Work Text:
When the Midnighter arrived in the company of a dog, it was startling to all parties. Its joints whirred and snapped as it tried to wag its tail, sniffing around the Carrier’s corridors, looking for new and interesting places to piss. Covered in scars, made more of steel than of flesh, limping as if off-balance, and the Midnighter kneeled in front of it, jokingly asking his husband, “Can I keep him?”
They did keep him, of course. The Carrier was a bit uncomfortable with the animal at first. It was in a lot of pain, struggled to breathe and walk, but did so anyway. Sleeping restlessly, exploring her halls, nervous, scared, but curious enough not to care. It had been running on adrenaline for longer than it could remember, the pain inconsequential to it now, discomfort now a companion it lived with. The Doctor remedied that soon enough, as doctors are meant to heal the ill.
“He’s hurt, you know.” He had told the Midnighter. “I can help him. Take out all the metal, he’ll be good as new.”
“Could ya’…” The Midnighter started, holding the metal feet in his hands. “Could ya’ take the pain away without taking out all the enhancements? Just so he’s not in any discomfort. I don’t like the idea of messing with him too much.” The Doctor did just that. All the bits of metal that were installed improperly, all the wires that poked in where they weren’t supposed to, they all disappeared. Instead of a chop-job, with clunky tubes that impaired ambulating, it was now a machine in tune with itself, as all creatures are.
The Midnighter took much too long to give it a name. He tried Sandy, Floyd, Bravo, Rex, Benji, Romeo, Bigfoot, Rin-Tin-Tin—nothing stuck for more than a day or so. A nameless animal, with no past and no greater purpose than killing, it crawled around inside her, waiting for the machine-man to name it. He bathed it carefully, in the same bathtub he had once used to bathe his infant child, not letting water splash on its oiled joints or electrical wiring. He clipped its nails, and brushed its teeth and didn’t give it a name, not yet.
It started sleeping in the bed with him, between he and his husband, and he allowed it.
“There’s dog hair all over our sheets, babe.” Apollo complained.
“I’ll wash ‘em.” He told his other half, gently stroking the fur between the dog’s eyes. “You know I can’t say no to him.”
“Projecting your identity issues onto an animal can’t be healthy.” Apollo jabs, smiling, kidding, but meaning it.
“I’ll start to examine that once you can make eye contact with yourself in the mirror.” The Midnighter snarked, cold and empty.
Apollo took his satin pillow and an extra blanket, and slept on the couch that night. The Midnighter apologized, really meant it, but it didn’t help. It hurt because it was true. The two of them were hanging together by a thread, and the dog with no name slept between them in their large bed, separating them, snoring.
“I love you,” The Midnighter called over the mass of muscle and metal.
“I love you too.” Apollo responded. “Always.”
“I love you so much.” The Midnighter continued, trying to keep it all together. Everything they had made, the world that had built, the family that was theirs, he felt it slipping through his fingers, and he was reminded that the hands he built it all with were not designed to build. They were designed to destroy, and claw, and suffocate. And maybe nothing could change that.
He put a hand between the dog’s front legs, on a skin-warmed hunk of metal. He tried to feel a heartbeat beneath it all, and when he did, he could have sworn there were two sets of beats.
Eventually, he named the dog “Jacket” because the metal on its chest and down its forelegs made it look like he was wearing a jacket. Jacket split his time between the Carrier and the cabin Apollo and the Midnighter had acquired to raise Jenny in. Every bit of Jacket was man-made, even the dog parts, so far disconnected from his wolffish ancestry, but he thrived in nature. No fence, and no rules, he killed birds, chased bugs, and ate fat toads that made him sick, and urinated on every tree. The Carrier missed him on those days, but he felt happier after returning.
Things like Hawksmoor and the Engineer were made for a beast like her, they were the type of living thing that could find a home in the veins of something cold and alive. She made Apollo sick with her foreign stars, only finding comfort beneath a red dwarf. For things like him, Swift, the Midnighter, the Doctor, and Jacket, she was a cage. A vehicle, a vessel, but nothing like a home. Something they withstood for convenience, and not out of love. While she had love for them, she knew nothing could be returned, because she was not of flesh or blood, or even steel.
Jenny did love her. This new Jenny. This Jenny she helped nurse and sit. Jenny knew her, and she felt Jenny’s hands be gentle with her, like she knew she could feel it, as if she could be injured. Jenny loved Jacket. She gave him a name long before her father did, not able to stand leaving it without an identity. She called him “boy,” so she could see him as “he” instead of “it.”
“Atta boy,” Jenny told him. “What a good boy you are.” And his feet were, suddenly, no longer feet, but were now “paws.” His hair was now “fur,” and he slept in the bed, either with her, in the girl’s arms, or with her fathers, inching them further apart with every sun-fall.
Jacket was old, and he was not made to last, but they made him last. Jenny, the Midnighter, the Doctor, Swift, and Apollo. Even with the extensions the Carrier’s inhabitants put on his lifespan, he would perish long before they would. And all of the things she held inside her, they would all die long before she did. Far apart, and in pain, and half-forgotten by the world they all loved so much, but the Carrier knew, unlike the humans she held, that dog would die without pain, and hopefully he would die beneath a tree somewhere.
