...You Don't Forget, Ch. 18; Epilogue
Title: ...You Don't Forget, Ch. 18/18, + epilogue
Author: blindswandive
Characters/Pairing: Ambrose/Cain; feat. various palace people
Rating: PG13 - PG16
Summary: This is a very long story that has been going on for a very long time. There are broken people and awkward relationships. There are unhappy pasts, a complicated present, and an uncertain future. There are intrigues and secrets and implications and uncertainties. There is alien hand syndrome, post traumatic stress disorder, and more petty injuries than are probably fair. There is, above all, love. And it all started with brain surgery, one time or another. I recommend starting from the beginning, or from the other beginning, depending on your tastes in beginnings (or in brain surgery).
This chapter contains jealousy, evasion, improvisation, and air currents; also, Azkadellia tips her hand.
Warnings: A glimpse inside of a scary brain; an only semi-satisfactory resolution to our problems; porches; acronyms; a fluffy epilogue.
Disclaimer: Characters and Oz and O.Z. belong to Baum, SciFi, etc. Storyline/writing are mine, and I'm not turning a profit from it.
Word Count: Ch. 18: 2546 (Epilogue: 1241; total finished wordcount 65,861)
Cross posted to tinman_fic.
Feedback is always, always love.
Previous chapters/series:
Seventeen • Sixteen • Fifteen • Fourteen • Thirteen • Twelve • Eleven • Ten • Nine • Eight • Seven • Six • Five • Four • Three • Two • One • Evil Like That (1-5)
Chapter 18
Ambrose was pacing, now. Bernhaben had been through twice that morning, and each time, Ambrose wound into a tighter ball of tension right under Cain's eyes. Ambrose's left arm--still badly scarred, but healthy enough to work marginally well--looked like it was fixing to betray him, swerving on his own as he walked, like it were conducting some invisible orchestra in an angry symphony.
...Maybe the Inspector hadn't just been a convenient target after all.
Cain laid his head against the bars, lacing his arms through and around them in a tired embrace. "Hey..." he began quietly, to catch his attention, and Ambrose's head snapped up.
"What?" he asked, immediately approaching the bars, sinking as fast into a mimic of Cain's posture as he could. Only as he did, his thin knees poked through as well, and some of his curls, and he wound up belly flat to the surface of the bars, looking more like he was clinging to them than anything else.
The sight made Cain hurt. Suddenly he didn't want to ask Ambrose about Bernhaben, anymore. It couldn't do any good, couldn't take any of the hurt out of the body across from him.
But Ambrose stared, shifted anxiously. "What is it?" he repeated, and looked a little desperate to talk, to connect somehow.
Cain couldn't leave him like that. And couldn't think of anything else to say. So reluctantly, he observed, "You really hate this Bernhaben guy."
Predictably, Ambrose scowled and looked away. The fingers of his left hand began curling around an iron bar.
Cain almost decided to drop it again, at that. But when Ambrose looked like his nerves were winding back up, like he might get back up to his pacing soon, Cain pressed on. "...Want to tell me why?"
"What, arresting us wasn't enough?"
Cain nodded. "I expect so. But you were mad as sin before that, too."
Ambrose laid the side of his head against the bars, still not looking back to Cain, and Cain sighed inwardly. Gods, he wished he could reach out and pat the mess of curls, do something to give a scrap of comfort.
He wished he could get a little comfort, too. He looked at the floor, and tried to quash down the feeling of helplessness.
"I guess I was," Ambrose admitted, and Cain agreed.
There was a long quiet before Ambrose could say anything else. When he did, he mumbled, "...I think he might be one of the new Advisors to the Queen."
Ah.
Cain dug up indignant disbelief, or an approximation of it. "What, that jerk?" he asked, scowling for Ambrose's sake.
Ambrose was caught off guard by his own laugh, and Cain's aches seemed to ease off a little at the sound.
*************
The allegation of prisoner abuse--abuse of Ambrose, her dearest friend--was too much. The Queen had determined to leave Bernhaben to his work, but this, she handled herself.
She was numb, but listened to every statement.
Tried to listen. Sometimes it nicked a little too close to the skin, and the sting distracted her.
"It was like he was mad," the guard defended himself. "He kept screaming about the Princess and Longcoats, like he thought he was surrounded. He--he's dangerous, your Majesty, he broke more bones among our men than we have men, he just wouldn't stop fighting. We couldn't get close enough to help him, I swear, we tried to follow protocol, we tried to help..."
The Queen looked away, over and out towards a window. "I see."
"Since then... Since the medic, I mean... Your Majesty, you'd have no idea, to look at him now, but I swear he was dangerous when we found him. Even the best of us are afraid to go near him, still." He paused, and then: "We did what we could."
The Queen nodded quietly, and the signal was clear. She was done with him. The man rose to go.
"Thank you for your assistance," she murmured as he left, but she was lost in thought, and did not hear his reply, if he made one.
**************
"Hold out your hand," Ambrose whispered. "Far as you can."
Cain sighed. "Doll, you know I can't reach that far..."
"Sh-shh," Ambrose said, dismissing it, face against the bars. "Do it, reach out."
Cain sighed, and slowly obliged, reaching out as far as he could, his good shoulder locked against the bars. His fingers missed the halfway point of the hallway by several inches, and Ambrose, even with his long limbs, hadn't been able to reach much farther from his side when they'd tried. They had been tantalizingly close, but more than a foot separated their fingertips from one another.
"Straighten your fingers," Ambrose said, pressed flush, "and close your eyes."
Cain obeyed, though the loss of touch was still more acute when he did, and there was a soreness inside he tried to tamp down.
He waited, and for a moment--as he expected--there was nothing. But then there was a sound, a rustling, and something moved against his fingers, a waft of coolness, the soft pressure of moisture in the air, barely substantial. Cain's breath caught in his throat, and his eyes opened on his empty fingers as he curled them towards the--the something that had touched them.
Ambrose smiled across at him, full of sad, sweet satisfaction, and closed his own eyes, drew another long breath, and blew quietly again through soft lips. There was the delay, again, and it was soft--so soft--but the air changed soon, and the stream of breath and displaced air reached him, and Cain's breath came back out in a shaken sigh, touched deeply by strange relief.
"Ambrose," he mumbled, unsure of what to say, grateful and lonely.
"Currents have a long reach," Ambrose said, smiling. "My lungs can reach farther than my hands."
Cain shook his head, at a loss for words.
But Ambrose curled to reach his hand out, then, stretched as far as he could. So Cain took a deep breath.
*************
The Queen worried her handkerchief, where she had it clutched low against her stomach under the table. It was a nervous habit she promised she would break, once the mess was over. But for now...
"I want him to rot," Azkadellia growled. "I want Glitch to spend the rest of his miserable little life down in that cell, alone and scared like I was."
"Azkadellia," the Queen murmured uncomfortably, though she laid a soothing hand (the one not preoccupied) on her daughter's arm.
"You asked what I thought was fair. He's dangerous, Mama," Azkadellia insisted, a strange coolness coming into her voice. "I won't feel safe from him unless he's locked in a tiny box where I can keep my eye on him." She tipped a few fingers through the air idly, tracing a little globe that shimmered faintly with the light of her imagining. It looked familiar.
The Queen's uneasiness settled into something harder, and she withdrew the hand to her lap, looking very carefully at her daughter. "Azkadellia..." she began again.
Azkadellia looked up and glared her challenge, her jaw set, and something there turned the Queen's belly cold, full of heavy remembering. She dug her nails into the fabric hard. But through force of will, the Queen's face smoothed. She sat up a little straighter, to match her daughter's height, tipping her chin up slightly. Her hair, now grey for far too long, pooled against the back of her chair. "Azkadellia, I think you've done quite enough of that for one lifetime."
***
DG and her mother locked hands and put their heads together, in the quietest corner of the palace they could find.
"I'm worried about her..." the Queen confided, and DG squeezed her hands. "I don't think... I don't think that we can let your sister fall into the hands of the Inspector."
DG swallowed. "Do you think... did Az do something, too?"
The Queen closed her eyes, tilted her head. "I don't know. But if the questions go on.. If we're bound by a trial... I fear we could lose them all."
DG sat back, stared at her mother with frightened eyes. "But you're the Queen. Can't you... Can't we do something?"
The Queen looked down, and nodded stiffly. "...There is something."
And when she had steeled herself, she sent for the Acting Inspector.
****************
Cain shook his head. "Now back up, Bernhaben--what do you mean, 'no trial?' What does that mean for those of us locked up? What's our recourse? You can't just leave us here to rot, you can't--"
Bernhaben interrupted to elaborate, if reluctantly. "Mister Cain, the feasibility of containment has been examined, and the Queen is satisfied that the matter has remained private enough that," and here he paused, dissatisfied, "it need not be subject to the traditional public trial. Furthermore, she sites the personal and 'family' nature of the subject, which makes it her royal prerogative to deal with it privately. Informal inquiries will be continued shortly, when the Queen has had more time to study the Princess Azkadellia's state and consider fitting justice for all involved, but formal prosecution will not go forward, and you will in all likelihood attain release or sentence shortly, at her pleasure. Therefore, my participation in the matter now ends."
Cain was too shocked to protest that any further, so Bernhaben nodded curtly and left, walk stiff and strained.
***
"One more time," Cain said, rubbing his temples against the swell of a headache.
"She's--Her Majesty has rescinded the investigation order," Ambrose began. "It means... well, that she's exercising her right as regent to be sole arbiter. While I was her advisor, she almost never did it--the Queen has always lived by the rule of law--but... " Ambrose trailed off.
Cain pinched the bridge of his nose. "So what does that mean for us? What can she do?"
Ambrose shook his head slowly. "Anything. Declare us innocent, have us hanged, let Azkadellia have her way with us, have Azkadellia hanged, release us with conditions, impose a definite sentence, impose an indefinite sentence... So long as she can demonstrate a basic consistency from her chain of evidence to her decision, it would hold up. And that's only if anyone wanted to challenge her, and no one ever challenges the regent on a matter of prerogative..."
There was a long, heavy silence, but finally Cain asked, "What kinds of conditions?"
But Ambrose was already tugging at his zipper, before Cain had even finished the question.
***************
"Please, Raw... I won't trust this to a stranger," the Queen pled.
"Can't," Raw said, simply.
DG stroked his arm fondly. "Come on," she cajoled, "you're so brave... How bad can it be in there?"
But the look in Raw's haunted eyes made her wonder if she didn't want to know.
He shook his head, slowly. "...Too bad. Not going back."
When the Queen pried into what he'd seen in Azkadellia's head, Raw got as far as this: "Briars, dark clouds, empty sickness, smoke. Hurting Glitch, hurting self, too much pain and hate and loneliness. Can't see what happened. Too dark."
After that, they couldn't bear to make him look at Ambrose.
***
DG stared at her shoes, and leaned against her mother's side, into the comfort of her arms.
"You know... I don't think I want to know what happened," she admitted, voice weak. "I don't think I could stand it. I love them all too much. I just... I don't want to know."
The Queen sighed and pet DG's hair, laying her cheek against her daughter's head. "I think..." she began slowly, but sighed, and stopped. "No. Neither do I, my darling."
*****************
DG came quietly before dawn, with the key, and unlocked both doors, one after the other.
"You can go," she said, barely loud enough to hear.
Cain stared, too stunned to even stand up.
"...We're putting it away," she explained.
Ambrose rose wordlessly, clutching his own arms and drifting into the open space of the doorway, but he couldn't seem to convince himself to step out. He wavered, one foot to the next.
Cain paused in the doorway, too, after he rose, but the promise of freedom--whatever came with it--was too much, and he took one solid step into the hall, where he could breathe a little better. He couldn't think of anything to say, though.
"Why?" Ambrose said, then covered his mouth with the glitch hand, like it wished he hadn't.
DG shook her head, still not quite looking at them. "There's no good way to fix any of this, so... so it's over. It's good to be the Princess, right?" she said, but didn't sound convinced. "I can just... make things go away, if... if I want to." Her voice trailed off.
Cain nodded, looking down at his hands.
After a heavy moment, Ambrose asked, "Azkadellia?" over the protest of his hand, voice tight and scared.
DG nodded, looked at the floor. "She's getting better. Or--she's healing up okay, anyway. She's... She's not as better as we thought she was, I guess. ...I don't know if she was ever okay."
Ambrose shook his head shortly, a little terrified jolt, and DG's eyes came up, wet and sad, but that seemed to settle something in her. She nodded, as if that answered all her questions well enough.
"No... I guess not. You..." She swallowed, and her voice was crinkling at the edges, and thick in the middle. "You guys should probably go. Maybe pretty far away. We... if we kill the investigation completely, we can't tell people you didn't do it or it didn't happen, but... at least this way we also don't have to... to risk proving anything that would make us have to hang you. So." DG shook a little, but she steeled herself. "So you should go. Somewhere you won't run into anyone from the palace and they won't run into you."
Cain remained silent. He could see the weight of the thing on DG, the terrible responsibility of it, and felt it settle onto him, too. He'd tried so hard, unthinkingly, to keep the thing from coming to light, but now that it had... The questions left unanswered, the justice left undone... He wondered if he'd feel this heavy for a long time. He wondered if his tin badge would rust, where it lay.
But when Ambrose stepped out, clutched DG in his thin arms, cried thanks into her hair, and she held onto him like an anchor, he couldn't bring himself to want anything different.
The law was over, for him, now. ...Maybe he could farm.
He wrapped his arms around them both, and when it finally slipped apart, he slid an arm around Ambrose and guided him away, quickly as he could, through the cool grey of the morning. He didn't know where they would go, but he thought he could walk a long, long way if he was doing it with Ambrose beside him.
***************
EPILOGUE
"Hand me that box of nails, Kid, I'm out up here."
Jeb did, but without looking--he was too distracted by the girl standing in his arms, by her forehead against his, by her bare feet in the grass. Cain shook his head vaguely, but couldn't begrudge them much. He got the feeling he'd be doing something similar if there weren't quite so many holes in the roof of the porch, and with the late summer rains so soon to come.
Why he was fixing this porch instead of his own, however...
"Weren't you two supposed to be making yourselves useful sanding?" he hinted. "Or pulling up the rotted boards inside so nobody goes through them and breaks a leg?"
The girl--Moura--grumbled something that sounded a lot like "grumpy," and they laughed in each other's arms, still dancing without music. But after a few long kisses (Cain politely looked away), they disengaged themselves and trudged up the porch and back to work, muttering complaints all the way.
Cain tried to keep his smile down as he called after them gruffly. "Hey, this is your porch I'm fixing, kids, if you'd rather get washed away..."
"We're going, we're going..." Jeb called, but Cain wouldn't really believe it until he heard boards break. He wouldn't hold his breath.
It wasn't until they were gone inside and safely out of the way that Ambrose came back any closer. He'd been dismantling a large and ugly metal blot on the landscape for parts, and that had kept him plenty busy.
And anyway, there was an uneasiness between him and Jeb that Cain didn't like, a stiff and stilted angularity when they spoke. But Cain let it be; they'd need time, and he wasn't going to rush them. They'd work it out for themselves. He was sure of that.
"So, you think you got enough out of that bastard to fix the water pump?"
"And the lights," Ambrose agreed, triumphantly, dropping a jumble of metal in the tall yellow grass. "And that TDESPHTL is a gold mine, I'd forgotten how complicated it was inside. I can do a million things with those parts, you wouldn't even believe."
Cain nodded, swallowing against a small lump rising in his throat. "Well. Just so long as they're in pieces, I'm happy enough," he said, and Ambrose nodded fiercely.
"Down to bolts and scraps," Ambrose said, with a touch of vicious glee.
Cain sighed, and felt a little lighter.
"Thanks, sweetheart. The thought of those kids living here, with that stuck out there, watching over them..."
Cain didn't have to finish his thought. Ambrose knew.
"You know," he mused, "I think I'll start carrying a spanner with me, wherever I go. Then if we find another, we can engage in a little guerilla beautification of the landscape, what do you think?"
"I think that sounds mighty fine," Cain agreed. "Hey, sunshine, you mind giving me a hand up here? If we can get this patched tonight, we can start on our roof tomorrow."
Ambrose looked unsteady, but eventually braced himself and mounted the ladder. "I'm not sure why we're fixing this place first," Ambrose admitted. "If we left them to their own devices, they might actually decide to do something with the place, rather than disappear and canoodle at all hours."
Cain laughed on his breath. "No, they'd keep canoodling and then just canoodle in the rain when it started coming in their ceiling." He shrugged. "They're young."
"They're not that young," Ambrose disagreed, for the sake of it. "Maybe I should decide to be young. Then you can cater to my whims and save me from myself when I flounce about willy-nilly."
Cain raised an eyebrow. "And how's that any different from now?"
"...Well, I'd be younger," Ambrose finally decided.
***
Cain and Ambrose packed up late, after a quiet but mostly comfortable dinner at Moura's table, trundling their tools and scraps into their two-wheeled cart.
The cart was most of what they'd brought with them, when they'd left the palace, that day, with what little they salvaged from the damaged cottage. There wasn't much that seemed fitting to take; most of it had been there when they'd arrived, and was still there when they left.
They brought Ambrose's books, his notes and papers and blueprints, and they brought his fine tools. They brought Cain's axe, and the shovels and spades from the gardens, the clothes they could salvage, and whatever they could harvest half-ripe from the patch of earth. A few plates and cups, a tea-set Ambrose had glued back together so many times it wasn't worth leaving, and enough silverware to eat with, and they were gone.
Their lives had seemed so small, then.
But when they'd started out down the path, through the town and on towards the next, they'd started to seem much bigger. The road somehow made everything feel infinite, broken open and full of bright space.
They breathed easier than they had in months.
Jeb and Moura had caught up with them a few days later, though they'd had a truck and everything inside it for their baggage. Neither pair explained themselves, but it had become clear soon enough that they were all headed for the old home, the old village, and so they traveled together.
Cain couldn't bear the thought of living in his house--Adora's house--now, but Moura had fallen in love with it on first sight, so Jeb had staked his claim. Cain had wished them well. There were several more abandoned houses within a few hours' walk--there were too many, in this part of the country--and after a few questions around the tiny village nearest them, Cain and Ambrose had settled on one about a mile and a half out from Jeb's. One that was small, but still had the bones of a farm beneath it, and where the plumbing seemed to be intact.
And that had been that.
Ambrose still complained of the walk, every time they took it, but seemed to mean it less and less every time.
Cain hoped that whenever he and Jeb made their peace, he might give up the argument altogether, but he wasn't going to hold his breath for that, either.
When they settled in for the night, it was in the bed they'd wheedled out of a junk dealer in the town, in sheets they'd bought used and old but soft. It was a bed big enough for two, this time, and they hadn't discussed that, either. They would make that work, too.
The dust overhead was evil, but Ambrose liked the way the light through the window caught it in the early morning, turning the cobwebs gold and the dust motes in the air into a shimmering cloud, so they left it where it lay on the ceilings and eaves--for now. They baked in the heat (there were so many holes in the slats of the walls that it wasn't much better than being outside), and they'd chill in the winter, but they'd get to that when they could.
For now, it was enough to lie together, knees to knees and forehead to forehead, with an idle hand tracing patterns on the mattress between them. It was enough to be here, in the quiet of the night, with the sound of the wind coming through the tall grass and sighing through the walls, sweet and low.
Author: blindswandive
Characters/Pairing: Ambrose/Cain; feat. various palace people
Rating: PG13 - PG16
Summary: This is a very long story that has been going on for a very long time. There are broken people and awkward relationships. There are unhappy pasts, a complicated present, and an uncertain future. There are intrigues and secrets and implications and uncertainties. There is alien hand syndrome, post traumatic stress disorder, and more petty injuries than are probably fair. There is, above all, love. And it all started with brain surgery, one time or another. I recommend starting from the beginning, or from the other beginning, depending on your tastes in beginnings (or in brain surgery).
This chapter contains jealousy, evasion, improvisation, and air currents; also, Azkadellia tips her hand.
Warnings: A glimpse inside of a scary brain; an only semi-satisfactory resolution to our problems; porches; acronyms; a fluffy epilogue.
Disclaimer: Characters and Oz and O.Z. belong to Baum, SciFi, etc. Storyline/writing are mine, and I'm not turning a profit from it.
Word Count: Ch. 18: 2546 (Epilogue: 1241; total finished wordcount 65,861)
Cross posted to tinman_fic.
Feedback is always, always love.
Previous chapters/series:
Seventeen • Sixteen • Fifteen • Fourteen • Thirteen • Twelve • Eleven • Ten • Nine • Eight • Seven • Six • Five • Four • Three • Two • One • Evil Like That (1-5)
Chapter 18
Ambrose was pacing, now. Bernhaben had been through twice that morning, and each time, Ambrose wound into a tighter ball of tension right under Cain's eyes. Ambrose's left arm--still badly scarred, but healthy enough to work marginally well--looked like it was fixing to betray him, swerving on his own as he walked, like it were conducting some invisible orchestra in an angry symphony.
...Maybe the Inspector hadn't just been a convenient target after all.
Cain laid his head against the bars, lacing his arms through and around them in a tired embrace. "Hey..." he began quietly, to catch his attention, and Ambrose's head snapped up.
"What?" he asked, immediately approaching the bars, sinking as fast into a mimic of Cain's posture as he could. Only as he did, his thin knees poked through as well, and some of his curls, and he wound up belly flat to the surface of the bars, looking more like he was clinging to them than anything else.
The sight made Cain hurt. Suddenly he didn't want to ask Ambrose about Bernhaben, anymore. It couldn't do any good, couldn't take any of the hurt out of the body across from him.
But Ambrose stared, shifted anxiously. "What is it?" he repeated, and looked a little desperate to talk, to connect somehow.
Cain couldn't leave him like that. And couldn't think of anything else to say. So reluctantly, he observed, "You really hate this Bernhaben guy."
Predictably, Ambrose scowled and looked away. The fingers of his left hand began curling around an iron bar.
Cain almost decided to drop it again, at that. But when Ambrose looked like his nerves were winding back up, like he might get back up to his pacing soon, Cain pressed on. "...Want to tell me why?"
"What, arresting us wasn't enough?"
Cain nodded. "I expect so. But you were mad as sin before that, too."
Ambrose laid the side of his head against the bars, still not looking back to Cain, and Cain sighed inwardly. Gods, he wished he could reach out and pat the mess of curls, do something to give a scrap of comfort.
He wished he could get a little comfort, too. He looked at the floor, and tried to quash down the feeling of helplessness.
"I guess I was," Ambrose admitted, and Cain agreed.
There was a long quiet before Ambrose could say anything else. When he did, he mumbled, "...I think he might be one of the new Advisors to the Queen."
Ah.
Cain dug up indignant disbelief, or an approximation of it. "What, that jerk?" he asked, scowling for Ambrose's sake.
Ambrose was caught off guard by his own laugh, and Cain's aches seemed to ease off a little at the sound.
*************
The allegation of prisoner abuse--abuse of Ambrose, her dearest friend--was too much. The Queen had determined to leave Bernhaben to his work, but this, she handled herself.
She was numb, but listened to every statement.
Tried to listen. Sometimes it nicked a little too close to the skin, and the sting distracted her.
"It was like he was mad," the guard defended himself. "He kept screaming about the Princess and Longcoats, like he thought he was surrounded. He--he's dangerous, your Majesty, he broke more bones among our men than we have men, he just wouldn't stop fighting. We couldn't get close enough to help him, I swear, we tried to follow protocol, we tried to help..."
The Queen looked away, over and out towards a window. "I see."
"Since then... Since the medic, I mean... Your Majesty, you'd have no idea, to look at him now, but I swear he was dangerous when we found him. Even the best of us are afraid to go near him, still." He paused, and then: "We did what we could."
The Queen nodded quietly, and the signal was clear. She was done with him. The man rose to go.
"Thank you for your assistance," she murmured as he left, but she was lost in thought, and did not hear his reply, if he made one.
**************
"Hold out your hand," Ambrose whispered. "Far as you can."
Cain sighed. "Doll, you know I can't reach that far..."
"Sh-shh," Ambrose said, dismissing it, face against the bars. "Do it, reach out."
Cain sighed, and slowly obliged, reaching out as far as he could, his good shoulder locked against the bars. His fingers missed the halfway point of the hallway by several inches, and Ambrose, even with his long limbs, hadn't been able to reach much farther from his side when they'd tried. They had been tantalizingly close, but more than a foot separated their fingertips from one another.
"Straighten your fingers," Ambrose said, pressed flush, "and close your eyes."
Cain obeyed, though the loss of touch was still more acute when he did, and there was a soreness inside he tried to tamp down.
He waited, and for a moment--as he expected--there was nothing. But then there was a sound, a rustling, and something moved against his fingers, a waft of coolness, the soft pressure of moisture in the air, barely substantial. Cain's breath caught in his throat, and his eyes opened on his empty fingers as he curled them towards the--the something that had touched them.
Ambrose smiled across at him, full of sad, sweet satisfaction, and closed his own eyes, drew another long breath, and blew quietly again through soft lips. There was the delay, again, and it was soft--so soft--but the air changed soon, and the stream of breath and displaced air reached him, and Cain's breath came back out in a shaken sigh, touched deeply by strange relief.
"Ambrose," he mumbled, unsure of what to say, grateful and lonely.
"Currents have a long reach," Ambrose said, smiling. "My lungs can reach farther than my hands."
Cain shook his head, at a loss for words.
But Ambrose curled to reach his hand out, then, stretched as far as he could. So Cain took a deep breath.
*************
The Queen worried her handkerchief, where she had it clutched low against her stomach under the table. It was a nervous habit she promised she would break, once the mess was over. But for now...
"I want him to rot," Azkadellia growled. "I want Glitch to spend the rest of his miserable little life down in that cell, alone and scared like I was."
"Azkadellia," the Queen murmured uncomfortably, though she laid a soothing hand (the one not preoccupied) on her daughter's arm.
"You asked what I thought was fair. He's dangerous, Mama," Azkadellia insisted, a strange coolness coming into her voice. "I won't feel safe from him unless he's locked in a tiny box where I can keep my eye on him." She tipped a few fingers through the air idly, tracing a little globe that shimmered faintly with the light of her imagining. It looked familiar.
The Queen's uneasiness settled into something harder, and she withdrew the hand to her lap, looking very carefully at her daughter. "Azkadellia..." she began again.
Azkadellia looked up and glared her challenge, her jaw set, and something there turned the Queen's belly cold, full of heavy remembering. She dug her nails into the fabric hard. But through force of will, the Queen's face smoothed. She sat up a little straighter, to match her daughter's height, tipping her chin up slightly. Her hair, now grey for far too long, pooled against the back of her chair. "Azkadellia, I think you've done quite enough of that for one lifetime."
***
DG and her mother locked hands and put their heads together, in the quietest corner of the palace they could find.
"I'm worried about her..." the Queen confided, and DG squeezed her hands. "I don't think... I don't think that we can let your sister fall into the hands of the Inspector."
DG swallowed. "Do you think... did Az do something, too?"
The Queen closed her eyes, tilted her head. "I don't know. But if the questions go on.. If we're bound by a trial... I fear we could lose them all."
DG sat back, stared at her mother with frightened eyes. "But you're the Queen. Can't you... Can't we do something?"
The Queen looked down, and nodded stiffly. "...There is something."
And when she had steeled herself, she sent for the Acting Inspector.
****************
Cain shook his head. "Now back up, Bernhaben--what do you mean, 'no trial?' What does that mean for those of us locked up? What's our recourse? You can't just leave us here to rot, you can't--"
Bernhaben interrupted to elaborate, if reluctantly. "Mister Cain, the feasibility of containment has been examined, and the Queen is satisfied that the matter has remained private enough that," and here he paused, dissatisfied, "it need not be subject to the traditional public trial. Furthermore, she sites the personal and 'family' nature of the subject, which makes it her royal prerogative to deal with it privately. Informal inquiries will be continued shortly, when the Queen has had more time to study the Princess Azkadellia's state and consider fitting justice for all involved, but formal prosecution will not go forward, and you will in all likelihood attain release or sentence shortly, at her pleasure. Therefore, my participation in the matter now ends."
Cain was too shocked to protest that any further, so Bernhaben nodded curtly and left, walk stiff and strained.
***
"One more time," Cain said, rubbing his temples against the swell of a headache.
"She's--Her Majesty has rescinded the investigation order," Ambrose began. "It means... well, that she's exercising her right as regent to be sole arbiter. While I was her advisor, she almost never did it--the Queen has always lived by the rule of law--but... " Ambrose trailed off.
Cain pinched the bridge of his nose. "So what does that mean for us? What can she do?"
Ambrose shook his head slowly. "Anything. Declare us innocent, have us hanged, let Azkadellia have her way with us, have Azkadellia hanged, release us with conditions, impose a definite sentence, impose an indefinite sentence... So long as she can demonstrate a basic consistency from her chain of evidence to her decision, it would hold up. And that's only if anyone wanted to challenge her, and no one ever challenges the regent on a matter of prerogative..."
There was a long, heavy silence, but finally Cain asked, "What kinds of conditions?"
But Ambrose was already tugging at his zipper, before Cain had even finished the question.
***************
"Please, Raw... I won't trust this to a stranger," the Queen pled.
"Can't," Raw said, simply.
DG stroked his arm fondly. "Come on," she cajoled, "you're so brave... How bad can it be in there?"
But the look in Raw's haunted eyes made her wonder if she didn't want to know.
He shook his head, slowly. "...Too bad. Not going back."
When the Queen pried into what he'd seen in Azkadellia's head, Raw got as far as this: "Briars, dark clouds, empty sickness, smoke. Hurting Glitch, hurting self, too much pain and hate and loneliness. Can't see what happened. Too dark."
After that, they couldn't bear to make him look at Ambrose.
***
DG stared at her shoes, and leaned against her mother's side, into the comfort of her arms.
"You know... I don't think I want to know what happened," she admitted, voice weak. "I don't think I could stand it. I love them all too much. I just... I don't want to know."
The Queen sighed and pet DG's hair, laying her cheek against her daughter's head. "I think..." she began slowly, but sighed, and stopped. "No. Neither do I, my darling."
*****************
DG came quietly before dawn, with the key, and unlocked both doors, one after the other.
"You can go," she said, barely loud enough to hear.
Cain stared, too stunned to even stand up.
"...We're putting it away," she explained.
Ambrose rose wordlessly, clutching his own arms and drifting into the open space of the doorway, but he couldn't seem to convince himself to step out. He wavered, one foot to the next.
Cain paused in the doorway, too, after he rose, but the promise of freedom--whatever came with it--was too much, and he took one solid step into the hall, where he could breathe a little better. He couldn't think of anything to say, though.
"Why?" Ambrose said, then covered his mouth with the glitch hand, like it wished he hadn't.
DG shook her head, still not quite looking at them. "There's no good way to fix any of this, so... so it's over. It's good to be the Princess, right?" she said, but didn't sound convinced. "I can just... make things go away, if... if I want to." Her voice trailed off.
Cain nodded, looking down at his hands.
After a heavy moment, Ambrose asked, "Azkadellia?" over the protest of his hand, voice tight and scared.
DG nodded, looked at the floor. "She's getting better. Or--she's healing up okay, anyway. She's... She's not as better as we thought she was, I guess. ...I don't know if she was ever okay."
Ambrose shook his head shortly, a little terrified jolt, and DG's eyes came up, wet and sad, but that seemed to settle something in her. She nodded, as if that answered all her questions well enough.
"No... I guess not. You..." She swallowed, and her voice was crinkling at the edges, and thick in the middle. "You guys should probably go. Maybe pretty far away. We... if we kill the investigation completely, we can't tell people you didn't do it or it didn't happen, but... at least this way we also don't have to... to risk proving anything that would make us have to hang you. So." DG shook a little, but she steeled herself. "So you should go. Somewhere you won't run into anyone from the palace and they won't run into you."
Cain remained silent. He could see the weight of the thing on DG, the terrible responsibility of it, and felt it settle onto him, too. He'd tried so hard, unthinkingly, to keep the thing from coming to light, but now that it had... The questions left unanswered, the justice left undone... He wondered if he'd feel this heavy for a long time. He wondered if his tin badge would rust, where it lay.
But when Ambrose stepped out, clutched DG in his thin arms, cried thanks into her hair, and she held onto him like an anchor, he couldn't bring himself to want anything different.
The law was over, for him, now. ...Maybe he could farm.
He wrapped his arms around them both, and when it finally slipped apart, he slid an arm around Ambrose and guided him away, quickly as he could, through the cool grey of the morning. He didn't know where they would go, but he thought he could walk a long, long way if he was doing it with Ambrose beside him.
***************
EPILOGUE
"Hand me that box of nails, Kid, I'm out up here."
Jeb did, but without looking--he was too distracted by the girl standing in his arms, by her forehead against his, by her bare feet in the grass. Cain shook his head vaguely, but couldn't begrudge them much. He got the feeling he'd be doing something similar if there weren't quite so many holes in the roof of the porch, and with the late summer rains so soon to come.
Why he was fixing this porch instead of his own, however...
"Weren't you two supposed to be making yourselves useful sanding?" he hinted. "Or pulling up the rotted boards inside so nobody goes through them and breaks a leg?"
The girl--Moura--grumbled something that sounded a lot like "grumpy," and they laughed in each other's arms, still dancing without music. But after a few long kisses (Cain politely looked away), they disengaged themselves and trudged up the porch and back to work, muttering complaints all the way.
Cain tried to keep his smile down as he called after them gruffly. "Hey, this is your porch I'm fixing, kids, if you'd rather get washed away..."
"We're going, we're going..." Jeb called, but Cain wouldn't really believe it until he heard boards break. He wouldn't hold his breath.
It wasn't until they were gone inside and safely out of the way that Ambrose came back any closer. He'd been dismantling a large and ugly metal blot on the landscape for parts, and that had kept him plenty busy.
And anyway, there was an uneasiness between him and Jeb that Cain didn't like, a stiff and stilted angularity when they spoke. But Cain let it be; they'd need time, and he wasn't going to rush them. They'd work it out for themselves. He was sure of that.
"So, you think you got enough out of that bastard to fix the water pump?"
"And the lights," Ambrose agreed, triumphantly, dropping a jumble of metal in the tall yellow grass. "And that TDESPHTL is a gold mine, I'd forgotten how complicated it was inside. I can do a million things with those parts, you wouldn't even believe."
Cain nodded, swallowing against a small lump rising in his throat. "Well. Just so long as they're in pieces, I'm happy enough," he said, and Ambrose nodded fiercely.
"Down to bolts and scraps," Ambrose said, with a touch of vicious glee.
Cain sighed, and felt a little lighter.
"Thanks, sweetheart. The thought of those kids living here, with that stuck out there, watching over them..."
Cain didn't have to finish his thought. Ambrose knew.
"You know," he mused, "I think I'll start carrying a spanner with me, wherever I go. Then if we find another, we can engage in a little guerilla beautification of the landscape, what do you think?"
"I think that sounds mighty fine," Cain agreed. "Hey, sunshine, you mind giving me a hand up here? If we can get this patched tonight, we can start on our roof tomorrow."
Ambrose looked unsteady, but eventually braced himself and mounted the ladder. "I'm not sure why we're fixing this place first," Ambrose admitted. "If we left them to their own devices, they might actually decide to do something with the place, rather than disappear and canoodle at all hours."
Cain laughed on his breath. "No, they'd keep canoodling and then just canoodle in the rain when it started coming in their ceiling." He shrugged. "They're young."
"They're not that young," Ambrose disagreed, for the sake of it. "Maybe I should decide to be young. Then you can cater to my whims and save me from myself when I flounce about willy-nilly."
Cain raised an eyebrow. "And how's that any different from now?"
"...Well, I'd be younger," Ambrose finally decided.
***
Cain and Ambrose packed up late, after a quiet but mostly comfortable dinner at Moura's table, trundling their tools and scraps into their two-wheeled cart.
The cart was most of what they'd brought with them, when they'd left the palace, that day, with what little they salvaged from the damaged cottage. There wasn't much that seemed fitting to take; most of it had been there when they'd arrived, and was still there when they left.
They brought Ambrose's books, his notes and papers and blueprints, and they brought his fine tools. They brought Cain's axe, and the shovels and spades from the gardens, the clothes they could salvage, and whatever they could harvest half-ripe from the patch of earth. A few plates and cups, a tea-set Ambrose had glued back together so many times it wasn't worth leaving, and enough silverware to eat with, and they were gone.
Their lives had seemed so small, then.
But when they'd started out down the path, through the town and on towards the next, they'd started to seem much bigger. The road somehow made everything feel infinite, broken open and full of bright space.
They breathed easier than they had in months.
Jeb and Moura had caught up with them a few days later, though they'd had a truck and everything inside it for their baggage. Neither pair explained themselves, but it had become clear soon enough that they were all headed for the old home, the old village, and so they traveled together.
Cain couldn't bear the thought of living in his house--Adora's house--now, but Moura had fallen in love with it on first sight, so Jeb had staked his claim. Cain had wished them well. There were several more abandoned houses within a few hours' walk--there were too many, in this part of the country--and after a few questions around the tiny village nearest them, Cain and Ambrose had settled on one about a mile and a half out from Jeb's. One that was small, but still had the bones of a farm beneath it, and where the plumbing seemed to be intact.
And that had been that.
Ambrose still complained of the walk, every time they took it, but seemed to mean it less and less every time.
Cain hoped that whenever he and Jeb made their peace, he might give up the argument altogether, but he wasn't going to hold his breath for that, either.
When they settled in for the night, it was in the bed they'd wheedled out of a junk dealer in the town, in sheets they'd bought used and old but soft. It was a bed big enough for two, this time, and they hadn't discussed that, either. They would make that work, too.
The dust overhead was evil, but Ambrose liked the way the light through the window caught it in the early morning, turning the cobwebs gold and the dust motes in the air into a shimmering cloud, so they left it where it lay on the ceilings and eaves--for now. They baked in the heat (there were so many holes in the slats of the walls that it wasn't much better than being outside), and they'd chill in the winter, but they'd get to that when they could.
For now, it was enough to lie together, knees to knees and forehead to forehead, with an idle hand tracing patterns on the mattress between them. It was enough to be here, in the quiet of the night, with the sound of the wind coming through the tall grass and sighing through the walls, sweet and low.