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thiscattygenius · 5 years

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So. @girlgeniusevents held a rarepair challenge. Write a Martellus/Agatha one-shot in a day.

It took me slightly more than a day and it’s roughly 4k words long and I don’t know why this was so much fun but here it is. No, I don’t ship this. Yes, I hope you will when you’ve finished reading this.

It might eventually end up on Ao3 but idk when. Enjoy.

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“Agatha! Oh, thank the heavens. What happened?”

She turns just in time to see Tarvek skid through the doorway, his shoulders dropping in relief.

Jabbing her thumb up at Martellus, she says, “He happened.”

Then Gil also comes crashing through the doorway, nearly bowling Tarvek over. “What happened? Oh. Him.”

He looks… he looks like Gil again. Almost like no time has passed since Mechanisburg.

“Did you…?” she asks Tarvek.

And Tarvek grins. “We did!”

“Did what? Oh!” Gil says, and then he’s grinning too, hands in the air in celebration. “He fixed it!”

She’s already running, throwing herself into his arms, throwing her lips against his so hard and fast she’s probably going to bruise, but she doesn’t care because he’s here and he’s fine and she’s missed him.

After an amount of time unfortunately closer to a moment than an eternity, her feet drop back to the floor.

Everyone’s staring. Well, she’s not ashamed.

Tarvek is looking a little off balance, though, fond, happy, a little closed-off and, she thinks, a little uncertain.

She doesn’t want to make him feel left-out, so she reaches out, grabs a fistful of the front of his shirt, and pulls him in for a kiss of his own.

It’s gentler than the first one. He’s surprised but not complaining, and Gil’s arm is still around her waist, and… and this is not the time for this.

She breaks the kiss and pulls away from both of them, just enough to compose herself. “Good. That’s great!” she says.

Zeetha wolf-whistles somewhere behind her and she valiantly does not turn around.

She does turn back to point accusingly at Martellus. “You’re not getting one.”

He huffs like a disgruntled cat and adjusts the lapels on a jacket he’s gotten from somewhere. “I wasn’t asking.”

“Um, Agatha?” Gil asks.

“Why is he here?” Tarvek finishes.

“Remember the touch of the king thing he put on me?” she asks. “Apparently it works both ways.”

Tarvek barks a laugh, and Gil looks vindicated enough that he must have been filled in on the details.

“So why is he still alive?” Tarvek asks.

Martellus bristles something that starts with, “Why you useless…” but she ignores that.

“We’re not killing him,” she says, then she adds, “Yet,” under her breath so only the boys, and probably the jägers, can hear it. “He’s promised to help undo the thing, and either way he’s more useful dead than alive right now.”

“I’ll still shoot him for you if you want,” Gil mutters.

“Gil,” she says, admonishing. “I can kill him myself if I need to.”

“I… well yes, of course,” he says, stumbling over his words just slightly.

“Either way, she’s right,” Tarvek says. “He can be useful, and we should really get back to the lab.”

There’s general agreement at that, and the room starts moving, everyone heading for the door to get back to the lab they were in.

Agatha gets a glimpse of Martellus’s face as he’s swept along with the flow, looking nicely confused.

“Did I interrupt something?”

There are a few huffs of laughter, but no one seems inclined to answer, so after a minute or so, she takes pity on him. “We were just about to remove my mother from my head,” she says.

To his credit, he loses the confusion immediately. “I actually am sorry I got in the way of that,” he says, stepping up beside her. “Anything I can do to help?”

She looks to Tarvek, who looks to Gil, who looks back at her. Her mouth opens to say something, and she snaps it shut again.

After breathing for a long ten seconds, she says, “I couldn’t say.”

Both her boys look concerned now.

“Is she pushing again?” Tarvek asks.

Agatha nods and says nothing. Then she keeps her mouth shut until they reach the lab.

Martellus stays by her side, and Zeetha comes up on her other, a silent guarantee that she won’t be running away, and the boys catch Martellus up on the plans.

He listens intently and even compliments the elegance of the suggested procedure. It’s a brusque, pragmatic sort of compliment, but she’ll call it what it is. He questions the decision to give Lucrezia an independent body, but doesn’t contest it once he hears it’s on Albia’s request.

Then he starts suggesting improvements.

Agatha can’t join in. She can’t be entirely sure right now that her suggestions would be coming from the right place, and either way she’s already contributed everything she needs to this process. Instead, she sits back, focuses on staying herself, and watches the boys make adjustments.

She finds her eyes drawn to Martellus. She can tell he’s restraining himself, which is a welcome surprise. He’s doing so on several levels, even. Purely socially, while the animosity between him and her boys is almost tangible, he’s holding himself back from being openly antagonistic, focusing on the task at hand, and they in turn stay focused too.

On a more technical level, she can tell he wants to make large changes in their setup. Of course he does. He’s a spark, after all, and a strong one. He wants to take the whole thing apart and rebuild it, better! Stronger! More effective! …but he doesn’t. He holds himself in check and defers to their groundwork, works within that, offering improvements up, through his teeth, yes, but for consideration, not as a demand.

He’s not here to submit to them, no, but he knows how to pick his battles.

She supposes that’s a quality he’s had since the beginning. Once he reads a situation correctly, he can be ruthlessly rational. He knows when to give in and when to keep fighting, and in effect, he might be one of the strongest people she’s ever met.

She doesn’t care for ever calling him her king, but she has to admit he’ll probably be good at it.

A rough hand on her arm drags her off her train of thought, and she looks up to see Zeetha grinning down at her. “You still Agatha in there?”

“Yes, I’m good,” Agatha says. “I can hold her back.”

“Good,” Zeetha says. “Seeing as we’re almost ready.”

Agatha looks back at the boys and sees to her surprise that Zeetha is correct. The final adjustments are just being done.

“You weren’t paying attention?” Zeetha asks, leaning down, and Agatha doesn’t like the sound of her grin.

“I’m concentrating!”

“Suuuure you are,” Zeetha says, looking pointedly at Martellus. “You were also appreciating the nice new view.”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Agatha says, hoping her blush doesn’t show. “He’s an ass.”

“Sure is,” Zeetha says. “You’ve got a nice view of it from here, don’t you?”

“Zeetha,” Agatha complains, hiding her face in her hands. “Why would I even want to get close to him?”

“It’s not like I’m saying to listen to a word he says. Just, you know…” Zeetha has a hand on each of Agatha’s elbows, swinging suggestively. “You already have two, so why not collect them all? Keep him in a little room in your castle and bring him out when you feel like having a spicy piece of…”

“Zeetha!” Agatha laughs, scandalized.

Mostly scandalized. Partially too used to Zeetha to be surprised. Partially trying not to show that the image is… interesting.

Suddenly, she’s yanked up by her elbows and shoved into a chair, and Violetta is securing straps around her arms.

“Wha… huh?”

“Distraction~,” Zeetha singsongs.

“Was that what that was!?”

Zeetha’s smile shifts from mischievous into firm and reassuring as she steps up and puts her hands on Agatha’s locket. “Needed to keep your mind elsewhere. Ready?”

Agatha takes a deep breath, and nods. “Ready.”

---

With the Lady Heterodyne securely strapped in, it’s all Martellus can do to step back and let his annoying little cousin take the controls. It is his project, after all, important as it is. His and Wulfenbach’s.

At least Martellus doesn’t have to worry about anyone subverting the instruments for their own purposes. Even without Wulfenbach’s careful eye on everything, it seems the Lady wasn’t wrong after all. Tarvek does genuinely seem to care.

It’s a surprise just how much he’s changed. Martellus doesn’t know when it happened, but he thinks he knows how. It can only be her doing.

He looks as the Lady Heterodyne’s body fights against her restraints, snarling and screaming, until she falls still as the process takes.

Every damn time he sees her, he wants to put his past self in a headlock even more. Every time, he underestimates her. Every time, she impresses him more.

She’s as frustrating as she is fascinating. Wily and obstinate and impossible to control, every time he tries to get an upper hand, she kicks him further down, but she’s strong, so strong. Fantastically intelligent, alluringly rational when it counts, and altogether disturbingly attractive.

It shouldn’t be surprising that Tarvek is fond of her, or that she has Wulfenbach wrapped around her little finger, or that any of these people are following her, because why wouldn’t they? Already he knows a life with anyone else would be nothing more than a disappointment, but he doesn’t think he’ll like what it’d take to have her.

He doesn’t know if it’s possible to have her. Not without breaking her.

If she was the kind of person who would tolerate being had, he doesn’t think she’d be half as enticing.

It’s worse than frustrating. If this was what Andronicus felt for Euphrosynia, Martellus can almost understand why it went the way it did. If this is what Heterodynes are like, he understands why they’re spoken of the way they are.

There are books that claim the Heterodynes are to other sparks what other sparks are to peasants. He never understood what that meant until he met her. He thought he knew how to swim, how to stay on top of any situation, but he had only ever swum in lakes, and she came down like a river.

He wants her more than he’s ever wanted anyone, but he’s not stupid. He’s not. He knows it’s not that easy. She doesn’t like him. She’s pragmatic enough to tolerate him, but she certainly doesn’t need him, and she already has not one but two men she does like falling at her feet to please her.

He’s not about to give up. A future where he just lets her go and settles for someone else is… well, he doesn’t like thinking about how pathetically unbearable that would be.

He does know his chances are small. He knows trying to push now would only push her away. He knows he can’t afford that. Not until the Other is gone for good.

The screaming of the machines settles down. The Lady Heterodyne slumps back in the chair.

The green-haired woman, Zeetha, he thinks, plucks the helmet from her head, and she blinks blearily up at them.

Then she sits up straight and starts laughing. “Guys!” she says. “It worked!”

The weight of tension melts away from the whole room.

He smiles too as most of her entourage descends upon her, somehow gets her out of the restraints and everyone starts chattering at once.

It worked! She’s free. Another instance of the Other is more or less taken care off, and the Lady Heterodyne is gloriously free, stretching her neck with relish and laughing in relief. She’s free, the way she always should have been, glowing and gorgeous. She smiles like sunlight.

There’s only one leash left on her now, and he’s the one feeling the lash of it.

That thought stings unexpectedly hard, and once again he has the wild urge to go back in time to smack himself. How could he ever have thought controlling her was possible? That taking her down and holding her under his wing was something he was even close to good enough to accomplish?

She’s a river. A whirlpool. Every second he spends in her presence pulls him further in.

He steps into the circle they’ve formed around her and draws her attention.

“Right, there’s still the other thing,” she says. “Let’s go take care of that.” She sweeps past him without a second glance and settles by a worktable. “Come here.”

He doesn’t stand for being ordered around.

Usually.

This isn’t orders, anyway. It’s what he meant for her to do.

He comes to her.

“Ah, Agatha?” Wulfenbach says, stepping after him.

“Gil,” she says, with a honey-soft undertone that she’s never had when addressing Martellus. “I think the two of us can handle this. It’s more important for you to help ensure nothing goes wrong with the Otherbox.”

“Are you sure?” Wulfenbach asks, his eyes flicking to Martellus.

“I can handle it,” she says. “Go.”

And he goes. Of course he goes. She owns him.

Martellus huffs, turning towards the worktable and taking a quick inventory of the tools they have at hand. “We’ll have to take some readings.”

He never made this effect with the intention of undoing it, and he was under considerable stress at the time. They’ll need far more detailed readings of both her and himself, individually and while in contact, to know what they’ll have to change, probably several times.

At least the work goes fast. Far faster than if he was working on his own. Faster than with any other possible assistant. He never has to tell her what’s needed, because she knows already, every step of the way. He starts adjusting a piece of their setup to make it more efficient, and by the time he’s halfway, she’s already redone the other half even better.

He doesn’t talk much, just outlines the basic idea of what they need to begin. She doesn’t talk at all, but she hums, that same strange hum she had while screwing his temporary hand onto his arm in her sleep.

He always assumed heterodyning would be musical. Relaxing, maybe. Instead, it keeps him on edge, constantly aware that if he loses his grip, he’ll be taken by the rapids.

He could learn to live on that edge, if he had to.

They get her readings done in record time, and she nods at the readout, presumably double-checking it against whatever readings she must have taken of herself earlier that day. Then they do his, which are for the most part where he expected them.

Then she grabs onto his newly stitched wrist so hard it hurts, and she stops humming as they watch the readouts show the biological reaction to the touch.

“That’s the best we’ll get, for now,” he says, watching the chemical changes take place. “We’ll have to take it in stages, but we should be able to reverse the process, and then we’ll be clear.”

“Good,” she says, releasing her hold and going to pull the chemicals they’ll need out of various closets.

He watches her while he rubs his aching wrist. Watches the tilt of her head, the tension in her arms, the swoop of her waist.

“Look,” he says, standing up straight so he can get the height advantage. She stands too, staring right up at him, and it doesn’t feel like an advantage at all. “You’re right,” he says. “I wouldn’t have been sorry if it hadn’t gone wrong for me, but it always would’ve gone wrong, against you, and I am sorry.”

“That’s not an excuse,” she says. “You’re still sorry because you made a mistake, not because you did anything wrong.”

“That’s… true.” Here it is again. Like his height means nothing, like his status is a joke, her piercing stare deflates him like bursting a balloon. “But, I mean…”

She glares at him for another moment before she sighs. “What is it?”

“I can’t be nice,” he tries again. “I can’t go around and be considerate of everyone. Not if I want to be what Europa needs right now, or ever. But, what I did to you was pointless and stupid and caused more problems than it solved.”

“To say the least,” she mutters, and he can’t argue.

“What I mean is that I shouldn’t have tried. You obviously can’t be controlled, and I am, actually, sorry I tried. I was an idiot the first time around, but I do learn, and even if it would’ve worked if I did it a second time, I wouldn’t want to try it.”

He doesn’t know it’s true until he says it. He doesn’t know why it’s true, now that he has.

If he could have her, really have her, wouldn’t he want to?

But he can’t, that’s the thing. He can’t have that, and he can’t afford to get caught up in dreams and fairy tales.

She holds his gaze for a long moment, and he’s the one who has to break away.

“Apology accepted,” she says. Then she turns back to the table with the chemicals and leaves him blinking in the dust.

He settles next to her again, and when she starts humming this time, it feels different. He’s still on the edge of falling to it, still a moment from losing control, but it feels, now, like the fall would be softer.

She stops to talk now, too. Not much, but every now and then, she pauses the humming to explain what she’s thinking, or to suggest a solution to an issue. It’s short, to the point, and oh so clever. He has to force himself not to smile every time she talks to him.

He has the vague suspicion that he’s acting like a boy with a crush, but that’s a thought he refuses to acknowledge.

And then they’ve finished the first stage of the process, swallowed the necessary chemicals and applied the appropriate electric shocks, and they need to take the readings again, and this time she reaches up distractedly and puts her hand against his cheek.

And he freezes.

He can barely see the new readings flashing past, too distracted by his breath leaving him. Her hand is warm against his face, soft, despite the callouses from a life of holding tools, gentle. He wants to lean into it, wants to put his own hand over hers and close his eyes, holding her there forever.

“Oh, that’s much better,” she says, and in an instant her hand is gone again, pulled away so she can leaf through the new numbers.

It leaves a cold handprint on his face.

“Martellus? Are you listening?”

Cursing himself, he shakes his head and looks through what she’s holding. “Yes, of course,” he says. Then, “Two or three more rounds like that and we’ll be cleared out, I think.”

She nods and starts picking through the chemicals again.

Two more rounds, two more touches until she again keeps him at an arm’s length, possibly forever. He hates how much that matters to him. Doesn’t know if he wants to drag it out or get it done.

“You were right about Tarvek,” he says, because he likes the way she looks at him when he admits she’s better than him at anything.

She looks up from where she’s measuring out distilled water for the solution. “What do you mean?”

“I thought he was only using you,” he says while keeping his eyes on the heating plate. “But it seems you were right that he honestly cares for you. I still don’t understand how you managed to do that.”

He expects her to get angry. Instead, she’s quiet for a while, and then she says, “Trying to survive Castle Heterodyne together didn’t hurt. Unlike some people I could mention, he’s actually a decent person once he stops trying to scheme so hard.”

“Hah,” Martellus says. “He’s also hopelessly in love with you.”

“There is also that, yes,” she says.

They fall back into silence and disharmonious humming, and Martellus is only halfway present, mentally. The phrase ‘hopelessly in love’ keeps bouncing around in his brain, because at this point, he thinks it might apply to himself as well.

He doesn’t like that. Tarvek is the hopeless romantic, not him. He wanted to marry her for the political weight the marriage would come with, not because he’s in any way hopeless.

But that was then, and this is now, and he can’t get it out of his head.

“Do you want to marry him?” he asks, eventually.

Now she actually does look angry. “I might!” she says, defiantly. “It’s hardly my priority right now, and I don’t see what business it is of yours.”

He considers that for a moment before he decides that the last part is safe to ignore. “And what about Wulfenbach?”

She huffs, nose in the air and, it warms him to see, lightly blushing. “Well. I am the Heterodyne. I have no reason to limit myself!”

The suggestion is so delightfully outrageous he has to laugh. It really is true that Heterodynes never do anything conventionally. She doesn’t laugh with him, but she does smile, and that alone feels like a victory.

They finish round two of the procedure and do the individual readings, and then he reaches out a hand towards her for the necessary contact. “May I?”

She steps closer and lets him hook his arm with hers, and he delights in the touch for those precious few seconds it takes for the readings to finish.

They’re almost pressed together to read the numbers at the same time, her side brushing up against his, and he’s hyperaware of every movement.

The readings are as good as they could’ve hoped. Just one more round of the procedure should be necessary to put them both back to normal, and he should be happy about that.

He should be, but he knows why he’s not.

“We’ll be working together for a while after this,” she says while they’re putting the last few doses together, measuring up salts and acids against each other.

“That was the hope,” he says. “It’s the one common goal I think we can all agree on.”

She holds her current solution up against the light to check if everything is properly dissolved. “Mmhm, of course. I hope you three can behave yourselves, then.”

Martellus pauses. He doesn’t know what to think about the way she says, ‘you three’. He didn’t know there was any context at all in which she thought of him as belonging to the same category as, well, her boys. He has no idea how to react.

“Of course!” he says instead. “I’m going to avoid being antagonistic to my own allies, if they let me.”

“And that will include me?” she asks.

“I never meant to be antagonistic to you.”

“You know what I mean,” she says, and he does.

“I won’t underestimate you again,” he says. “We’ll be equals. At least for now.”

She considers him with one raised eyebrow. “Will be?”

“Are,” he corrects. “There’s no one else I’d rather work with. No one else is half as good.”

She smiles, and goes back to work, humming.

He clings onto the edge of her fugue and settles in beside her, not sure what it is that hangs between them now, but liking it much better than he did before.

It takes them well over an hour of quiet work to finish, too many small details to tweak, too many things that are too important to be careless with. It’s not hard, it’s just very exact work, and by now they’re well into the flow of it.

It takes him almost by surprise when he’s standing there with the last few wires for the readings hanging off his arms, and they’re done.

She stretches her arms above her head and cracks her neck and looks for all the world like she’s just mildly tired after a long day. “Only one thing left now,” she says.

“Oh?” he says, surprised, because he can’t think of what.

“Well, we have to make sure it all went well,” she says.

“Oh, right,” he says, because that had honestly not come to mind. They’re both of them powerful sparks, and with the readings so readily available, it wasn’t even difficult work. He’d taken it for granted that there haven’t been mistakes.

“In all seriousness, I don’t think I’m going to get married,” she says out of the blue, piercing him with a look.

“That’s… an interesting decision. Politically,” he says.

“It’s easier,” she says. “It leaves me undisputed power over Mechanisburg and the freedom to make or break alliances with fewer assumptions of bias.”

“I can see the appeal,” he says, and then he has to ask, “Why are you bringing this up now?”

“Just needed to make sure that was clear,” she says.

Then she steps close, puts her hand on the back of his neck and pulls him down and then. Her lips. Meet his.

He doesn’t breathe. Doesn’t move for the first few seconds.

Then he reacts, putting his arms around her and hugging her close, kissing her back, because he doesn’t know why this is happening but he won’t complain, will never complain about this.

Beneath the soft exterior, she’s made of muscle, silk-covered steel mashing against him, dragging him down, and he can’t get enough. He can’t have her, but maybe he can have this, just for a moment, just for right now, she takes a hold of him and drags him down the rapids.

Then it ends, and she pulls away like nothing happened, looks at the readings from their instruments and smiles.

“Great!” she says. “Then that’s over.”

He doesn’t want it to be over.

“The king’s touch thing, idiot,” she says, and throws the readouts at him. “It worked. I’m going to go check on the boys.”

And again she leaves him in the dust, his hands full of paper proving they are once again untethered from each other, and his eyes glued to her retreating form.

He can’t have her, never could, but now she has him, and from here on out, he thinks, she always will.

#girl genius #fanfiction #girl genius events #martellus/agatha challenge #rarepair challenge #I was dared don't at me

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