...You Don't Forget
Hi! So this is in the same universe as my "Evil Like That..." (which you can find here--a pg-13-R Glitch/Azkadellia that never got as trashy and explicit as I'd thought it would). You shouldn't have to have read that to be able to follow this (especially not this chapter), especially if you can accept that he had a weird, bad, sexy time of it with Az after she took his brain out. Though it would be nice. :) Much thanks to the wonderful people who commented and encouraged me to continue it, and especially to cabinetmaking for the excellent brain/psych discussions!
Title: ...You Don't Forget, Ch. 1/?
Rating: PG, in this chapter, though it might eventually up to R, later, with issues and kink.
Summary: Ambrose will have to adjust to having a more reliable memory (and a few new glitches) after rebrainment, and to piecing together events that he would rather not have remembered. Cain makes a good, quiet sounding board. This chapter begins just before surgery, and is done in a kind of vignette style, a collection of small pieces. Mostly sweet.
Warnings: An unreliable corpus callosum, alien hand syndrome. Sweetness.
Words: 1957
Crossposted to tinman_fic.
Feedback is Very much appreciated!
"Okay, this is just. . . really too weird," DG said, but the surgeon snapped at her to hush. His pen scratched on furiously.
"Sorry," she sighed, and backed off, pacing away across the room. From under her breath came, "It's still really weird, though."
Glitch--Ambrose--was murmuring in a steady, quiet stream, and the surgeon was having enough trouble keeping up with him as it was, without having to block out the mutterings of the discontent. The headcase had both palms planted on the glass that was separating him from his brain--at which he was staring with adoration--and Raw had one beside them and the other rested gently on the matted curls, completing the circuit.
And Ambrose, thus connected to himself, was giving instructions to the surgeon.
About reconnecting his brain.
To itself.
DG was having a very hard time keeping quiet about this bizarre arrangement. It made some sense, of course--Ambrose's whole brain was one of the most brilliant in the O.Z., and if anyone would have useful insight on how to undo the damage they had inflicted on him, it would be, well, him, but it didn't make it any less strange.
Cain, at least, was able to restrain himself from a running commentary. He was hanging over the scene with an air of diffuse protectiveness, silent and careful. He didn't really know what he would do, if something happened--or even what might happen, at this stage--but he'd be ready to do something, if it did.
He couldn't imagine doing anything else, being anywhere else.
***
Cain sat down quietly beside an ashen-faced Glitch, who was waiting outside of the surgical ward.
"What's up?" he asked, with a gentle elbow. "You nervous or something?"
Glitch tried to smile, but it flitted away. "I think--I think some things have happened in my life that I'm not going to like remembering with more regularity and clarity," he said, fiddling with his sterile gown.
Cain patted his back awkwardly, and said, "Me, too."
And when Glitch thought about that for a moment, he leaned over and laid his head on Cain's shoulder.
They sat in silence until one of the surgeons came out of the door and nodded.
"Stay?" Glitch asked helplessly.
"I'm not leaving," Cain promised, and he didn't.
***
"Count back from one-hu--"
"Nonono, I can't do that. I'd--I'd rather... I'd rather. . . Cain?" he called, helplessly.
"Yeah?" Cain's face, covered carefully under the eyes by a towel, came fuzzily into view.
"Say something?" Glitch pleaded.
"I'll keep an eye out for you. Sweet dreams, sugar."
Glitch closed his eyes and sighed. "Thank you. Sweet dreams, sugar, sweet, sugar..." and this was how he counted until the world faded peacefully away.
***
"Good morning, sunshine."
"Mn. Wasn't it 'sweetheart,' last time?"
"Just trying to keep you on your toes, princess."
Ambrose 'hmph'ed, rolled over, and went back to sleep.
***
The zipper was still there.
"In case we have to go back in for further repairs," the quailing surgeon had explained, when Cain had made a somewhat forceful inquiry about it. They'd uncovered the unconscious Ambrose's scalp after a few hours to check for any leakage, and the reality of it was clear to Cain for the first time.
"That's disgusting." He couldn't place why it offended him so much, when the zipper hadn't bothered him beforehand. But now it was a Mark. A scar the man shouldn't have to bear, after all the rest that had happened. Cain bit back bile.
"It's... it's convenient--safer!" the surgeon amended, when it became clear "convenience" was not a good (or safe) reason to give the Tin Man. "If--if just in case--we have to, it will be less traumatic to, ah, open him again."
Cain left to be sick, but after that, he did not leave again.
***
Ambrose twitched, as he dreamed.
Cain watched, and wondered of what.
**********
Ratatatatat. Ratatatatat.
"I don't feel any different," Ambrose insisted, his eyes like a cow's, huge and doleful. He couldn't stop drumming his fingers on the windowsill.
Ratatatatat, ratatatat.
"You realize that you should, though," Cain reminded him. "Which is a sign that you do, actually."
This startled him out of his distraction, though his left hand kept drumming. "What?"
"Well, you remember that you just got your marbles back, don't you?"
"Of course! Anyone with half a--oh."
"Yeah," Cain said, significantly.
"...I guess I do feel a little different."
"That's what I thought."
Ratatatatat. Ratatatatat. Ratatatatat.
***
"I've realized that my brain has been storing information improperly for the last several annuals," Ambrose was explaining, swinging every step ponderously as they strolled. His hands were clasped tightly behind his back, and he didn't seem able to keep his eyes off of the ground beneath him. "Because my synapses weren't always firing quite right," (Cain let him get away with this understatement) "information wasn't being encoded any more properly than it was being accessed, if you understand what I mean."
"Not exactly," Cain admitted.
Ambrose nodded, considering how to go on. He shuffled his heel against the gravel walk and skipped a step very solemnly. "Well, all right. Imagine that for a period of time, you saw blue and thought it was orange, and saw orange and thought it was blue. Afterwards, you're going to remember having seen orange skies and blue poppies, even once you're seeing correctly again. That's--well, that's a gross oversimplification, but... it has the right feeling, I think."
"Surreal, too. But I can follow it," Cain said, and smiled unevenly, though Ambrose didn't see.
"Or this is a better example," Ambrose went on, dreamily, as if his friend hadn't spoken. "If you kept a filing system, but you didn't have the letter... the letter 'A,' say, you wouldn't file anything under 'A.' You'd file my name under 'M,' perhaps, because that's what comes next, or under 'G' because that makes sense, too. So once you'd learned the letter 'A' and made a place for it, and went to look for all the 'A' names in the world, they'd be scattered throughout the cabinet, and--"
"Yeah," Cain interrupted him, as gently as he could, with a hand on his shoulder, "I think I get it."
Ambrose's eyes darted up, and for a moment he looked like he was pouting, but when he looked away, again (via a glance at Cain's hand), his grin was poorly hidden.
Cain arched an eyebrow suspiciously. "What?"
His laugh was more poorly suppressed than his grin. "Nothing."
***
Ratatatatat. Ratatatatat. Ratatatatat.
"Did I always do this?" Ambrose asked, abruptly, over breakfast.
"No," Cain said, a little too quickly. A little too eagerly. "That's--that's completely new, the, uh, endless. Endless finger drumming. Some kind of glitch," he added, significantly.
Ratatatatat. Ratatatatat.
"Hm. Well, I can't seem to stop," Ambrose said, unbothered, as he regarded his errant hand.
"No?" Cain looked like he was sinking by centimeters.
"Nope!"
Cain sighed, and nodded.
***
"I was right-handed," Ambrose explained, as he stirred his tea. "I had a very dominant left brain, you know--have, I suppose. But after all this time without it, I'd gone to relying heavily on my left hand, my right hemisphere. It seems like they're at cross-purposes, sometimes, now. I've got a handle on the right side of my body again, of course," he ting'd the spoon his right hand was holding gently against the cup, to prove it, "but the left sometimes has got a mind of its own. So to speak."
"Ah," Cain said, patiently. "Is, uh, that why it's on my leg?"
"Hmm? Oh, dear."
***
"Avoidance, contrary behavior, and engagement with objects," Ambrose began, from no where, as he often did.
Cain was getting better at picking up on the trains of thought that barreled through, though, and after assessing the situation, he hazarded a guess. "...Your glitch hand?"
Ambrose was watching his left hand ("the one with the glitch," they were saying now, mostly affectionately) as it hovered over the stone curve of the bridge, not quite touching down on the surface. He'd been experimenting with walking to Cain's left, for once, to spare his walking companion's arm being gripped by his less directable fingers, and the hand had drifted aimlessly since.
"The alien hand has three basic modes," Ambrose confirmed. "Moving away from contact--which it's doing, now--is one. Another is to be contrary--undoing the work of the other hand, like how it pulled back the bowl I pushed towards you, this morning?"
"I remember," Cain began, but Ambrose hadn't really given him a pause, and kept going.
"The third is to use the objects within reach. Unbuttoning the buttons of my coat, picking up pencils..."
"Grabbing me," Cain offered, almost under his breath, but Ambrose's distraction was selective, and this time, he paused.
"Well, yes, there is that," he said, studiously watching his hand float.
Cain smiled.
The next time they walked, he stopped and moved Ambrose bodily to his right, and the glitch hand again seized onto his elbow like an anchor.
When Ambrose pestered him long enough as to why, he admitted, "I just didn't like seeing it wander," and shrugged. "It looked kind of lost."
Ambrose didn't try to spare Cain any more glitches, after that.
***
"Hey, Ambrose," Cain began, and his tone was a little strange.
"Hmm?" Ambrose was too deep in his book to really look up. He was lying on his stomach with the book pinned under his right elbow, so that he could keep using the hand to pick berries from the bag in front of him. He'd given up on the glitch hand for the moment; it was busily doing whatever it was it felt like doing, apparently to Cain's interest, since the Tin Man's sole activity for the last half hour been to watch it.
"Have you, uh, seen your left hand writing, lately?"
"Mmhmm." Ambrose angled awkwardly for a few more berries.
Cain thought he had an idea, now, of why the man's lips were always stained so dark--he'd eaten half the bag they'd brought out. Sometimes it seemed as though he ate nothing but berries.
After a moment, Cain asked, "So, does it write things that make sense? That you mean?"
"Mm," Ambrose swallowed, "sometimes."
Cain watched him.
Cain waited for him to elaborate. Cain waited for him to address the current situation. Cain waited for him to say anything. But of all the times the man could pick to be quiet...
"So, is this true?" Cain eventually asked, impatient.
"What?" Ambrose blinked, looked up, and finally set the book and berries aside. "What are you talking about, is what true?"
Cain gestured to the space between the tree roots beneath them, where an idle finger had been digging letters in the dirt, and was tracing the phrase there over and again.
"Oh." Ambrose paused to regard his work, considered, and then nodded. "Yes."
And with that, he went back to his book. His left hand was still following the "v."
"You do?"
"Yep."
Cain stared for a moment, but found that he had no more questions, and that he was content to watch the glitch hand swear its master's love for him in the dirt.
(Link to Chapter Two)
Title: ...You Don't Forget, Ch. 1/?
Rating: PG, in this chapter, though it might eventually up to R, later, with issues and kink.
Summary: Ambrose will have to adjust to having a more reliable memory (and a few new glitches) after rebrainment, and to piecing together events that he would rather not have remembered. Cain makes a good, quiet sounding board. This chapter begins just before surgery, and is done in a kind of vignette style, a collection of small pieces. Mostly sweet.
Warnings: An unreliable corpus callosum, alien hand syndrome. Sweetness.
Words: 1957
Crossposted to tinman_fic.
Feedback is Very much appreciated!
"Okay, this is just. . . really too weird," DG said, but the surgeon snapped at her to hush. His pen scratched on furiously.
"Sorry," she sighed, and backed off, pacing away across the room. From under her breath came, "It's still really weird, though."
Glitch--Ambrose--was murmuring in a steady, quiet stream, and the surgeon was having enough trouble keeping up with him as it was, without having to block out the mutterings of the discontent. The headcase had both palms planted on the glass that was separating him from his brain--at which he was staring with adoration--and Raw had one beside them and the other rested gently on the matted curls, completing the circuit.
And Ambrose, thus connected to himself, was giving instructions to the surgeon.
About reconnecting his brain.
To itself.
DG was having a very hard time keeping quiet about this bizarre arrangement. It made some sense, of course--Ambrose's whole brain was one of the most brilliant in the O.Z., and if anyone would have useful insight on how to undo the damage they had inflicted on him, it would be, well, him, but it didn't make it any less strange.
Cain, at least, was able to restrain himself from a running commentary. He was hanging over the scene with an air of diffuse protectiveness, silent and careful. He didn't really know what he would do, if something happened--or even what might happen, at this stage--but he'd be ready to do something, if it did.
He couldn't imagine doing anything else, being anywhere else.
***
Cain sat down quietly beside an ashen-faced Glitch, who was waiting outside of the surgical ward.
"What's up?" he asked, with a gentle elbow. "You nervous or something?"
Glitch tried to smile, but it flitted away. "I think--I think some things have happened in my life that I'm not going to like remembering with more regularity and clarity," he said, fiddling with his sterile gown.
Cain patted his back awkwardly, and said, "Me, too."
And when Glitch thought about that for a moment, he leaned over and laid his head on Cain's shoulder.
They sat in silence until one of the surgeons came out of the door and nodded.
"Stay?" Glitch asked helplessly.
"I'm not leaving," Cain promised, and he didn't.
***
"Count back from one-hu--"
"Nonono, I can't do that. I'd--I'd rather... I'd rather. . . Cain?" he called, helplessly.
"Yeah?" Cain's face, covered carefully under the eyes by a towel, came fuzzily into view.
"Say something?" Glitch pleaded.
"I'll keep an eye out for you. Sweet dreams, sugar."
Glitch closed his eyes and sighed. "Thank you. Sweet dreams, sugar, sweet, sugar..." and this was how he counted until the world faded peacefully away.
***
"Good morning, sunshine."
"Mn. Wasn't it 'sweetheart,' last time?"
"Just trying to keep you on your toes, princess."
Ambrose 'hmph'ed, rolled over, and went back to sleep.
***
The zipper was still there.
"In case we have to go back in for further repairs," the quailing surgeon had explained, when Cain had made a somewhat forceful inquiry about it. They'd uncovered the unconscious Ambrose's scalp after a few hours to check for any leakage, and the reality of it was clear to Cain for the first time.
"That's disgusting." He couldn't place why it offended him so much, when the zipper hadn't bothered him beforehand. But now it was a Mark. A scar the man shouldn't have to bear, after all the rest that had happened. Cain bit back bile.
"It's... it's convenient--safer!" the surgeon amended, when it became clear "convenience" was not a good (or safe) reason to give the Tin Man. "If--if just in case--we have to, it will be less traumatic to, ah, open him again."
Cain left to be sick, but after that, he did not leave again.
***
Ambrose twitched, as he dreamed.
Cain watched, and wondered of what.
**********
Ratatatatat. Ratatatatat.
"I don't feel any different," Ambrose insisted, his eyes like a cow's, huge and doleful. He couldn't stop drumming his fingers on the windowsill.
Ratatatatat, ratatatat.
"You realize that you should, though," Cain reminded him. "Which is a sign that you do, actually."
This startled him out of his distraction, though his left hand kept drumming. "What?"
"Well, you remember that you just got your marbles back, don't you?"
"Of course! Anyone with half a--oh."
"Yeah," Cain said, significantly.
"...I guess I do feel a little different."
"That's what I thought."
Ratatatatat. Ratatatatat. Ratatatatat.
***
"I've realized that my brain has been storing information improperly for the last several annuals," Ambrose was explaining, swinging every step ponderously as they strolled. His hands were clasped tightly behind his back, and he didn't seem able to keep his eyes off of the ground beneath him. "Because my synapses weren't always firing quite right," (Cain let him get away with this understatement) "information wasn't being encoded any more properly than it was being accessed, if you understand what I mean."
"Not exactly," Cain admitted.
Ambrose nodded, considering how to go on. He shuffled his heel against the gravel walk and skipped a step very solemnly. "Well, all right. Imagine that for a period of time, you saw blue and thought it was orange, and saw orange and thought it was blue. Afterwards, you're going to remember having seen orange skies and blue poppies, even once you're seeing correctly again. That's--well, that's a gross oversimplification, but... it has the right feeling, I think."
"Surreal, too. But I can follow it," Cain said, and smiled unevenly, though Ambrose didn't see.
"Or this is a better example," Ambrose went on, dreamily, as if his friend hadn't spoken. "If you kept a filing system, but you didn't have the letter... the letter 'A,' say, you wouldn't file anything under 'A.' You'd file my name under 'M,' perhaps, because that's what comes next, or under 'G' because that makes sense, too. So once you'd learned the letter 'A' and made a place for it, and went to look for all the 'A' names in the world, they'd be scattered throughout the cabinet, and--"
"Yeah," Cain interrupted him, as gently as he could, with a hand on his shoulder, "I think I get it."
Ambrose's eyes darted up, and for a moment he looked like he was pouting, but when he looked away, again (via a glance at Cain's hand), his grin was poorly hidden.
Cain arched an eyebrow suspiciously. "What?"
His laugh was more poorly suppressed than his grin. "Nothing."
***
Ratatatatat. Ratatatatat. Ratatatatat.
"Did I always do this?" Ambrose asked, abruptly, over breakfast.
"No," Cain said, a little too quickly. A little too eagerly. "That's--that's completely new, the, uh, endless. Endless finger drumming. Some kind of glitch," he added, significantly.
Ratatatatat. Ratatatatat.
"Hm. Well, I can't seem to stop," Ambrose said, unbothered, as he regarded his errant hand.
"No?" Cain looked like he was sinking by centimeters.
"Nope!"
Cain sighed, and nodded.
***
"I was right-handed," Ambrose explained, as he stirred his tea. "I had a very dominant left brain, you know--have, I suppose. But after all this time without it, I'd gone to relying heavily on my left hand, my right hemisphere. It seems like they're at cross-purposes, sometimes, now. I've got a handle on the right side of my body again, of course," he ting'd the spoon his right hand was holding gently against the cup, to prove it, "but the left sometimes has got a mind of its own. So to speak."
"Ah," Cain said, patiently. "Is, uh, that why it's on my leg?"
"Hmm? Oh, dear."
***
"Avoidance, contrary behavior, and engagement with objects," Ambrose began, from no where, as he often did.
Cain was getting better at picking up on the trains of thought that barreled through, though, and after assessing the situation, he hazarded a guess. "...Your glitch hand?"
Ambrose was watching his left hand ("the one with the glitch," they were saying now, mostly affectionately) as it hovered over the stone curve of the bridge, not quite touching down on the surface. He'd been experimenting with walking to Cain's left, for once, to spare his walking companion's arm being gripped by his less directable fingers, and the hand had drifted aimlessly since.
"The alien hand has three basic modes," Ambrose confirmed. "Moving away from contact--which it's doing, now--is one. Another is to be contrary--undoing the work of the other hand, like how it pulled back the bowl I pushed towards you, this morning?"
"I remember," Cain began, but Ambrose hadn't really given him a pause, and kept going.
"The third is to use the objects within reach. Unbuttoning the buttons of my coat, picking up pencils..."
"Grabbing me," Cain offered, almost under his breath, but Ambrose's distraction was selective, and this time, he paused.
"Well, yes, there is that," he said, studiously watching his hand float.
Cain smiled.
The next time they walked, he stopped and moved Ambrose bodily to his right, and the glitch hand again seized onto his elbow like an anchor.
When Ambrose pestered him long enough as to why, he admitted, "I just didn't like seeing it wander," and shrugged. "It looked kind of lost."
Ambrose didn't try to spare Cain any more glitches, after that.
***
"Hey, Ambrose," Cain began, and his tone was a little strange.
"Hmm?" Ambrose was too deep in his book to really look up. He was lying on his stomach with the book pinned under his right elbow, so that he could keep using the hand to pick berries from the bag in front of him. He'd given up on the glitch hand for the moment; it was busily doing whatever it was it felt like doing, apparently to Cain's interest, since the Tin Man's sole activity for the last half hour been to watch it.
"Have you, uh, seen your left hand writing, lately?"
"Mmhmm." Ambrose angled awkwardly for a few more berries.
Cain thought he had an idea, now, of why the man's lips were always stained so dark--he'd eaten half the bag they'd brought out. Sometimes it seemed as though he ate nothing but berries.
After a moment, Cain asked, "So, does it write things that make sense? That you mean?"
"Mm," Ambrose swallowed, "sometimes."
Cain watched him.
Cain waited for him to elaborate. Cain waited for him to address the current situation. Cain waited for him to say anything. But of all the times the man could pick to be quiet...
"So, is this true?" Cain eventually asked, impatient.
"What?" Ambrose blinked, looked up, and finally set the book and berries aside. "What are you talking about, is what true?"
Cain gestured to the space between the tree roots beneath them, where an idle finger had been digging letters in the dirt, and was tracing the phrase there over and again.
"Oh." Ambrose paused to regard his work, considered, and then nodded. "Yes."
And with that, he went back to his book. His left hand was still following the "v."
"You do?"
"Yep."
Cain stared for a moment, but found that he had no more questions, and that he was content to watch the glitch hand swear its master's love for him in the dirt.
(Link to Chapter Two)