FIC: Once Upon A Time
Title: Once Upon A Time Part 1/?
Pairing: Eventual Cain/Ambrose
Rating: PG-13
Disclaimer: Despite my seize for power, nothing came of it.
Summary: During the Cains' work to the South, something goes awry. Ambrose has to help, but also faces his own perils along the way.
Notes: This part is dedicated to luchia13. FEEL WELL!
There is often a fallacy in stories, in that they end with ‘happily ever after’, though the truth of it is, most endings are just a precursor to the very next Once Upon A Time. When the evil Witch fell and order was restored to the O.Z., this was precisely what happened.
The tale never does end. It merely becomes permutated, the theme and the characters changing, but the setting never dissipating truly.
Once upon a time, there was a great kingdom known as the O.Z…
*
“Where exactly does magic come from?” DG had asked quietly to Ambrose in passing while they ate their breakfast amidst the long and great tables of the Dining Hall. With Wyatt and Jeb Cain no longer amongst them and Raw at their side, DG and Ambrose had taken to huddling in their own small world, Azkadellia occasionally joining.
Ambrose - who had been that name for many a month now with the aid of great things such as science and magic - had been eating his porridge, spoon half in the air before a babbled ‘Ah’ came out. “Well, the myth says that Dorothy Gale had magic slippers and it was these that gave her great power. It slowly permeated her whole being and all the children she had were born with magic,” he explained, eyes glazed over as he thought of the many annuals past.
DG popped a piece of bread into her mouth thoughtfully. “Wouldn’t that mean that there were cousins or something? People with magic who weren’t Royal?”
Ambrose’s smile was sly and knowing. “You do take after your mother,” he praised fondly. “Always a step ahead. That’s exactly right. The lineage charts are kept in the library and you can puzzle out just how many fifth, sixth, and seventh cousins you have,” he promised. “I think I’m…twelfth-twice-removed?” Most people in the upper echelons of the Royal Court had a way to trace themselves back to Dorothy Gale. It wasn’t very important so much as it was a common trait.
Those like the Cains, like Raw, like Ahamo, however, had no such claim on lineage.
“You’re related to me?” DG echoed with a bemused and incredulous tone. “That’s pretty cool.”
“Twelfth-twice-removed,” Ambrose said again. “We’re as related as llamas are to lions.”
“That’s a very strange analogy,” DG said thoughtfully, using a piece of bacon to punctuate her point and nearly launching herself over the table and half-over Ambrose when a letter was brought to the head table by one of the pages, who was greatly accustomed to this kind of behaviour from the Princess. “It’s from Jeb!” she announced excitedly. “I’d know his writing anywhere.”
Jeb tended to send the letters as Raw had a tendency to scrawl unintelligible words and Cain did the same. Ambrose really suspected Cain of doing that on purpose so he wouldn’t be the one appointed to doing correspondences. So, it was left to either Jeb or whatever random person within the Resistance who was willing to do the men’s job for them. DG ripped open the letter without much grace at all, wandering back and forth in front of Ambrose as her eyes scanned it.
Then she stopped pacing, blinked the once, and Ambrose knew something was wrong.
“DG?”
DG glanced up at Ambrose, looking young and looking lost. “Um. Jeb says that they’ve moved into the lakes and that they’re doing their best to chart the area while resettling towns and keeping the peace.”
That didn’t seem to be anything to warrant DG’s reaction. “And?” he prodded gently.
“And Cain’s gone missing,” she said, staring at the words. “I’ve read it like, four times, but he can’t possibly mean anything else. Listen… ‘Father hasn’t been back in two days. Normally when he does this, he’s back by nightfall. We’ll keep searching, but no sign of him yet.’” She stared up at Ambrose, shaking her head. “We have to do something, we should get out there.”
“DG,” Ambrose chastised lightly. “Jeb and Raw know what they’re doing and it would take us days to even reach the South. If we had to go by foot, especially in this climate, it could take upward of a week. We’d be helpless.”
“But we’d be there!” she stubbornly argued. “Glitch!”
It was dirty play and they both knew it. Glitch was a shadow of his past, something that he had tucked away in a little corner to be thought of only when he was truly comfortable with the many annuals spent with only half a brain. Glitch was the name that devoted utter, undying loyalty to DG come hell or Papays.
“I can’t let you go,” Ambrose said, voice fraught with tension and fear. And mostly, with anger that he couldn’t just let her off into the wilderness, but now that there was a Queen to contend with who spent all her days worrying about her daughters…well, he couldn’t, in his right mind, let DG traipse off on a wild goose chase when Jeb could most likely handle it. “Wait for more letters. Okay?”
And so they did.
A week later, no word came.
Two weeks and nothing.
It took exactly sixteen days by the Ozian calendar for word to come to DG and when she opened the envelope, it was to a sigh of relief, giving Ambrose a sunny smile that could rival the O.Z.’s suns themselves. “Jeb says he came back the other day. He’d just been corralling prisoners and one of the roads washed out.”
“What did I tell you?” Ambrose said smugly, posture lifting as the smug satisfaction of being right settled into him.
The rest of the day was spent in relative ease as they wandered the gardens and Azkadellia even joined them at one point while DG took to wandering deeper into the woods. Ambrose had let them go off with a stern warning, but one look at DG when she promised to not let go told him that he would never have to worry about that ever again in his life.
The suns were setting while he made his way back to the palace, his coat trailing behind him in graceful swishes that were accentuated by his long strides.
“Sir?” the Page that had delivered Jeb’s letters to DG was standing by the back entranceway and wearing a polite expression. “There’s a letter for you. I delivered it to your lab as I was told and…”
“Thank you,” Ambrose cut him off with a hand raised in the air to signify that he didn’t need to say another word. He cast one more fond look over his shoulder at the girls before making his way into the lab to find an envelope bearing the Cain seal on the back, wax pressed hard to keep the envelope folded.
The writing was clearly Jeb’s.
Why send two copies? Surely they would have known that Ambrose would see the letter they sent to DG? Ambrose shook his head and set it aside, determined to read it after a round of experimentation. It had been DG’s comments at breakfast the other week that had started the gears chugging away and cycling down foreign and dark paths that held secrets and discoveries waiting to be had. And Ambrose, oh, he wanted to find them.
In the end, the little doohickey acted a little like a magnet to discover charged particles of magic in the air and using that good ol’ Mt, sucked them out and put them in a contained area (that acted as a vacuum) to then be applied to anything that could best benefit with the use of some magic.
He’d locked the doors and had dressed himself in protective mesh before entering the area of his lab designated for this experiment, his blood rushing so quickly that he could hear his heart pounding away and it was intoxicating. The only downside was that Ambrose wished that he could have someone there with him. DG would definitely appreciate it and he supposed Azkadellia would, but he still wasn’t sure he wanted to put a modicum of power under her nose.
She might be free of the Witch, but fifteen annuals’ worth of influence was a hard thing to ignore.
The whole of the operation didn’t take very long to set up and before long, the whole lab was thrumming with what Ambrose could only determine was magic and that his postulation of free particles in the air had been right. It was a shame that the scientific pillars of the O.Z. were taking so long to rebuild because with this discovery, he could have earned himself quite a hefty sum, not to mention a travelling circuit around the educational institutes. But that was the old days and…
“Ah. Ow,” Ambrose said, when he realized he’d nicked his elbow on a sharp corner and caused a tear in his suit. “Ow! That smarts!” he yowled when he caught sight of the free blood dripping. Before he could start fussing, he shifted and yanked for the power-bar, pushing it up just temporarily to see if he could achieve the pinnacle of the experiment, to be able to watch the magic dance in the air before him.
But nothing happened.
Ambrose could feel the magic all around him in that intoxicating rush that made his head spin in circles, just like DG’s little doll. It was so obviously there and had been from the moment he began to draw on the magic all about the palace, that free-range stuff and not the power that belonged to DG and her family.
But there remained nothing to be seen.
He sighed and turned off the power switch, rubbing at his forehead as his mind tried to pinpoint the exact point in the calculation that things had gone awry. Maybe…well, maybe he needed to add another element. Maybe Moratainium wasn’t enough. Maybe if he added a chemical and a phosphorous element to the process that would dye the particles so that when he activated the switch, then he would able to see them.
He scribbled his notes down in his manual as he took off the labcoat to inspect just how bad the damage was. “Oh, cripes,” he muttered with a sigh, trying to stop the bleeding with just his palm. In his mind, he could hear Cain saying something about it being ‘just a tiny wound, why, you want me to kiss it better?’ and then he went pink and felt stupid for it, because no one was around to either hear his thoughts or see him go pink.
Those little flirtations, the ones that had gone absolutely nowhere, those had been a mainstay when Cain had been at the palace. He would say something or do something and Ambrose would go pink and volley his own flirtation in return. It had all been innocent and playful as neither of them was ready for anything of that kind. In fact, Ambrose still sometimes wondered if he and Cain weren’t using each other for practice on how to behave like a normal human being after so long being something else.
He hardly minded. It was nice to have a shallow offering, just a sampling of what things could be like if he ever decided to become a real live human being again, now that he had the full brain to mimic the other normals.
His elbow was patched in no time though he had no kiss to make it better.
While he was rubbing a hand up and down, he used his other hand to slowly pry open the seal from Jeb’s letter and open it, scanning the introductory passage (more of the same ‘hello, how are you, Raw is well despite his hairballs, I am well, the food is terrible, the charts are closer to being finished, give the Queen our word, Cain is still missing’).
Wait.
Ambrose froze where he was. That had to be impossible. He had to have misread. Just that day, they had received word that he was fine.
No. No, no, no, screamed Ambrose’s lesser-controlled half, the one that had been so dominant with Glitch. He grasped hold of the nearest surface as he read on.
Ambrose,
Hello, how are you? We’re well down in the South, Raw has been having less issues since the ladies of the last village gave him his grooming. I am well, though the food leaves something to be desired. We hope you’ll tell the Queen we’re making great progress despite my father’s continued absence.
I know this contradicts the other message we sent, but Raw thought of something and he has a point. We both know that it’s not safe for DG to be out here with the political climate so tetchy and if she knew about Father, nothing would stop her. We search for him every day, but we cannot find him and Raw and I both want your help. Please hurry. Every day that passes bodes worse for my Father.
-J. Cain
It took less than five seconds for Ambrose to rush out of the room, coat dumped in a pile on the floor as he charged through the halls to gain the Queen’s permission to leave immediately for the South.
*
There were moments when Ambrose hated the process of rebuilding a realm and this was pointedly one of them. He was standing outside the tower with his things and a horse, staring forward into the distance with a distinct sneer on his face. The Queen had permitted him to go South, of course, had not even hesitated when he showed her the letter and told her of the grave need to not mention this to either DG or Azkadellia. The Queen had promised to tell them that Ambrose was simply performing a delivery and taking a much-needed vacation in the meantime.
“Oh, and Ambrose?” the Queen had asked so kindly. “There is one matter that you could help us with on your travel South as you will be passing the newly finished prison for those who are most volatile. Perhaps you could bring some validity to this notion of a delivery.”
The Tower had been acting as a temporary hold for those before they could be held at trial, but there were certain criminals who required more guarding, higher protection, and just that extra degree of caution. The most discouraging thing of all since the Monarchy had been put back into place was just how many people needed to stand trial, so many so that Ambrose had to move prisoners out of the Tower just to make room for new ones.
And the prisoner…
“Come on, Zero, let’s get going,” Ambrose muttered when the guards brought him out. He had shackles and Ambrose had the only key for them, but he was taking no precautions, bringing along a carriage. He and Ambrose were to sit in the back while the driver brought them towards the ever-washed-away roads to the South and Ambrose wasn’t relishing a single moment of the forthcoming journey.
Zero just gave Ambrose that slimy smile he had. “And here I thought this would be a boring trip.”
He was loaded up first and Ambrose took one last look at the Tower, pressing his palm to Jeb’s letter, tucked away carefully inside his new green coat, the embroidery so new that not a stitch was out of place. He gave the driver a single nod before climbing into the back of the carriage and sitting opposite Zero.
Boring was most definitely not the word for what this trip would be.
tbc
Pairing: Eventual Cain/Ambrose
Rating: PG-13
Disclaimer: Despite my seize for power, nothing came of it.
Summary: During the Cains' work to the South, something goes awry. Ambrose has to help, but also faces his own perils along the way.
Notes: This part is dedicated to luchia13. FEEL WELL!
There is often a fallacy in stories, in that they end with ‘happily ever after’, though the truth of it is, most endings are just a precursor to the very next Once Upon A Time. When the evil Witch fell and order was restored to the O.Z., this was precisely what happened.
The tale never does end. It merely becomes permutated, the theme and the characters changing, but the setting never dissipating truly.
Once upon a time, there was a great kingdom known as the O.Z…
*
“Where exactly does magic come from?” DG had asked quietly to Ambrose in passing while they ate their breakfast amidst the long and great tables of the Dining Hall. With Wyatt and Jeb Cain no longer amongst them and Raw at their side, DG and Ambrose had taken to huddling in their own small world, Azkadellia occasionally joining.
Ambrose - who had been that name for many a month now with the aid of great things such as science and magic - had been eating his porridge, spoon half in the air before a babbled ‘Ah’ came out. “Well, the myth says that Dorothy Gale had magic slippers and it was these that gave her great power. It slowly permeated her whole being and all the children she had were born with magic,” he explained, eyes glazed over as he thought of the many annuals past.
DG popped a piece of bread into her mouth thoughtfully. “Wouldn’t that mean that there were cousins or something? People with magic who weren’t Royal?”
Ambrose’s smile was sly and knowing. “You do take after your mother,” he praised fondly. “Always a step ahead. That’s exactly right. The lineage charts are kept in the library and you can puzzle out just how many fifth, sixth, and seventh cousins you have,” he promised. “I think I’m…twelfth-twice-removed?” Most people in the upper echelons of the Royal Court had a way to trace themselves back to Dorothy Gale. It wasn’t very important so much as it was a common trait.
Those like the Cains, like Raw, like Ahamo, however, had no such claim on lineage.
“You’re related to me?” DG echoed with a bemused and incredulous tone. “That’s pretty cool.”
“Twelfth-twice-removed,” Ambrose said again. “We’re as related as llamas are to lions.”
“That’s a very strange analogy,” DG said thoughtfully, using a piece of bacon to punctuate her point and nearly launching herself over the table and half-over Ambrose when a letter was brought to the head table by one of the pages, who was greatly accustomed to this kind of behaviour from the Princess. “It’s from Jeb!” she announced excitedly. “I’d know his writing anywhere.”
Jeb tended to send the letters as Raw had a tendency to scrawl unintelligible words and Cain did the same. Ambrose really suspected Cain of doing that on purpose so he wouldn’t be the one appointed to doing correspondences. So, it was left to either Jeb or whatever random person within the Resistance who was willing to do the men’s job for them. DG ripped open the letter without much grace at all, wandering back and forth in front of Ambrose as her eyes scanned it.
Then she stopped pacing, blinked the once, and Ambrose knew something was wrong.
“DG?”
DG glanced up at Ambrose, looking young and looking lost. “Um. Jeb says that they’ve moved into the lakes and that they’re doing their best to chart the area while resettling towns and keeping the peace.”
That didn’t seem to be anything to warrant DG’s reaction. “And?” he prodded gently.
“And Cain’s gone missing,” she said, staring at the words. “I’ve read it like, four times, but he can’t possibly mean anything else. Listen… ‘Father hasn’t been back in two days. Normally when he does this, he’s back by nightfall. We’ll keep searching, but no sign of him yet.’” She stared up at Ambrose, shaking her head. “We have to do something, we should get out there.”
“DG,” Ambrose chastised lightly. “Jeb and Raw know what they’re doing and it would take us days to even reach the South. If we had to go by foot, especially in this climate, it could take upward of a week. We’d be helpless.”
“But we’d be there!” she stubbornly argued. “Glitch!”
It was dirty play and they both knew it. Glitch was a shadow of his past, something that he had tucked away in a little corner to be thought of only when he was truly comfortable with the many annuals spent with only half a brain. Glitch was the name that devoted utter, undying loyalty to DG come hell or Papays.
“I can’t let you go,” Ambrose said, voice fraught with tension and fear. And mostly, with anger that he couldn’t just let her off into the wilderness, but now that there was a Queen to contend with who spent all her days worrying about her daughters…well, he couldn’t, in his right mind, let DG traipse off on a wild goose chase when Jeb could most likely handle it. “Wait for more letters. Okay?”
And so they did.
A week later, no word came.
Two weeks and nothing.
It took exactly sixteen days by the Ozian calendar for word to come to DG and when she opened the envelope, it was to a sigh of relief, giving Ambrose a sunny smile that could rival the O.Z.’s suns themselves. “Jeb says he came back the other day. He’d just been corralling prisoners and one of the roads washed out.”
“What did I tell you?” Ambrose said smugly, posture lifting as the smug satisfaction of being right settled into him.
The rest of the day was spent in relative ease as they wandered the gardens and Azkadellia even joined them at one point while DG took to wandering deeper into the woods. Ambrose had let them go off with a stern warning, but one look at DG when she promised to not let go told him that he would never have to worry about that ever again in his life.
The suns were setting while he made his way back to the palace, his coat trailing behind him in graceful swishes that were accentuated by his long strides.
“Sir?” the Page that had delivered Jeb’s letters to DG was standing by the back entranceway and wearing a polite expression. “There’s a letter for you. I delivered it to your lab as I was told and…”
“Thank you,” Ambrose cut him off with a hand raised in the air to signify that he didn’t need to say another word. He cast one more fond look over his shoulder at the girls before making his way into the lab to find an envelope bearing the Cain seal on the back, wax pressed hard to keep the envelope folded.
The writing was clearly Jeb’s.
Why send two copies? Surely they would have known that Ambrose would see the letter they sent to DG? Ambrose shook his head and set it aside, determined to read it after a round of experimentation. It had been DG’s comments at breakfast the other week that had started the gears chugging away and cycling down foreign and dark paths that held secrets and discoveries waiting to be had. And Ambrose, oh, he wanted to find them.
In the end, the little doohickey acted a little like a magnet to discover charged particles of magic in the air and using that good ol’ Mt, sucked them out and put them in a contained area (that acted as a vacuum) to then be applied to anything that could best benefit with the use of some magic.
He’d locked the doors and had dressed himself in protective mesh before entering the area of his lab designated for this experiment, his blood rushing so quickly that he could hear his heart pounding away and it was intoxicating. The only downside was that Ambrose wished that he could have someone there with him. DG would definitely appreciate it and he supposed Azkadellia would, but he still wasn’t sure he wanted to put a modicum of power under her nose.
She might be free of the Witch, but fifteen annuals’ worth of influence was a hard thing to ignore.
The whole of the operation didn’t take very long to set up and before long, the whole lab was thrumming with what Ambrose could only determine was magic and that his postulation of free particles in the air had been right. It was a shame that the scientific pillars of the O.Z. were taking so long to rebuild because with this discovery, he could have earned himself quite a hefty sum, not to mention a travelling circuit around the educational institutes. But that was the old days and…
“Ah. Ow,” Ambrose said, when he realized he’d nicked his elbow on a sharp corner and caused a tear in his suit. “Ow! That smarts!” he yowled when he caught sight of the free blood dripping. Before he could start fussing, he shifted and yanked for the power-bar, pushing it up just temporarily to see if he could achieve the pinnacle of the experiment, to be able to watch the magic dance in the air before him.
But nothing happened.
Ambrose could feel the magic all around him in that intoxicating rush that made his head spin in circles, just like DG’s little doll. It was so obviously there and had been from the moment he began to draw on the magic all about the palace, that free-range stuff and not the power that belonged to DG and her family.
But there remained nothing to be seen.
He sighed and turned off the power switch, rubbing at his forehead as his mind tried to pinpoint the exact point in the calculation that things had gone awry. Maybe…well, maybe he needed to add another element. Maybe Moratainium wasn’t enough. Maybe if he added a chemical and a phosphorous element to the process that would dye the particles so that when he activated the switch, then he would able to see them.
He scribbled his notes down in his manual as he took off the labcoat to inspect just how bad the damage was. “Oh, cripes,” he muttered with a sigh, trying to stop the bleeding with just his palm. In his mind, he could hear Cain saying something about it being ‘just a tiny wound, why, you want me to kiss it better?’ and then he went pink and felt stupid for it, because no one was around to either hear his thoughts or see him go pink.
Those little flirtations, the ones that had gone absolutely nowhere, those had been a mainstay when Cain had been at the palace. He would say something or do something and Ambrose would go pink and volley his own flirtation in return. It had all been innocent and playful as neither of them was ready for anything of that kind. In fact, Ambrose still sometimes wondered if he and Cain weren’t using each other for practice on how to behave like a normal human being after so long being something else.
He hardly minded. It was nice to have a shallow offering, just a sampling of what things could be like if he ever decided to become a real live human being again, now that he had the full brain to mimic the other normals.
His elbow was patched in no time though he had no kiss to make it better.
While he was rubbing a hand up and down, he used his other hand to slowly pry open the seal from Jeb’s letter and open it, scanning the introductory passage (more of the same ‘hello, how are you, Raw is well despite his hairballs, I am well, the food is terrible, the charts are closer to being finished, give the Queen our word, Cain is still missing’).
Wait.
Ambrose froze where he was. That had to be impossible. He had to have misread. Just that day, they had received word that he was fine.
No. No, no, no, screamed Ambrose’s lesser-controlled half, the one that had been so dominant with Glitch. He grasped hold of the nearest surface as he read on.
Ambrose,
Hello, how are you? We’re well down in the South, Raw has been having less issues since the ladies of the last village gave him his grooming. I am well, though the food leaves something to be desired. We hope you’ll tell the Queen we’re making great progress despite my father’s continued absence.
I know this contradicts the other message we sent, but Raw thought of something and he has a point. We both know that it’s not safe for DG to be out here with the political climate so tetchy and if she knew about Father, nothing would stop her. We search for him every day, but we cannot find him and Raw and I both want your help. Please hurry. Every day that passes bodes worse for my Father.
-J. Cain
It took less than five seconds for Ambrose to rush out of the room, coat dumped in a pile on the floor as he charged through the halls to gain the Queen’s permission to leave immediately for the South.
*
There were moments when Ambrose hated the process of rebuilding a realm and this was pointedly one of them. He was standing outside the tower with his things and a horse, staring forward into the distance with a distinct sneer on his face. The Queen had permitted him to go South, of course, had not even hesitated when he showed her the letter and told her of the grave need to not mention this to either DG or Azkadellia. The Queen had promised to tell them that Ambrose was simply performing a delivery and taking a much-needed vacation in the meantime.
“Oh, and Ambrose?” the Queen had asked so kindly. “There is one matter that you could help us with on your travel South as you will be passing the newly finished prison for those who are most volatile. Perhaps you could bring some validity to this notion of a delivery.”
The Tower had been acting as a temporary hold for those before they could be held at trial, but there were certain criminals who required more guarding, higher protection, and just that extra degree of caution. The most discouraging thing of all since the Monarchy had been put back into place was just how many people needed to stand trial, so many so that Ambrose had to move prisoners out of the Tower just to make room for new ones.
And the prisoner…
“Come on, Zero, let’s get going,” Ambrose muttered when the guards brought him out. He had shackles and Ambrose had the only key for them, but he was taking no precautions, bringing along a carriage. He and Ambrose were to sit in the back while the driver brought them towards the ever-washed-away roads to the South and Ambrose wasn’t relishing a single moment of the forthcoming journey.
Zero just gave Ambrose that slimy smile he had. “And here I thought this would be a boring trip.”
He was loaded up first and Ambrose took one last look at the Tower, pressing his palm to Jeb’s letter, tucked away carefully inside his new green coat, the embroidery so new that not a stitch was out of place. He gave the driver a single nod before climbing into the back of the carriage and sitting opposite Zero.
Boring was most definitely not the word for what this trip would be.
tbc