To Me A Kingdom 1/?

[signy1]

Title: To Me A Kingdom
Author: Signy
Characters: Glitch, DG, the Queen, Raynz
Pairing: none
Warning: Some slight discussion of unpleasant, if hypothetical, medical side-effects.
Summary: Glitch is waiting patiently for his brain to be replaced; it doesn’t quite go according to plan. Part one of a multi-installment story.
Notes: The title is from a 16th century poem by Edward Dyer; the opening line is ‘My mind to me a kingdom is.’ Seemed apropos.



Even the dungeons were nicer nowadays. They were still dungeons-there was just no mistaking them for anything else-but the cells had cots that weren’t made of stone and toilet facilities that weren’t buckets and those two facts alone made them look like luxury suites compared with the digs the Witch had provided.

A lot of phrases like ‘basic human dignity’ and ‘rehabilitation’ and ‘civil rights’ had been thrown around, during the planning stages and the renovation itself. Glitch suspected that the real truth was that most of the people doing the planning had seen more of the insides of cells than they’d ever cared to, and were making damned sure that the accommodations improved just on the off chance they ended up back on the wrong side of the bars. It had been an observation he’d had every intention of keeping to himself, but somehow it hadn’t turned out as he’d planned.

Fortunately, most of them took it as a joke and laughed. Or maybe they’d just taken him as a joke and laughed; he couldn’t quite tell. Not all that important, either way. Even Azkadellia had laughed, but he had the sneaking suspicion that there had been something a bit different about her; it had been bitter laughter.

Most of the cells, improvements or no, were empty, now, anyway. Most of the former inhabitants had been freed, with fervent apologies and compensation that the treasury couldn’t really afford. Most of the Witch’s troops had been pardoned-for the most part, Cain had said, any armed force consisted of people in uniforms doing what they were told because they had been told to do it, and that most of them, if told to do something different, would cheerfully do that, instead, and that all they needed was the right sort of orders to follow.

That bit of logic had gotten him-protesting the while-saddled with the job of giving the ex-Longcoats, most of whom were now tin men, the right sort of orders and the additional task of weeding out the ones who were genuinely trouble, and when Jeb had spoken up to criticize a few of Cain’s initial plans of action, Cain had promptly named him his second-in-command. By all accounts, they’d started arguing about fifteen minutes after the field promotion and hadn’t stopped yet, and by those same accounts, between the two of them, the new force was quickly becoming a shining model of efficiency and valor.

…What had he been thinking of? Oh. Right. Dungeons.

Azka-the Witch’s alchemist, Raynz by name, was one of the few current prisoners. Glitch hadn’t testified. He’d avoided the trial like the proverbial plague, in fact, and had made very certain not to read any of the documentation, because he was fairly sure that if he had to read in official black and white that he was Exhibit A for the prosecution he would die of shame.

Of course, there was always the chance that he had read it and managed to forget. That was probably the sole and singular advantage to his situation-for every, say, five good and/or important memories flushed down the metaphorical commode, one painful one went along for the ride to oblivion, too. He thought. It wasn’t as though he could actually remember what he’d forgotten. But the fact that he couldn’t remember too many of the sorts of things he wouldn’t want to remember was evidence, of a sort. Evidence of absence wasn’t really absence of evidence… or did he mean the other way around? Absence of evidence and evidence of absence of Ambrose, anyway.

…What had he been thinking of? Oh. Right. Raynz.

Raynz could look forward to a very long time watching his fingernails grow in the newly refurbished cells, at any rate. The Queen had given him a few days to examine the décor in minute detail and had then offered him an alternative-a lifetime spent repairing the damage he had done.

He had accepted. Glitch himself had been put at the top of the alchemist’s to-do list; the Queen had insisted. She refused to call him Glitch, too-DG’s stubbornness had not appeared from thin air-and while he didn’t exactly mind being called Ambrose, (and in any case, arguing with the Queen over inconsequentials was simply Not Done, being both semi-treasonous and a less-than-stellar career move, not to mention fairly pointless, because there was that whole ‘stubborn’ thing again,) it did tend to leave him with the unpleasant feeling of eavesdropping on conversations meant for someone else.

He scratched his head, long fingers avoiding the zipper with the ease of long practice. His hair had been cropped short his first morning in the palace, and he disliked it intensely. A valet had simply appeared in his room at the crack of dawn, sniffed in a superior, disapproving sort of way, and-what hurt most-promptly confiscated his coat. Before Glitch had quite managed to assimilate what was being done to him, he was washed, dressed, and shaved, and the valet had given up on what even Glitch was quite willing to admit was a tonsorial disaster.

He had not, however, expected the dratted fellow to whip out a pair of scissors from the shaving case and blithely begin hacking his way through the tangles, and the end result was not vastly dissimilar to Cain’s military-style crewcut. The only real difference was that Cain managed to look a whole lot better. Cain, in point of fact, in Glitch’s opinion at least, managed to not look like a toilet brush.

The Queen had assured him that the medicos would have had to do the same thing, in any case, to prep his head for surgery. DG had pointed out that it would, after all, grow back. Azkadellia had, almost convincingly, lied that she thought he looked quite nice. Raw had tactfully avoided the subject entirely. And Cain had smirked. For two days.

…Surgery. That was what he’d been thinking of, wasn’t it? Yes, yes it was. Right. Surgery. That was why he was sitting in this room, on this rather unpleasantly cold examining table with ominous leather straps dangling forlornly from the sides, waiting for the guards to bring Raynz. Who, seeing as how he’d been the one to remove his brain in the first place, was presumably the best person to put it back. And then he’d be able to keep his thoughts straight from one minute to the next, and maybe even be able to keep his thoughts straight from one minute to the next.

The door opened, and he started. He’d been waiting for someone, hadn’t he? Was this them?

“Hey, Glitch,” DG said, her cheerful tones doing a fairly good job of hiding her apprehension. The wide blue eyes were the only real cracks in the mask.

“Hello, Ambrose,” the Queen echoed, a faint but unmistakable emphasis on the name.

“Hello,” he said, smiling at them, then paused, not entirely sure what they were doing here and even less sure as to how to ask.

DG rescued him. “We weren’t about to let you do this alone,” she explained. “Besides, we’ve both got questions for the doctor-alchemist?-the alchemist, too.”

Oh, right. The alchemist, that was who he was waiting for. Good gods, he was glitching worse than usual today. Probably just nerves. Probably just nerves. He smiled again as they sat down, DG close enough to take his hand, the Queen facing them.

Glitch struggled with his mind for what seemed like an annual. Somewhere in the synapses, he was sure, the perfect conversational segue was lurking, and it was really just a matter of tracking it down and dragging it out of the brain via his mouth, and then the uncomfortable silence would have gone away and DG and her mother would be smiling and answering and things would be all right.

Unfortunately, the door opened again, admitting Raynz and a guard, before he found it.

“Hello,” Raynz said, an expression just shy of a sneer on his face. “I see I’ve got an audience.”

“You’re hardly trustworthy enough to dispense with one,” the Queen said, quellingly. “Proceed.”

Raynz inclined his head just enough to make a mockery of the respectful gesture, and stepped to the end of the table, flexing his hands. “Lie down,” he told Glitch brusquely.

Glitch obeyed, devoutly grateful that the alchemist seemed to have no intention of buckling the straps into place; grateful enough not to mind being spoken to in a tone of voice that would have been considered unduly harsh if addressed to a dog. DG, who did mind, gritted her teeth and patted his hand.

“And Princess,” Raynz continued, holding the zipper pull but making no move to unfasten it, and not altering his tone nearly enough in her opinion, “I’ll have to ask you to get out of my way.”

DG didn’t really think she was in the way, but she acquiesced, crossing the room to sit by her mother. It didn’t escape either of their notices that Glitch, lying perfectly still, had paled markedly the moment she had released his hand.

Raynz jerked the zipper open and peered into the recesses of Glitch’s skill. A nasty smile licked over his cadaverous face, and, without looking, he picked up a metal probe from an instrument tray. “Hmm,” he said. “What have you been doing with yourself?” With a decisive motion, he jabbed his probe at something, and Glitch-obviously involuntarily-yelped out something that sounded like a mathematical formula.

The smile widening, Raynz did it again. Glitch repeated the formula; something about triangles and the squares of their sides.

“Fascinating,” Raynz murmured, not taking his eyes from the interior of Glitch’s head. Glitch, his breath coming in short, panicky gasps, held on, white-knuckled, to the edge of the table and what remained of his dignity, silent except for the random phrases Raynz’s probe teased out of his brain, one sharp poke at a time. This went on for what probably wasn’t more than ten or fifteen minutes, but which seemed like a very long time.

“Look,” DG said, eventually. “Enough fooling around. How soon can you put his brain back in?”

Raynz looked up, meeting her eyes with his cold ones, and-unforgivably-he smiled. “I can’t,” he said. “It’s impossible.”

“What?” DG gasped.

“Nonsense,” said the Queen.

“No,” Glitch whispered. “You took it out, you can put it back! You can put it back! You can put it-”

DG was on her feet by the second repetition-what she thought of as the ‘broken-record’ effect seemed to be triggered mostly by stress, and unless forcibly stopped, could and would go on more or less indefinitely. It was embarrassing for him and annoying for everyone else. And she was damned if she’d let the O.Z’s own personal Dr. Mengele see them sweat. She put a reassuring hand on his arm. “Glitch!” she snapped. “It’s okay.”

With a gasp, Glitch stopped mid-word. He took a deep, ragged breath.

Raynz wasn’t even paying attention. He was staring raptly into the recesses of Glitch’s skull-he was literally watching the synapses misfire, she realized, and he was enjoying the sight.

“Incredible,” he said, eventually, and shook his head. “We took more out of him than he should have been able to survive. The fact that he was able to rewire himself even this efficiently… it’s amazing.”

“Amazing,” DG agreed sourly. “Let’s get back to the part where you put the rest of his brain where it belongs.”

“I can’t,” Raynz repeated, the mocking smile back on his skull-like face. “He’s reclaimed more brain functions than I would have thought possible, and I wish I’d kept him under observation, because it really would have been a fascinating process to watch. But there’s just no way to simply stitch the removed portion into the mélange; they don’t match anymore. It wouldn’t work properly. Or at all. You’d be extremely lucky if he kept what brain function he has now.” He shrugged. “Or any at all.”

“I’m willing to risk it,” Glitch insisted. “I rewired myself once, you said so yourself. I can do it again. I need my brain back,” he finished, almost begging.

Raynz sneered. “It would be like nailing an apple back onto a tree branch,” he said. “The apple would only rot, and probably rot whatever other apples were on the branch alongside it, too. Oh-can you still follow metaphors? If your skull is the tree branch, and your brain is the apple… do you understand? Trying to replace your brain in your skull would only end the same way as the rotten apple. The surgery itself would destroy most of the connections you’ve forged since the original vivisection, and there’s no guarantee that the portion we took would even survive being removed from the jar, let alone reconnect with the other half.” He leaned over to stare down at Glitch, and met his eyes for the first time. He was smiling. “You’d probably drool a lot,” he predicted. “The brain would begin to denature, slowly liquefying itself as the rest of your body began to shut down, one vital function at a time…”

“Enough!” The Queen was on her feet now, too, and the fury in her eyes was terrible to see. “Take him away,” she told the guard. “We’ll revisit the terms of your sentence after you’ve taken some time to consider the matter,” she told Raynz. “Because I assure you, we are not finished.”

The guard-looking a bit green-roughly seized Raynz’s arm. Raynz, still smiling, let himself be led away. The Queen maintained the regal pose until the door had swung safely shut, then looked at Glitch.

He was sitting up. Characteristically, he was comforting DG as best he could manage as she sobbed incoherently into his shoulder.

The Queen bent to join the embrace, DG sandwiched between them, and they just held each other for a few moments. Eventually, DG lifted her head and said clearly, “He’s not touching you. Ever again. I wouldn’t put it past that lunatic to deliberately screw things up, and I. Won’t. Let that happen.”

Glitch just nodded, reaching to wipe a stray tear off her face. “Don’t cry,” he said quietly. “It’s okay. Please don’t cry.”

She blinked away another freshet of tears, and nodded. Very gently, she reached for the zipper, pulled it closed. “You’re the best friend I’ve ever had, Glitch,” she told him. “And even if they never put your brain back, I don’t care. I’ll always love you. Just the way you are.”

The moment the words were out, she could tell-heartfelt though they’d been-they’d been the wrong ones. His face went empty, dead-except for his eyes, which were an ocean of pain-and he pulled away from her, slid himself backwards off the table, and stood, with the metal table and his agony a sudden barrier between them.

“Ambrose…?” The Queen, one hand on her heart and the other extended towards him, was as upset as any of them.

He closed his eyes for a moment, then shook his head. “The name’s Glitch,” he said, with a painful sort of finality. “I’m sorry, your majesty. But it is.” He gulped. “By your leave…?”

The Queen did not trust herself to speak. She nodded, and he left the room.

DG turned to her mother. “I didn’t mean to hurt him,” she murmured helplessly.

“I know, my dearest,” her mother assured her. “And he knows. He always…” Her voice broke, and wordlessly, she reached for her daughter. Comforter and comforted, turn and turn about, they sat together in the bleak examining room for some time.