Fic: A Different Kind of Storm (1/?)
Title: A Different Kind of Storm (1/?)
Chapter Title: Two Weeks Later
Rating: PG-13 because that’s the highest it’ll ever go.
Story summary: Even before Az took over, things in the O.Z. weren’t always peaceful. Why would that change now?
Chapter summary: The war with Az left a lot of loose ends.
Word count: ~3200
Warnings: I have a tendency to leave no one normal. I indulge that tendency shamelessly in this story. Also warnings for SLASH (duh), angst (as readers of “One in a Thousand” know), some Queen-bashing and Ambrose-bashing (they’re great… sometimes, but they just don’t look too nice for a while), and death and violence (in future chapters).
Disclaimer: Please tell me you don’t honestly think I own Tin Man… *sighs in relief* Good, I’m dealing with sensible people here.
Characters, pairings: The main pairing will be Cain/Glitch, obviously, but the whole cast will feature, and most of them will end up in couples. More on that at the end (because it’s long and I don’t want to delay the story any more).
A/N: This is the first chapter of the fic from whose universe “One in a Thousand” comes. People who hated me for ending that story with such angst, sorry; “One in a Thousand” took place a couple chapters in, so this is backing up a little.
Here we go! Feedback is much appreciated!
---
“My name isn’t Glitch. It’s Ambrose.”
The voice that slipped through his lips wasn’t his. The words weren’t anything he’d ever thought of or even wanted to speak. The brain-in-a-box was speaking through him, telling what to do to shut down his mutated machine-
His mutated machine.
That had slipped into his mind without any intent, but it was so true. The machine in front of them-hell, the machine it was based off of-wasn’t his. It belonged to the brain-in-a-box that called itself Ambrose and wouldn’t even respond to Glitch except to correct people.
And now that brain-in-a-box was taking over his head.
When the scientists came in and shoved Raw away and grabbed Glitch, he rejoiced silently. The brain-in-a-box wasn’t in his head anymore. Or so he thought, until the little viewer put his hand on Glitch’s head and started telling them Ambrose’s thoughts.
Ambrose, the stupid brain-in-a-box that didn’t belong in Glitch’s head… It was there, and it would stay. It was in control. It told Cain-Cain-to call him Ambrose, and not Glitch, and Cain obeyed, shattering any hope Glitch might still have had that he and Ambrose could be the same person.
When he woke up, it was him. He looked at Cain through the reset-induced confusion and realized that he had opened his own eyes. Him, not Ambrose. Cain said “Good morning, sweetheart,” and Glitch had to remind himself that the man was only joking as the reset set itself back to normal. They brought him back to the brain-in-a-box, and he rejected the connection, passing of his inability to think as typical Glitch syndrome. There was a moment of triumph when Cain took out his gun before Ambrose reacted, shoving Glitch out of the way so he could tell them how to reverse the machine.
And he had never let Glitch speak since.
Ambrose regarded Glitch as a half, something which was created as a result of circumstances which should have been avoided. Why should Ambrose respect Glitch’s right to live? Ambrose had the full set of memories. Ambrose had his job as the Queen’s advisor.
Ambrose didn’t give a damn about Wyatt Cain.
---
“I may have saved you from hypothermia, but this saved your life.”
It took several days before Cain realized there was a third near-death experience that hadn’t been explained away.
He had almost drowned.
Zero had shot him, he had fallen out the window, he had almost drowned, and then Glitch had found him in the ice and brought him back to the wagon and warmed him up. The toy horse had saved him from the bullet, and Glitch had saved him from the ice, but who or what had saved him from the fall and the water?
After days of trying to figure it out, Cain began to have dreams about the experience.
The fall had left bruises and cuts all over his body from breaking through the ice. He knew that much, and the injuries had been completely healed by the time they stopped Azkadellia… but it took a while longer to make sense of the drowning experience. According to his dreams, which were so real he could taste the water in his mouth, he had actually stopped breathing and begun swimming up to the surface. Covered in injuries and literally drowned, he had spat out all the water in his lungs and passed out.
Then… he would have survived the hypothermia and the bullet, too? That didn’t sit right with him. First, it meant that Glitch’s (and the toy horse’s) acts of heroism were utterly pointless; and second, it just didn’t feel true. He spent days trying to figure it out without getting anywhere, before finally giving it up as a problem that couldn’t be solved. It was best to get his mind off it. He had other things to worry about.
Like how Ambrose had gotten back inside Glitch, for example.
---
“You must be re-introduced to the O.Z. as a princess on your birthday.”
DG had been paying minimal attention at best until her mother let that little secret out. “WHAT?” she half-shrieked. “But my birthday’s in less than two months, and-and I still barely remember anything!”
“Do not worry, DG,” the Queen told her, running a hand down her youngest daughter’s face. All the beautiful color had fled when DG had learned of her latest duty. “I can teach you everything you need to know. I’m sure your memories will return in time.” They couldn’t return soon enough, she thought privately.
“Yeah,” DG said. “Yeah, because everything always works out so well, right?” The Queen did not miss the sarcasm flooding her daughter’s voice.
“It will,” the Queen told her calmly. “Nothing will go wrong. No one will interfere.” Not the witch; not even Azkadellia, who still wouldn’t go outside.
“Why do I have to do this, anyway?” DG’s voice took on a whining tone, and the Queen’s face turned stern.
“You are a princess. You are the assurance to the people that the country will not fall into anarchy should anything happen to your father and me. Besides… I thought it would be a good time to explain the events of the past fifteen years… and Azkadellia’s forgiveness.”
She knew that DG wouldn’t refuse after that, and she was not disappointed. “All right,” her daughter said, chin suddenly set, “what do I need to know?”
The Queen smiled a small, triumphant smile and began explaining. “First, you must understand…”
---
Tutor Kyros Dram had been offered an official pardon. He had been given a place to live out his remaining years quietly, without worrying after little girls or trying to play double agent. So he was very surprised to hear a knock on his door one night and open it to find a patrol of Tin Men waiting to arrest him.
“Is there a problem, officers?” Kyros asked, watching their faces in the dim light.
“Would you mind coming with us, sir?” the commander of the unit asked him.
“Would you mind telling me what the problem is?” Kyros returned.
“We just need to ask you some questions,” the commander assured him.
But it was nothing like that. Kyros had been sure that habeas corpus was assured once the Queen and her husband had retaken the throne, but he had been thrown in jail without a trial or even learning the charge. He gathered, from noticing the people in the same block he was in, that he had been arrested for treason.
---
The pages had yellowed with time, but the writing was still perfectly legible. There was the darkened sky and the pillar of green light that he hadn’t understood at all… There was the shortest entry of them all, just three words-DG lets go-that he hadn’t understood until it was too late… There was the sketch of the odd pink thing in the tub of green that had turned out to be Ambrose’s brain, impossible to put back… There was the page of angry chicken-scratch that even now, even knowing what it said, he still couldn’t read…
And there was the first entry that consisted of words that described a knowing, not a seeing. The first will be like her, but the second will be like me… That entry, the one that he had stared at for so long, uncomprehending, that he now understood and wished he didn’t… Now he picked up the new leather-bound journal from his side table and opened it to the first sight he’d risked recording or even allowing to reach his eyes in almost fifteen years… She is staring at her sketchbook, confused as I have ever seen her, and there is a drawing in her sketchbook of a boy falling. She knows the building behind him, and she knows she knows him, but she can’t place his face. Her hand moves as though in a trance, and corrects a line here, darkens a stroke there… The picture is perfect as a picture, but she knows it is not quite accurate.
In fifteen years, the sights had piled up behind his eyes, pressing up against one another. No entry from his old book was so detailed. Fifteen years ago he would never have known what the girl he saw knew. Of course, fifteen years ago, his entry would have had more about what her face looked like. That would have been helpful.
But in fifteen years, his eyes had grown starved for seeing, his mind starved for knowing. He had pushed it all away, and now he couldn’t forget any of it, even the many things he had neglected to put down on paper.
The door opened, and a beautiful woman with lavender eyes came in. “Ahamo?” Lemuela asked as she closed the door. “What are you doing?”
Ahamo blinked, and he was again staring at his journals. In half a second he had flipped them shut and shoved them behind the table. He grabbed a book that he had set on the side table for that purpose just as the door really did open.
“Ahamo?” Lemuela asked as she closed the door. “What are you doing?”
Ahamo looked over from the book, Slippers and Slippers, to his beautiful wife. “Just reading,” he told her. “I will never know all your legends.”
Lemuela smiled, stepping up to her husband and looking over his shoulder at the book. “You already know that one,” she pointed out.
Ahamo smiled back easily. “I’ve given up on knowing them all,” he replied. “It’s a hopeless case. I’ll stick with reading the ones I like, see how far that gets me.”
Lemuela laughed her light, appreciative golden laugh, and Ahamo’s smile became instantly more genuine.
---
She stared at her sketchbook, confused. There was a drawing in her sketchbook of a boy falling. She knew the building behind him, and she knew she knew the boy, but she couldn’t place his face. Her hand moved as though in a trance and corrected a line here, darkened a stroke there… The picture was perfect as a picture, but she knew it wasn’t quite accurate.
It was only when she had finished filling in the details that she realized just how accurate the picture was.
There was a moon in a crosshatched night sky, exactly half full; and a clock tower in the city beyond showed 10:00. DG stared at the picture for a long moment, too stunned to speak.
DG tore the sketch carefully out of her book and tacked it up on the wall by her other recent drawings. Stepping back to look at them, she realized that none of them featured her dreams. When was the last time she had drawn something other than her dreams? She couldn’t remember; she couldn’t even remember drawing any of these. But there they were: pictures of fights, pictures of strangers, and one picture of Cain that almost scared DG from the sheer intensity of the emotion on his face. And now this new picture joined them, a testament to the tragedy that still existed in the O.Z.
Looking at the pictures hurt her eyes, like staring into the sun for too long. Giving up, she turned away and started getting ready for bed.
---
She never goes outside anymore. The light still hurts her eyes, for one thing, and for another, she knows no one wants to have to look at her. They all want to pretend that she doesn’t exist. They want her to go away and never come back. So she stays inside, and reads, and wonders what will happen now.
In some ways she wishes DG had never come back. Things were simpler without her sister. She still doesn’t care all that much what Lemuela thinks-she never cared what Lemuela thought-but Ahamo matters to her again, and DG matters even more. It hurts to see her little sister go through life as though in a daze, recognizing everything but remembering nothing. It hurts to visit her sister in her room and see the drawings on the walls, many of which she recognizes from the dreams the two used to share. She cut the connection when DG let go, and she hasn’t forged it again since. Sometimes she wants to, but looking at DG always reminds her why she doesn’t want her little sister in her head.
She doesn’t have a lot of time. She knows that. It won’t be long before she starts shaking, before the breaths she spends hours taking become truly necessary. She doesn’t know what she’ll do when that happens; she doesn’t know if she’ll be able to do what she knows she must.
But she has a little time until then, a few more days to spend with her sister, and her father, and the woman she no longer calls ‘mother.’
---
There is cold sweat running down his skin, almost freezing where it touches the metal around him. His head fell forward days ago, when he lost the strength and the will to hold it up meaninglessly, and now the only movement he makes is to breathe.
In and out. In and out. It’s torture to drag air through his tired throat, and he knows the irony of the situation is that these breaths take more energy than they give. But he keeps going, because he doesn’t know any other way to count the time. There’s no other way to know how much longer he has before he dies.
A movement outside makes him jerk his head up and stare at the woman in front of him. He must be delirious, he knows, because she can’t be here; it’s impossible; he must be seeing things, because she can’t be here; she just can’t…
“Hello, Líng,” she whispers, and he’s sure he’s making it up, because there’s no way he could hear something that quiet from in here…
But a moment later it doesn’t matter whether she was real or not, because she’s gone, and he’s just realizing that he’s stopped breathing.
---
The city is spread out below him like a blanket, and he stands on a balcony above it all, wondering what would happen if he jumped.
There’s no point in wondering, really-he knows what would happen; he would fall from the balcony until there was no way he wasn’t about to die, and then he would stop falling. There’s no getting around that fact; he can’t throw himself to his death. It’s ironic, really, considering why that is.
He remembers the day when his mother died-the screams torn from her throat, the hollow thump as her cold body hit the floor. He remembers deep black eyes staring into his and a cold voice telling him, Run.
He remembers the last time he met those eyes, the time when they turned bright turquoise and his turned ice blue. He remembers everything he saw as those two impossible gazes met. He remembers how, strangely, it became considerably harder to hate the man after that.
His mother would never have condoned such thoughts in her son. She would have sat him down and treated him to a lecture of why the man was their enemy-because he was evil-and why he had to hate him-because he was evil. Thirteen annuals ago, he had listened and believed, but now, if his mother told him such things, he would ask why. He knew what his mother would say to that-because the man was a parasite. And he would ask if that made his father a parasite too, and she would freeze, and her face would turn white, and she would slap him hard and tell him never to say such things again.
He wonders if she ever met an impossible gaze, if she ever learned that what had happened to her was nothing at all compared to what might have happened. He doubts it. His mother never wavered in her belief that the man and everyone like him were pure evil.
But he’s seen Ambrose. He knows that the man made the right decision.
Why does that change things so much?
Still lost in thought, he glances down and sees the city below him. Just as he has done every day for the past week and a half, he turns away from the railing and goes back inside.
---
Her eyes are jade green, staring at the wood. It started out thin, and by now it’s so rotted that if she just put out her foot it would snap. Somehow, the fragility makes her think that it will last that much longer.
The air around her is cool and welcoming. She stretches, reaching her fingers toward the sky. All it would take is a small jump and a quick thought, and she would join the clouds chasing each other across the deep blue sky. A deep breath of the cool autumn air excites her, and she rises up until her toes barely make contact with the earth’s surface. It takes a long moment to relax with the scents of grass and wind flying into her nose, inviting her to just leave the ground for a moment. Finally, though, she comes to her senses and lowers herself to the ground.
Looking around, she sees the box that made her life hell years ago. She couldn’t stand to look at it then; it reminded her every time she accidentally glimpsed it of the person she had lost to its duplicate. Now she can stand to look. She can see the person inside, and it makes her want to laugh. Jade green eyes burn brighter and brighter as she approaches the box and looks through the glass.
Eerie turquoise eyes meet hers and widen in shock. She smiles to see that the man recognizes her after all this time.
“Hello, Líng,” she whispers, shooing her voice through the box so it reaches his ears. She hears the sound of his breathing stop in shock, and she steps away.
A few feet away she decides to ignore common sense and just jump into the air.
---
It was always hard to focus on what he could see with his eyes and ignore everything pouring in from around him, everything he could feel from the Collective. The difficulty tripled when he tried to speak to someone. The most he could ever force out were a few words. Collective, their language was so ambiguous. It was impossible to tell what they were saying half the time. Sometimes he thought that they could understand him better than he could them.
When he was a child, he hadn’t even bothered to speak, instead choosing to immerse himself in the sensations of others through his own Sense and the Collective. He knew, when Lylo asked him to protect Kalm, that it was because of that tendency. Lylo didn’t want Kalm to have to strain his focus and his Sense to pay attention and answer questions, especially not with the scientists shocking him.
The feelings his Sense conveyed to him now were infinitely more interesting-human feelings always were-and he once again had to fight the urge to stop responding and just remain in his Sense. He wouldn’t even need the Collective to hold his attention now, surrounded as he was by such interesting people.
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A/N: Clarifying detail:
The Collective is the accumulated Senses and knowledge of all viewers. (Yes, I totally made it up. No, you did not miss something crucial.) Viewers invoke the Collective as their god. (The canon reference to “gods” gives me license to make up all sorts, so you will see other gods in this fic.)
Sorry, I’m not naming the anonymous chapters. I think you can guess most or all of them, though.
In case it wasn’t clear enough, the Queen’s name is now Lemuela.
I said I would expand on the “Pairings” note above, so here’s the rest:
When I first started this story, the plan was Cain/Glitch, Az/Zero, DG/Jeb, and Lemuela/Ahamo (wow, a canon pairing-what a revolutionary idea!). Then the story started mutating on me, and now Zero has become a turning point. The gist of it is, it will either be Az/Zero, or it will be Zero/Jeb. If it’s Zero/Jeb, then it becomes either Az/DG or Az/OC and DG/OC. (No matter what, though, it’s going to be Cain/Glitch; there’s no getting around that.) I’m fine with any of those options (please don’t flame me for that-I consider sisterly bonds after twenty years to be void enough for a relationship, and I have a plan for Jeb/Zero, and for Az/Zero and DG/Jeb), so it falls to you the readers. I need your help deciding on the ships. (This next bit is not supposed to sound like a threat, so please forgive me if it does-) I need to know what the pairings will be so I can start setting them up. It will be very hard to write any more of this story if I don’t know what the pairings are, so please, comment, review, and give me a suggestion. (Or hey, just give me a suggestion. I’m fine with that, so long as I can keep writing. I’d prefer a comment, but I realize that most or all of you have lives away from the computer, too.)
Feedback (and votes) are much appreciated!
-Ssauei’ssui