatic, and being a complete numbskull, he’d gone along with it. When the wing snapped off and she’d plummeted out of sight, she’d given him one final glance. One that had cut him like a knife. It had been confused and slightly scared, but also held just a hint of accusation. ‘You let me fall,’ it said.
“Not my fault!” he yelled at the tank as he leapt to his hooves. “It wasn’t my idea! You wanted it!”
The tank was silent. The cloudy fluid inside had settled again into its uniform chartreuse. After trotting over to it almost against his will, Gearshift reached out with a trembling hoof and lightly touched the cylinder. “Not my fault, but I’m going to fix it.” After all, fixing things is what he did.
He’d met the unicorn in a bar. They’d both been there for hours, and Gearshift could see that they both seemed to have quite a collection of empty glasses in front of them. The bartender hated it, but Gearshift liked to keep all of his glasses right where he could see them. It was an easier way to tell the time. If there were more than ten glasses, it was probably a sign that he ought to drag himself home.
He could vaguely remember stumbling over to the unicorn and asking him what his story was. Anypony with that many glasses must have gone through something intense. He couldn’t recall the rest of the conversation, but when he’d woken up the next day, he’d come out of his bedroom to find the unicorn sleeping on his couch.
The next few weeks had flashed by. Turns out that the unicorn’s name was Test Tube, and he’d been thrown out of the Canterlot Royal Academy after ignoring multiple warnings to abandon his radical theories. Tampering with nature, they’d called it. He’d just wanted to help, but they’d shown him the door when he’d been caught exhuming a grave. Now he’d been blackballed, so he made his way trying to sell knock-off saddlebags door to door.
It was hard to tell whether his sour stomach that morning was a result of the conversation or the night of drinking, but despite Gearshift’s state, a fire had ignited within him. It had started as a spark of curiosity, but as the unicorn had recounted his successes with bringing back small woodland creatures, Gearshift’s heart thumped its way into a steady gallop. He’d found himself agreeing to further this research on one condition: Its first priority was bringing Iris back to him.
Naturally, he’d closed his shop. They’d needed the room, after all. Slowly, over the next few months, its familiar features changed. Where drill presses and acetylene torches once stood, banks of machines with blinking bulbs and twisting tubes of glass now dominated the floor. Gone were the schematics he’d pinned to the walls over the years, now replaced with pages of magical theory too dizzying to even look at. All that was left from the old days was his old, battered desk, the ratty sofa, and the bar.
And a mare. One who was sealed in a tank of regenerative fluid, which was powered by a glowing bank of stone-carved runes. Test Tube had tried to explain it to him once, but all Gearshift could think about was how ‘rune’ sounded almost exactly like ‘ruin.’ It made his skin crawl, especially because every so often, she moved. Test Tube had told him over and over again it was just an effect of the chamber’s automatic mixing, but Gearshift couldn’t shake the feeling that Iris’s hooves were sometimes reaching out for him through the glass. Every once in a while, the swirling fluid would part for just a moment, and he’d catch a glimpse of her face. He swore that her eyes were rolling behind their lids.
In the early days, he’d watched the tank for hours, hoping for… he didn’t know exactly. A sign of life? A sign of love? Of forgiveness? What he’d mostly seen was the slow regrowth of muscle and skin. When they’d removed her from her grave, the sight of her dessicated corpse had nearly driven Gearshift mad, but over many long months, she’d regained most of her old appearance. Or at least he thought she had. It was very hard to see much more than her hooves. They were the most likely thing to bump up against the glass walls.
Gearshift’s eyes flicked over to the pin-up calendar on his wall. Iris used to buy him one every year. She’d said that it was the solemn duty of all greaseponies to have pin-up mares on their walls. Plus, it had given her an excuse to dress up from time to time. The thought of that intimate time together, and the red circle around today’s date, sent a sizzling bolt down Gearshift’s spine.
“No! Uh-huh!” Gearshift paced, and his eyes darted around the room. Each place they tried to settle seemed to offer up some uncomfortable memory. Times he’d spent with Iris. The work he’d done since. Empty bottles stacked in an embarrassingly large pile in the corner. Black clothes. Shovels.
At first, the experiments had seemed so exciting. They’d taken a dead squirrel they’d found at the base of a tree and brought it back. It had scrambled around the lab in panicked flight until they’d trapped it in a blanket and taken it outside. Upon release, it had climbed up into a tree and chattered down angrily at them for several minutes.
Gearshift had whooped, wrapping Test Tube in a bear hug and twirling him around. This was going to work and everything was going to be okay again.
But it wasn’t. The next morning, they’d found the squirrel beneath the tree, or more properly, they’d found the decaying remnants of the squirrel scattered around the area. It appeared to have fallen apart where it sat.
Test Tube was undaunted. He pointed to it as a great success. The squirrel had dissolved into an almost unrecognizable pile of goo, but a corpse returned to life for even a few hours was nothing short of a full-blown magical breakthrough. Gearshift had reminded him that he’d promised a full restoration, but Test Tube had waved that away. They were getting there. They just needed more research.
Gearshift’s breath came in short, shallow gasps now. There was very little room left to pace in what was once his shop, but he made the most of it. Circling around banks of equipment and stacks of notes, he worked his arid-dry tongue around in his mouth and tried to conjure up some saliva.
They’d gotten better. He had to admit that, at least. Each experiment had lasted just a bit longer. The last one, a cow from the next field over named Mooreen, had been with them almost a week. She’d complained loudly about being locked in their observation shed, but in the end, she’d disintegrated as they all had.
“You ready?”
Gearshift screamed, leaping into the air. Whirling, he half scampered, half fell away from Test Tube.
“Get a grip, buddy! This is the big day!” Test Tube’s grin seemed to stretch further around his face than Gearshift thought could be possible. “Aren’t you excited?”
Pressing his hoof to his heart, Gearshift tried to slow it from a wild gallop to at least a controlled canter. “Look, maybe we should wait until we’re totally sure.”
“I am totally sure!” Test tube snatched up what seemed to be a random piece of parchment covered back and front in dense scribbles. “I told you, I found the error! This is going to be the one!”
“She’s always been the one,” Gearshift muttered.
“What was that?” Test Tube said absently as he fished his glasses out of his lab coat’s front pocket.
“Nothing. I-I just think we ought to try on… on somepony else first.”
Test Tube rolled his eyes. “I’ve told you, we don’t have the supplies. If you want to break into more labs, warehouses, and graveyards for the next three years, then maybe, but I don’t know how much longer that revitalizing fluid is going to last. Even that stuff has a natural decay, you know. She was only supposed to be in there for a week, but it’s been three months. That fluid is finicky. It just wasn’t designed for that kind of lifespan.”
“I know, I know,” Gearshift said as his hooves twined around each other. “It’s just… I mean, what if it doesn’t work? You thought the cow was a sure thing—”
Thrusting the parchment into Gearshift’s face, Test Tube tapped a circled mathematical formula. “It would have been if we’d used an evocation rune to electrify the chemical exchange instead of heating both solutions via coil induction separately and then mixing! It’s so obvious! I can’t believe I didn’t think of it before!”
Gearshift trembled, then sank down to the couch to put his head in his hooves. It was now or never. If it worked, he could get his life back on course, maybe even be respected for his contributions to science. If it didn’t, well, he’d have to move on, he supposed. Either was better than this horrible waiting. “Okay,” he whispered.
“What?” Test Tube ripped his eyes from the equation.
“Go ahead and do it, I guess.” Gearshift tried to swallow, but he still hadn’t been able to work up any saliva.
Grinning, Test Tube clapped Gearshift on the shoulder. “That’s the spirit! This time tomorrow, you’ll be running hoof in hoof along the beach and I’ll be on my way back to Canterlot!” Test Tube threw a few switches, and the machinery around them thrummed to life. “Come here, come here!” he said, waving Gearshift over.
It took all of his will, but Gearshift dragged himself off of the couch and over to where the scientist hopped from hoof to hoof. “What?”
Test Tube motioned to a large, red button covered by a chunky metal guard. “I think you should do the honors!”
“Me?” Gearshift took a step back. “No, I—”
With a casual indifference that Gearshift found profoundly unsettling, Test Tube flicked his hoof out, knocking the guard out of position. “It’s not hard. Just hit this button. The machine will do the rest.”
“Not hard?” Gearshift felt the veins in his neck standing out. “Not hard? I’m bringing my wife back from the dead! There’s a very good chance she’ll fall to pieces in my hooves and I’ll lose her forever! What about that doesn’t seem hard to you?”
Test Tube pushed his glasses back up his nose. “Technically, you lost her forever already. You stand to lose nothing. Either things remain as they are or you gain. Seems like a fine position to be in, if you ask me.”
Who would, you nutcase? Gearshift stared at the tank. The liquid inside was moving again. Every so often, an indigo hoof drifted out of the haze to slide across the glass. Was it worth it? Even just a week? A week where he could tell Iris how sorry he was and to properly say good-bye? Would it be enough? Would she hate him? Should he tell her what might come in just days? Frowning, he turned to face Test Tube squarely. “Look, I think we should—”
“Fine, I’ll do it.” With alarming speed, Test Tube brought his hoof up and then slammed it down on the button.
And inside the rejuvenation chamber, Iris screamed.
~~~
It was hard to think back on that time. The actual moments of the night seemed scattered and hazy. Gearshift wrestling with Test Tube. The revitalization chamber opening. The stink of the solution as it cascaded out onto the shop’s floor. The thin wail from Iris after she’d coughed the fluid out of her lungs.
Halfway through strangling the scientist, Gearshift had dropped him when Iris fell out of the chamber’s opening doorway. He’d run to her and said things. All of the things. He’d cried and laughed and screamed them. She’d trembled and stared and coughed, trying to clear her lungs. In the end, she’d wrapped herself around him and they were whole again.
Three weeks and four days later, Gearshift buried Test Tube after bashing his brains in with a shovel.
At first, everything had looked promising. Iris was confused, but her personality seemed intact. Gearshift had told her that she’d been in the hospital for years, and that they’d told him that she was never going to recover. Test Tube had been his only option, so he’d tried his radical theories. Iris had asked plenty of questions, but he managed to deflect most of them by telling her that she needed more recovery time before they really got into it. The important thing was that they were back together.
But as they’d set out for the beach on that summer night, a clump of Iris’s mane had fallen out. It had been nearly a month, and Gearshift was just beginning to breathe normally again. He’d wrapped his hoof around her head and brought her in for a kiss, but when his hoof came away, part of her scalp came with it.
Iris had frozen for a moment, then slowly reached up to touch the area with a tentative hoof. Her eyes filled with questions as she stared down at the bloody hunk of mane he held out between them. Just as she opened her mouth to ask, one tooth fell from its bloody socket, then another.
It had taken less than a minute. Piece by piece, Iris had fallen apart. He’d tried to hold her together, but she just slid through his hooves. After gathering up what he could of her, Gearshift had galloped back and snatched up one of the forgotten shovels that still occupied a corner of the shop. Test Tube was asleep on the couch, and it only took a few sobbing blows for it all to be over. He might not know much about physiology or biology or any other -ology, but Gearshift was an earth pony who knew how things worked. Gifted with exceptional strength, he slammed the shovel’s edge into Test Tube’s temple several times. The scientist never even stirred.
Crying and snarling, Gearshift dragged Test Tube’s limp body out to the field, dug a hole, then tossed his one-time partner into it. He dug a second hole some ways away. It was in the center of a field of wildflowers in view of the ocean. Opening his saddlebag, he gently removed Iris from it and placed her into the hole.
He screamed and jumped out of the hole when her hooves moved.
He had no idea how long he’d spent quaking next to that grave. Finally he’d crawled to the edge and peered in. At the bottom of the hole, the pieces of his former wife lay in a pile that was just beginning to rot. All except for her hooves, which were working themselves out from beneath the tangle of limbs and mane. Twisting their way to freedom, they’d shaken themselves clean, then started feeling around the rough walls for a way out.
Gearshift had scrambled away, gibbering, but he couldn’t ignore the scraping sounds the hooves made as they tried to climb out. He couldn’t quite remember what happened after that. It seemed like he’d spent hours screaming.
All at once, he’d realized that everything was quiet. The sun must have set hours ago because he found himself shivering and covered in dew. Unable to resist, he’d crawled forward and peeked into the grave.
At the bottom, the hooves tapped impatiently. Despite himself, a weak grin worked its way across his face. It was the same impatient hoof tap that Iris always gave him when he was taking his time to double-check things. Swallowing hard, he’d climbed down into the hole and scooped the hooves up. They ran in excited circles around the grave while he picked through the rest of the pieces and fought back his rising gorge. There was no further sign of the mare he loved.
The hooves had run back toward the shop, but stopped a few yards away and turned back, tapping again. He’d stared blankly at them before finally following.
Now, months later, they walked along the beach as they always did. Eight hoofprints. Four and four, just like any set of lovers might leave, but they were out much later than most. Only in the small hours, and only when it was cold, or stormy, or in some way inhospitable. Gearshift walked, and Iris walked with him. Or sometimes she ran and jumped and attacked what life she had left with the zeal she’d always shown.
Gearshift grinned. It was a small thing, the least of grins, but a smile nonetheless. He didn’t have all the pieces—or even most of them—but somehow, these four indigo hooves were enough.
