To a man who had lost everything – his job, his home, his country, his wife, and his son – there were few things left to hold onto. At times, Cain almost thought that it would be better if he had simply stayed in the iron suit, locked into the endless deprivation of even the touch of his own skin. At least it would have saved him from this bitter, morally decrepit world he’d emerged into. There was no love, not after watching his family be tortured for fifteen years. There was no trust, not when anyone could be a spy, complete strangers in a world that had sped by him. There was no justice, not after the Tin Men had been disbanded in favor of the Longcoats and their dark secrets. He wasn’t even sure if there was truth anymore; everything felt like lies now, nothing but lies from everyone he heard. Tutor had lied. Zero had lied. Azkadellia was made of nothing but lies. Even the good queen and king had lied, as well-intentioned as they were.

There was almost nothing left. The only thing that remained for him, the only thing he could snatch onto with the steadfast grip of a drowning man, was loyalty. It had been pounded into his skull from the day he was born, and it would never truly leave him, as much as he tried to ignore it. He liked to pretend that he didn’t have any feelings. It made the vile pill of this dying land easier to swallow. If he didn’t feel the pain or the loss or the burning ache of what-could-be, then it would be easier to keep on going. If he focused on his head, on his logic and his experience, he could tell himself that the silly little organ hooked up in his chest was really only there to keep his blood pumping. It didn’t make it true. So he just focused on what he knew, the only thing that made sense anymore, his plain, old, honest loyalty.

Even that he’d tried to throw away. He would have abandoned the vapor-soaked Mystic Man for a chance at Zero’s head, given the chance – or so he told himself. He did the same for DG. But he came back, every time, without fail. He couldn’t leave well enough alone. The moment he’d heard that she was in trouble, being picked up at the theatre by that gang of Longcoats, he’d come running. It was like there was a rope tied around that old heart of his, battered and bruised, but somehow managing to keep pumping, and every time someone who’d shown him any kindness was in trouble, it yanked as hard as it could. He was an old dog. It was all he had to give. He wasn’t exactly sitting pretty, a prime font of strength. His entire collection of useful resources was a six-shooter revolver, a hat that was long out of fashion, a fondness for riding the edge of danger, and an unhealthy heap of loyalty.

And to a loyal man, there is no greater sin than betrayal. When he first met DG and Glitch, he refused to lead them to the Central City because he was convinced they would disappear like smoke in the wind the moment real trouble hit. He couldn’t trust them, of course – he hadn’t yet relearned how – and the idea that he would give them his word, his protection, his loyalty, only to have them turn their backs to him and leave him to die… it was enough.

Of course, he was proven wrong. He hated being wrong. But then he’d seen it again and again. DG had nothing but true friendly love for her group mates, that much she showed him every time she insisted on wasting their time just to help that one person out, beginning with Raw. Raw himself, despite his debilitating fears, stood by his friends when it counted. And Glitch – for Glitch, Cain reserved the deepest sense of guilt for having misjudged him. It was easy to do so, given his ambling manner, his tendency to leapfrog topics with no real sense of connection, his unnervingly constant smile, and his disturbing failure to remember even the simplest of tasks.

But Glitch was the most loyal of them all. He was a man stranded on an island of time that unraveled under his feet. His past disappeared behind him as quickly as the future solidified into the present. He could travel neither forward nor back, forever marooned on a tiny stretch of the here-and-now that was so riddled with pockmarks and pitfalls as to render it half useless. Half of the time Cain was amazed that Glitch could even remember their names, as he forgot them frequently enough, let alone what their quest concerned. He was helpless – not physically, as his dancing skills proved, but mentally – easily susceptible, his frayed synapses sparking and snapping when he became upset. And yet.

And yet, time after time, Glitch was the one who stood by them. He supposed it was only natural. A man without a head has only his heart to rely upon. But even so, Glitch was the one to thrust himself into danger for the sake of a comrade. Though Cain chose not to mention it, he did recall feverish dreams of his time in the caravan after Glitch had rescued him. They were foggy, intermittent, a weak montage of fragmented moments seen through the haze of hypothermia and frequent slips into unconsciousness. But he remembered Glitch hovering over him, his shock of dark hair shaking as he rubbed warmth into Cain’s frost-bitten fingers. He remembered patches of startling warmth and the feeling of being held, enveloped in heat. He remembered long, spindly, aristocrat’s hands drifting through his own damp hair with silent, warm reassurance. He even remembered snatches of song, painfully out of tune, murmured under the zipper-man’s breath; the melody and the lyrics flitted schizophrenically every two or three lines as Glitch forgot what he was singing and why, but the caring smile remained.

He was always smiling, in that odd, delirious manner. At first, it drove Cain a little mad to see him grinning at nothing, the corners of his lips twitching up as his brain sent signals fizzling out into the empty space of his skull, his top row of teeth gently gnawing on the edge of his lower lip as he tried – and failed – to keep his smile under control. Occasionally Cain took to rapping his knuckles on the hollow side of his skull to hear the odd noise it made and elicit the startled giggle from Glitch that shocked him out of his pointless smiling. But somewhere along the road, as he began to see that Glitch was not as crazy as he’d thought, but simply unwired, the smiles stopped annoying him and started reassuring him. There was finally a constant in his life again, something he could depend on, even if it was ridiculous. No matter what happened, Glitch would keep that silly smile.

Cain tried, he did. But every time he made an effort to be that optimistic, real life kept getting in the way. In some ways, he almost envied the zipperhead his mild insanity – at least it gave him the chance to forget all of the horrible things that had happened. But every time he started thinking about that, he saw Glitch start repeating the same sentence five times in a row, or insist that there was ‘some important doohickey that did something somewhere around here in that place, that place where the thing happened…’ the envy disappeared.

He told himself that once they got everything sorted out in the O.Z. – if they got everything sorted out in the O.Z. – then they would restore Glitch to his old self. The memories he had seen on the mirror in the cabin, Raw’s face contorted with the pain of the images he was conducting, they chilled him. Gli- Ambrose. That was his name, wasn’t it, Ambrose – had been brilliant. A genius, really. The queen’s own advisor, trustworthy, honest, intelligent, and articulate. At the same time that the memories had saddened him, they flared an anger deep in the pit of his stomach, a need to fix it, even if he didn’t know how. All it took was Glitch’s hesitant face after the invasion, trying so hard to smile and for the first time since Cain knew him, failing. Something plummeted from between his ribs, something he hadn’t thought he’d even felt anymore, and he’d been at a loss for words and actions.

But when the sun had returned to the sky and the hundred lakes around the zone had lit up in a healthy golden glow, there were still no answers to be found for Glitch. The first few weeks were spent focusing on the most crucial of aid – returning the papay orchards to bloom, healing the rift in the O.Z. earth, and dismantling the Longcoat reign. There was no time to listen to petitions for Glitch’s brain. Each of those days, Glitch would somehow find his way back to the brain room. Sometimes Cain would catch him there, staring into the bubbling tank, fingers splayed across the glass as if he could somehow absorb it back into himself. He never said anything when he saw Glitch like that, only tightened his lips and walked away.

By the time the queen was finally able to hear Cain’s plea to consider the attempts of suturing his brain back together, he needed to hear her promise. None was forthcoming. The brain had been left too long outside of a functioning host, she said. For fifteen years, it had been nothing more than a convenient circuit board for the hideous machine that was the Sorceress’ creation, a prison for information that could be teased out by the careful application of electrical circuitry. It could be accessed on occasion by those circuits, or by a viewer, but it had lost its ability to function as a brain, a cohesive part of Glitch-Ambrose’s whole. The shock would likely kill him, even if they did manage to revive the brain by some miracle. She was sorry, she said, and he knew that she was. It didn’t do anything to assuage the feeling that he’d swallowed a brick of ice.

He’d insisted – quietly – on being the one to break the news to Glitch. The zipper-man had taken it admirably, promising that he’d managed to survive this long without it. He’d smiled, a twisted, weak attempt that had broken Cain’s fledgling, scarred heart before it had even begun to heal. Then he had sat there, too still, without his usual fidgeting and twirling of his hair. A moment later, he’d cast himself into Cain’s arms, and Cain simply wasn’t callous enough to refuse him the hug. So he put his arms around him and let Glitch rest his chin on his shoulder, not even withdrawing when he felt the cold corner of Glitch’s zipper biting into his cheek.

Glitch started babbling in his ear, close enough that he could feel the whisk of his warm breath tickling his neck. He started talking about music boxes and machines that wound down, clocks without gears, and pianos with snapped strings. Soon enough, his mumblings had turned to pineapples and lightbulbs, book spines and ladies’ shoes, but Caine couldn’t forget the painful image of Glitch’s head as a clock, the mechanisms ticking and whirring but no gears to carry the movement or interpret it into anything logical.

‘You have a brain,’ he told him, and reminded him that Glitch himself had recalled the last digits of the machine to save the country. Glitch was unimpressed. It didn’t count if he was at gunpoint, if Caine was there to push him to it. Caine laughed lowly and drew back enough to look at his face, clapping his hand twice against the side of his cheek. Glitch looked startled, but didn’t flinch from the touch. ‘Tell you what,’ he said. ‘I’ll be your brain.’

For a moment, Glitch frowned at him as the strange idea filtered in through his ears to his half of a brain, processing visibly until he blinked with surprise and a new smile. He knew Cain was intelligent – he’d proven it enough when they were on the run – and he knew that his word was good. There were so many stupid, hourly problems that came from being half-brained, from the big things, like forgetting his name, to the little things, like fumbling and tripping over himself and pulling on doors the wrong way. If Cain promised to help him struggle through them, then he would, as simple as that. After grinning at him for a long minute, he froze, a sudden thought occurring to him. ‘If I have your brain,’ he protested, ‘what do you have? I can’t just steal one of your organs and not give one back!’

Cain rolled his eyes and got to his feet, pushing a hand off of the floor and dismissing Glitch’s dismay as another manifestation of his ineffable synapses. But the zipper-man clambered hastily to his feet in front of him and grabbed at his arms. Cain had long ago learned to recognize the light of a truly lucid thought in Glitch’s eyes, so he stopped obediently. ‘I’ve got it!’ he beamed, pleased with himself beyond all measure, even against the force of Cain’s raised, skeptical eyebrows. ‘You be my brain, and I’ll be your heart!’

In an instant, the world went silent. Cain’s pale eyes bored down into his with a seriousness that made him falter, his smile twitching with the effort to hold it up as the seconds, then minutes, passed by with aching slowness. Eventually, he tuned out and back in again, with a ‘What are we d-‘ that was cut off by a pair of chapped lips pressing into his. And then he was kissing back simply because it felt right, minutes before he even remembered who he was kissing and what they had been talking about and was glad that he did.

There was no real way for goodness to thrive in the midst of evil, as far as Cain was concerned. That made it alright that he hadn’t been able to trust, hope, or love while the O.Z. was still under the crushing hand of the Sorceress. And if the rebirth of their land brought with it a rebirth of his heart, left dormant for so many years, well. At least he was getting it in a fair trade.