...You Don't Forget, Ch. 6/?, WIP (Glitch/Cain)
Title: ...You Don't Forget, Ch. 6/?
Author: Lu
Characters, Pairing: Glitch/Cain
Rating: PG.
Summary: Ambrose has to adjust to having a more reliable--and overactive--memory (and a few new glitches) after rebrainment, and to knowing things that he would rather not have remembered at all. Cain does what he can to help. This chapter includes a new coping mechanism, an old one wrought new, sweetness, love, and the vengeful god of grout.
Warnings: Pretty fluffy.
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.
Words: 2983
Cross posted to glitch_wyatt
Your feedback is love--thanks to everyone who's been so much help and encouragement. You are love. I did a little piece of art for this chapter. (And, also: This isn't likely to last on quite so fluffy, but didn't we all need a little sweetness?)
Chapter Five
Chapter Four
Chapter Three
Chapter Two
Chapter One
Previous Series
Chapter Six
When Ambrose woke up, it was too dark to see. Or maybe he just hadn't managed to open his eyes.
He felt empty.
The bubble had shrunk down to something the size of a fist, and receded to the spot under his stomach where it usually lay, and it felt like it had left nothing behind in his chest at all. When he breathed out, he didn't breathe in again.
He wondered if he squeezed his eyes shut tightly enough, he could will stars.
He wondered if he squeezed himself tightly enough, there could be nothing.
But then there was a hand on his shoulder, in the dark, and his phantom lungs went back to their work, in spite of him. There was a murmur. "You awake?"
Cain, his brain supplied, and he tried to make his eyes close even tighter.
Then there was a sigh, and a much smaller sound as the hand withdrew: "All right. 'Love you, kid, sweet dreams."
***
Love?
Ambrose breathed the word in and swallowed it, and it echoed around the black space in his chest until it found meaning. His eyes opened wide, then, without his permission. Love?
It turned out it wasn't really as dark as all that, after all. It was more sort of... dark red, and mangy, and moth-eaten. Sofa-o'-clock, he thought dimly, and then his mouth twitched in a reflexive smile.
He put together from there that he was lying on the sofa, facing the back of it, wrapped up in their thickest blanket. The room was very dim, though not completely dark, but it must have been very late in the day. He drew a long breath through his nose, the noisy kind one takes on waking suddenly.
"Hm? What'sat?" he mumbled, excessively sleepily, trying to coax the thing out again. Love, he prayed to it.
"You're awake," Cain said, instead, sounding a little surprised.
"Just," Ambrose sighed, and closed his eyes again, rolling onto his back. Love, he promised himself, anyway. He felt a little lighter. "What time is it?"
"Past five. You, uh, you been out for a while."
Fuzzy memories of the morning came to him, then, and he untangled his arms from the blanket (Cain must have freed the glitch hand from captivity) to rub his face. "Oh, gods, I must have been. It was hardly seven in the morning when I blacked out, I think, wasn't it?"
Cain was silent.
"Wasn't it? Cain?"
Cain's voice was hollow. "Must have been, yeah. You--" he began, but he gave up. "...Seven? Really?"
Ambrose was finding this turn of conversation alarming. So he took a deep breath and dragged the blanketed mass of his legs down to the floor, so he could sit up straight in his blanket cocoon. He felt a little more prepared for it, that way. "It's just a guess. Was it later than that?"
"'Guess I don't rightly know," Cain evaded. "Seemed later than that, to me, when you... fell asleep."
"How late?"
"Just about four hours ago," Cain confessed.
Ambrose considered that carefully, tamped down on the accompanying nausea, and very calmly said, "Then I believe we have differing perceptions on just when it was, in the process, that I stopped being involved."
"Ah."
"So I suppose I kept going, past the, um. Past the point I remember. Which was where you got up and said something manly and responsible about willpower and I realized what I was doing," Ambrose supplied, wishing his throat didn't feel like it was full of hot ants. "Would that be fair to say?"
"That's as far as you've got?"
"Yes," Ambrose said slowly.
He was glad when Cain didn't dispute that further, and just nodded. "Then, yeah. That makes some sense."
"Some?"
"Well, you didn't seem with it, you just seemed awake."
"I don't think I was either," Ambrose sighed. He felt too hot all over, suddenly, and disentangled himself from the blanket, though the force of the motion made him feel a little seasick. "I didn't... do anything else really horrible or embarrassing or...?"
"No," Cain said, immediately. "You just... didn't seem to know where you were," he finished, lamely.
Ambrose nodded, and got up to go wash his face with very, very cold water, love, for the moment, forgotten.
He frowned, when he saw himself in the mirror, there, and leaned close to look. His face was marked, and he rubbed at it until some of the dried salt had flaked off on his fingers. The collar of his shirt was stained, too.
So he stopped looking, bowed his face to the bowl, and washed his face so long that he hoped it might rinse completely away.
***
Ambrose sat down on the lid of the toilet and thought very hard, leaving his face buried in the towel and letting his breath make a warm place for it there. The fingers of his left hand drummed over his eye through the fabric.
What had happened?
He had been wrapped up, clearly, because he woke that way. He had been crying--he could still taste it on his lips even as he'd tried to scrub it away. He'd been--well, up and moving, anyway--for a lot longer than he recalled, if Cain was to be believed (which he implicitly was). But that was all he had to work with. It all felt familiar, like a half-remembered dream--he did half-remember a dream, but it was the same kind of dream as always, with guards and evil places and terror, and waking up somewhere that he hadn't fallen asleep--but it didn't feel real. It felt like there was a little black void in his life, that he'd have much rather thought was full of a deep and empty sleep.
He hated it, this looking back and seeing shadows. It felt like glitching,
He hated it.
He hadn't cared as much about glitching, before he got his brain back--he hadn't always remembered that he didn't remember, so it was harder to worry about it so much. But now that the days went in straight lines from morning to night, he noticed when there was any minute he couldn't account for, and it felt like slipping, like that horrible moment just before sleep when you think you're taking a step and find nothing beneath your feet, and the fall wakes you again.
He hated that, too.
He let himself sit there, and feel sick, and wonder, for a long, silent time. And then he finally steeled himself, got up, and went back out to the other room, still clutching the faded red towel up under his chin.
"Cain, could you... would you help me with something?"
***
They pieced together every half-formed image of the day that was in Ambrose's head with every blunt recollection of Cain's, and they took an hour to do it. They had to stop several times, for Ambrose to sit back and breathe, or get a glass of water, or count all the boards in the floor, but they trudged through, until Ambrose could put it back together almost as if he'd seen it himself, like a book with side-by-side translations.
It had gone something like this: He had realized what the hell he'd been trying to do--to get Cain to do--and realized all of the things he'd said, and he hadn't been able to deal with it. That was where he lost hold of things, and then he had tried to run, but Cain--not a longcoat, at all, he was wearing pajamas--caught him quickly, because he was confused and off balance and a little tangled in his clothes. He'd struggled, and hit Cain (for which he apologized profusely, when he saw the bruise later), and Cain had shepharded him back in and wrapped him up in the blanket, and his own arms, to kept Ambrose from swinging about too much, while he was in something that sounded distressingly like hysterics. When he'd stopped fighting, Cain had dared to untie his arm, and to lay him down, and then just sat beside him for the next four hours while he spent himself and his panic down far enough with weeping that he could pass out.
It was not a pretty thing to have. But it was, Ambrose supposed, better than nothing. It was better than guards, and it was better than failed escapes, and it was better than being trapped and hopeless in a cell, so he balled it up into a hard piece the size of a marble and swallowed it down. Even with the embarrassment and helplessness, he decided, he could take a good clean collapse over the rest any day.
And with that, he realized he felt a little bit better.
******************
Ambrose couldn't seem to stop crying.
Cain was trying to accept this.
It wasn't really a problem--it didn't seem to upset Ambrose, too much, ironically--but it did take some getting used to the idea that there was nothing to be done for it. Since his Spell on the Sofa, Ambrose had just been raw, his threshold to emotion virtually nonexistent. "I have no filter left," he said (through tears, of course), but at least he was wearing a sort of watery smile at the time.
Something in him had apparently decided that this was the best safety valve it had, and it had never quite closed off, since, so much as slowed. Sometimes it did abate to the point where the clever use of a handkerchief could obscure the fact of it, like listening between drips to the leaking of the roof, but it never held back for so long that he could hide that he'd been crying. His eyes were always a little red and sore, even at the best of times.
Ambrose had been embarrassed, and had apologized at first, but Cain had suggested that that was okay, and that he wouldn't tell anyone. And that maybe it was good for him, at that. And then Ambrose had started crying in earnest again, so Cain had patted him awkwardly, but held him steadily, and Ambrose thought he could handle that, and that maybe it was helping after all.
***
Ambrose couldn't seem to stop remembering.
It kept him trembling, unsteady. If he'd thought in some desperate moment that burning the pieces of his life that he'd made solid and concrete could stem the tide, he'd been very wrong; every new memory that formed was no less plagued with shame or terror than the rest, and they came on unbidden, in their own good time. It all had a momentum of its own, and all Ambrose could do for it was to batten down and weather it as it twisted through.
He tried to accept this.
And after a while, he gracefully accepted the lost scraps of paper Cain had kept for him, too. And when he dug up a new notebook and began scratching in it, it was with a great deal of dignity and a conspicuous lack of comment from either of them. And, of course, loud sniffling.
He kept going about his days as normally as he could, after that, though he had no context for it, and "normal" did seem to include intermittent weeping, the occasional flight into the woods, and now and then trying to ride Cain's last nerve until it broke. But whenever he felt he needed to, he stopped what he was doing to pull out the notebook, and then he would put it back away whenever he was done, and Cain would make no comment on his sneezing and sobbing, and this seemed like a normal enough way to behave, to them. After a while it became so reflexive and (relatively) comfortable that if Ambrose was replacing a wheel on a full barrow, he could wordlessly leave Cain bracing the thing up on his own, and then be back, wiping his eyes, in time to save its contents and Cain's arms before either gave out. He left needles mid-stitch, but, "That way," he said, "I have to come back."
It seemed to be working that way, so Cain didn't question it. He was building up a kind of endurance for The Lurch, even as Ambrose became more efficient and considerate about how long he left Cain in it.
There was a kind of peace.
***
In a few weeks, the rain stopped, and the days turned clear and cold, so Cain and Ambrose borrowed a ladder to fix the leaks in their roof. Ambrose mostly braced the ladder against the wind, and passed tools up from the ground.
Once he stranded Cain up on the low roof to run inside, but when he came back, a little shamefaced, Cain was just lying across the overhang on his stomach, smiling, looking quite as casual as possible.
"So," Cain said, patiently.
"...Yes?" Ambrose asked, bracing.
Cain pointed to the hammer in the grass. And the ladder that had slipped over beside it, as well.
"Oh."
Cain grinned, when Ambrose handed up the hammer, and then went back to work. He even hummed a little.
Ambrose gathered up the latter and braced it against the roof again. "Did it--did it get very windy, then, while I was in?"
Cain nodded. "Just glad I wasn't standing up, myself, when that gust came through..."
"Me, too," Ambrose chimed, shaken by the thought. His eyes were watering, again, just as soon as that. "I'm so sorry, Cain, I--"
"Hey, hey, hush. S'all right."
Ambrose smiled weakly, and then the tickle of tears caught up with him anyway, and he sneezed violently.
Cain shifted to roll off of his pocket and free his handkerchief, barely thinking about it. He shook it out of its fold and dropped it wordlessly down from the roof.
Ambrose watched it float until it had almost fallen too far to catch, but remembered himself and saved it from the mud. "Thank you," he mumbled, ashamed, as he blew his nose. "You're such a gentleman, Cain. Coming to the aid of those in distress. Like a boy sc--"
"Now none of that," Cain warned. "I can only barely abide 'gentleman,' as it is."
Ambrose sniffed, and carefully folded up the handkerchief, tucking it away in his own pocket (Cain lost more of them, that way...). "Well, you are. You're a man, aren't you, and you're very gentle."
Cain grunted, but his best efforts at a stiff, serious look were failing. He could see Ambrose grinning, out of the corner of his eye, and he couldn't seem to help smiling, himself, when he saw it. "I'll have you know I'm very tough."
"Of course you are," Ambrose placated. "Tin Men usually are."
"That's right."
"And so are boy scouts."
"Now you listen here..." Cain began, but when he looked down at his heckler, Ambrose was looking up at him with so much sweetness, and so much--devotion? Could that be it?--that it stopped his throat. He pushed on, trying "You... just..." but the wet grin proved too much.
So Cain just shook his head, and smiled. "Whatever you say, sunshine."
***
It went on, like that. Peaceful, if damp.
But then one day, Ambrose found himself with the notebook open, and a dry face, even after he'd filled a half a page, so for the first time in a very long time, he let his pencil continue on, to contemplate distant things, like the rigging of bridges, and irrigation systems. It only lasted a moment, because his left hand rather promptly began pulling pencils from a cup on the desk and bouncing them on the floor, but his spirits were lifted too high to begrudge it. So he gave in, closed the book, and indulged the glitching whim, instead, which was apparently to scrub the kitchen tiles.
It went about it haphazardly, but with great enthusiasm.
"It's like a tornado," Ambrose said to Cain, fascinated. "Look, watch--are you watching? There it is, going along, wreaking devastation and horror in a perfectly normal way, holding pattern, holding direction, and then, boom! Right around a tile, off in a new direction. And then this row over here, that thought it was going to be spared, will lose one lone tile in an act of senseless cleaning. This hand is the cruel and chaotic god of dirty grout, smiting vengefully and at random."
"I love you," Cain said.
"There's a heady feeling of power, that goes with it," Ambrose went on, "I must be experiencing it on some level, because I feel very--" And then Ambrose caught up with his body, and decided the shaking of his hands and the flush of his face and the stupid grin he was wearing weren't in response to the joys of housekeeping, after all. It didn't stop him from talking, but neither of them listened past that point, or held it against him. Mostly, they smiled, and Ambrose cried as casually as possible as he rambled, because Ambrose had been crying for a month, at that point, and it was only to be expected. Cain offered him a handkerchief that was wrinkled but clean.
There it is, Ambrose thought, as Cain came and sat down beside him on the floor. Love.
(Next chapter: Ch. 7)
Author: Lu
Characters, Pairing: Glitch/Cain
Rating: PG.
Summary: Ambrose has to adjust to having a more reliable--and overactive--memory (and a few new glitches) after rebrainment, and to knowing things that he would rather not have remembered at all. Cain does what he can to help. This chapter includes a new coping mechanism, an old one wrought new, sweetness, love, and the vengeful god of grout.
Warnings: Pretty fluffy.
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.
Words: 2983
Cross posted to glitch_wyatt
Your feedback is love--thanks to everyone who's been so much help and encouragement. You are love. I did a little piece of art for this chapter. (And, also: This isn't likely to last on quite so fluffy, but didn't we all need a little sweetness?)
Chapter Five
Chapter Four
Chapter Three
Chapter Two
Chapter One
Previous Series
Chapter Six
When Ambrose woke up, it was too dark to see. Or maybe he just hadn't managed to open his eyes.
He felt empty.
The bubble had shrunk down to something the size of a fist, and receded to the spot under his stomach where it usually lay, and it felt like it had left nothing behind in his chest at all. When he breathed out, he didn't breathe in again.
He wondered if he squeezed his eyes shut tightly enough, he could will stars.
He wondered if he squeezed himself tightly enough, there could be nothing.
But then there was a hand on his shoulder, in the dark, and his phantom lungs went back to their work, in spite of him. There was a murmur. "You awake?"
Cain, his brain supplied, and he tried to make his eyes close even tighter.
Then there was a sigh, and a much smaller sound as the hand withdrew: "All right. 'Love you, kid, sweet dreams."
***
Love?
Ambrose breathed the word in and swallowed it, and it echoed around the black space in his chest until it found meaning. His eyes opened wide, then, without his permission. Love?
It turned out it wasn't really as dark as all that, after all. It was more sort of... dark red, and mangy, and moth-eaten. Sofa-o'-clock, he thought dimly, and then his mouth twitched in a reflexive smile.
He put together from there that he was lying on the sofa, facing the back of it, wrapped up in their thickest blanket. The room was very dim, though not completely dark, but it must have been very late in the day. He drew a long breath through his nose, the noisy kind one takes on waking suddenly.
"Hm? What'sat?" he mumbled, excessively sleepily, trying to coax the thing out again. Love, he prayed to it.
"You're awake," Cain said, instead, sounding a little surprised.
"Just," Ambrose sighed, and closed his eyes again, rolling onto his back. Love, he promised himself, anyway. He felt a little lighter. "What time is it?"
"Past five. You, uh, you been out for a while."
Fuzzy memories of the morning came to him, then, and he untangled his arms from the blanket (Cain must have freed the glitch hand from captivity) to rub his face. "Oh, gods, I must have been. It was hardly seven in the morning when I blacked out, I think, wasn't it?"
Cain was silent.
"Wasn't it? Cain?"
Cain's voice was hollow. "Must have been, yeah. You--" he began, but he gave up. "...Seven? Really?"
Ambrose was finding this turn of conversation alarming. So he took a deep breath and dragged the blanketed mass of his legs down to the floor, so he could sit up straight in his blanket cocoon. He felt a little more prepared for it, that way. "It's just a guess. Was it later than that?"
"'Guess I don't rightly know," Cain evaded. "Seemed later than that, to me, when you... fell asleep."
"How late?"
"Just about four hours ago," Cain confessed.
Ambrose considered that carefully, tamped down on the accompanying nausea, and very calmly said, "Then I believe we have differing perceptions on just when it was, in the process, that I stopped being involved."
"Ah."
"So I suppose I kept going, past the, um. Past the point I remember. Which was where you got up and said something manly and responsible about willpower and I realized what I was doing," Ambrose supplied, wishing his throat didn't feel like it was full of hot ants. "Would that be fair to say?"
"That's as far as you've got?"
"Yes," Ambrose said slowly.
He was glad when Cain didn't dispute that further, and just nodded. "Then, yeah. That makes some sense."
"Some?"
"Well, you didn't seem with it, you just seemed awake."
"I don't think I was either," Ambrose sighed. He felt too hot all over, suddenly, and disentangled himself from the blanket, though the force of the motion made him feel a little seasick. "I didn't... do anything else really horrible or embarrassing or...?"
"No," Cain said, immediately. "You just... didn't seem to know where you were," he finished, lamely.
Ambrose nodded, and got up to go wash his face with very, very cold water, love, for the moment, forgotten.
He frowned, when he saw himself in the mirror, there, and leaned close to look. His face was marked, and he rubbed at it until some of the dried salt had flaked off on his fingers. The collar of his shirt was stained, too.
So he stopped looking, bowed his face to the bowl, and washed his face so long that he hoped it might rinse completely away.
***
Ambrose sat down on the lid of the toilet and thought very hard, leaving his face buried in the towel and letting his breath make a warm place for it there. The fingers of his left hand drummed over his eye through the fabric.
What had happened?
He had been wrapped up, clearly, because he woke that way. He had been crying--he could still taste it on his lips even as he'd tried to scrub it away. He'd been--well, up and moving, anyway--for a lot longer than he recalled, if Cain was to be believed (which he implicitly was). But that was all he had to work with. It all felt familiar, like a half-remembered dream--he did half-remember a dream, but it was the same kind of dream as always, with guards and evil places and terror, and waking up somewhere that he hadn't fallen asleep--but it didn't feel real. It felt like there was a little black void in his life, that he'd have much rather thought was full of a deep and empty sleep.
He hated it, this looking back and seeing shadows. It felt like glitching,
He hated it.
He hadn't cared as much about glitching, before he got his brain back--he hadn't always remembered that he didn't remember, so it was harder to worry about it so much. But now that the days went in straight lines from morning to night, he noticed when there was any minute he couldn't account for, and it felt like slipping, like that horrible moment just before sleep when you think you're taking a step and find nothing beneath your feet, and the fall wakes you again.
He hated that, too.
He let himself sit there, and feel sick, and wonder, for a long, silent time. And then he finally steeled himself, got up, and went back out to the other room, still clutching the faded red towel up under his chin.
"Cain, could you... would you help me with something?"
***
They pieced together every half-formed image of the day that was in Ambrose's head with every blunt recollection of Cain's, and they took an hour to do it. They had to stop several times, for Ambrose to sit back and breathe, or get a glass of water, or count all the boards in the floor, but they trudged through, until Ambrose could put it back together almost as if he'd seen it himself, like a book with side-by-side translations.
It had gone something like this: He had realized what the hell he'd been trying to do--to get Cain to do--and realized all of the things he'd said, and he hadn't been able to deal with it. That was where he lost hold of things, and then he had tried to run, but Cain--not a longcoat, at all, he was wearing pajamas--caught him quickly, because he was confused and off balance and a little tangled in his clothes. He'd struggled, and hit Cain (for which he apologized profusely, when he saw the bruise later), and Cain had shepharded him back in and wrapped him up in the blanket, and his own arms, to kept Ambrose from swinging about too much, while he was in something that sounded distressingly like hysterics. When he'd stopped fighting, Cain had dared to untie his arm, and to lay him down, and then just sat beside him for the next four hours while he spent himself and his panic down far enough with weeping that he could pass out.
It was not a pretty thing to have. But it was, Ambrose supposed, better than nothing. It was better than guards, and it was better than failed escapes, and it was better than being trapped and hopeless in a cell, so he balled it up into a hard piece the size of a marble and swallowed it down. Even with the embarrassment and helplessness, he decided, he could take a good clean collapse over the rest any day.
And with that, he realized he felt a little bit better.
******************
Ambrose couldn't seem to stop crying.
Cain was trying to accept this.
It wasn't really a problem--it didn't seem to upset Ambrose, too much, ironically--but it did take some getting used to the idea that there was nothing to be done for it. Since his Spell on the Sofa, Ambrose had just been raw, his threshold to emotion virtually nonexistent. "I have no filter left," he said (through tears, of course), but at least he was wearing a sort of watery smile at the time.
Something in him had apparently decided that this was the best safety valve it had, and it had never quite closed off, since, so much as slowed. Sometimes it did abate to the point where the clever use of a handkerchief could obscure the fact of it, like listening between drips to the leaking of the roof, but it never held back for so long that he could hide that he'd been crying. His eyes were always a little red and sore, even at the best of times.
Ambrose had been embarrassed, and had apologized at first, but Cain had suggested that that was okay, and that he wouldn't tell anyone. And that maybe it was good for him, at that. And then Ambrose had started crying in earnest again, so Cain had patted him awkwardly, but held him steadily, and Ambrose thought he could handle that, and that maybe it was helping after all.
***
Ambrose couldn't seem to stop remembering.
It kept him trembling, unsteady. If he'd thought in some desperate moment that burning the pieces of his life that he'd made solid and concrete could stem the tide, he'd been very wrong; every new memory that formed was no less plagued with shame or terror than the rest, and they came on unbidden, in their own good time. It all had a momentum of its own, and all Ambrose could do for it was to batten down and weather it as it twisted through.
He tried to accept this.
And after a while, he gracefully accepted the lost scraps of paper Cain had kept for him, too. And when he dug up a new notebook and began scratching in it, it was with a great deal of dignity and a conspicuous lack of comment from either of them. And, of course, loud sniffling.
He kept going about his days as normally as he could, after that, though he had no context for it, and "normal" did seem to include intermittent weeping, the occasional flight into the woods, and now and then trying to ride Cain's last nerve until it broke. But whenever he felt he needed to, he stopped what he was doing to pull out the notebook, and then he would put it back away whenever he was done, and Cain would make no comment on his sneezing and sobbing, and this seemed like a normal enough way to behave, to them. After a while it became so reflexive and (relatively) comfortable that if Ambrose was replacing a wheel on a full barrow, he could wordlessly leave Cain bracing the thing up on his own, and then be back, wiping his eyes, in time to save its contents and Cain's arms before either gave out. He left needles mid-stitch, but, "That way," he said, "I have to come back."
It seemed to be working that way, so Cain didn't question it. He was building up a kind of endurance for The Lurch, even as Ambrose became more efficient and considerate about how long he left Cain in it.
There was a kind of peace.
***
In a few weeks, the rain stopped, and the days turned clear and cold, so Cain and Ambrose borrowed a ladder to fix the leaks in their roof. Ambrose mostly braced the ladder against the wind, and passed tools up from the ground.
Once he stranded Cain up on the low roof to run inside, but when he came back, a little shamefaced, Cain was just lying across the overhang on his stomach, smiling, looking quite as casual as possible.
"So," Cain said, patiently.
"...Yes?" Ambrose asked, bracing.
Cain pointed to the hammer in the grass. And the ladder that had slipped over beside it, as well.
"Oh."
Cain grinned, when Ambrose handed up the hammer, and then went back to work. He even hummed a little.
Ambrose gathered up the latter and braced it against the roof again. "Did it--did it get very windy, then, while I was in?"
Cain nodded. "Just glad I wasn't standing up, myself, when that gust came through..."
"Me, too," Ambrose chimed, shaken by the thought. His eyes were watering, again, just as soon as that. "I'm so sorry, Cain, I--"
"Hey, hey, hush. S'all right."
Ambrose smiled weakly, and then the tickle of tears caught up with him anyway, and he sneezed violently.
Cain shifted to roll off of his pocket and free his handkerchief, barely thinking about it. He shook it out of its fold and dropped it wordlessly down from the roof.
Ambrose watched it float until it had almost fallen too far to catch, but remembered himself and saved it from the mud. "Thank you," he mumbled, ashamed, as he blew his nose. "You're such a gentleman, Cain. Coming to the aid of those in distress. Like a boy sc--"
"Now none of that," Cain warned. "I can only barely abide 'gentleman,' as it is."
Ambrose sniffed, and carefully folded up the handkerchief, tucking it away in his own pocket (Cain lost more of them, that way...). "Well, you are. You're a man, aren't you, and you're very gentle."
Cain grunted, but his best efforts at a stiff, serious look were failing. He could see Ambrose grinning, out of the corner of his eye, and he couldn't seem to help smiling, himself, when he saw it. "I'll have you know I'm very tough."
"Of course you are," Ambrose placated. "Tin Men usually are."
"That's right."
"And so are boy scouts."
"Now you listen here..." Cain began, but when he looked down at his heckler, Ambrose was looking up at him with so much sweetness, and so much--devotion? Could that be it?--that it stopped his throat. He pushed on, trying "You... just..." but the wet grin proved too much.
So Cain just shook his head, and smiled. "Whatever you say, sunshine."
***
It went on, like that. Peaceful, if damp.
But then one day, Ambrose found himself with the notebook open, and a dry face, even after he'd filled a half a page, so for the first time in a very long time, he let his pencil continue on, to contemplate distant things, like the rigging of bridges, and irrigation systems. It only lasted a moment, because his left hand rather promptly began pulling pencils from a cup on the desk and bouncing them on the floor, but his spirits were lifted too high to begrudge it. So he gave in, closed the book, and indulged the glitching whim, instead, which was apparently to scrub the kitchen tiles.
It went about it haphazardly, but with great enthusiasm.
"It's like a tornado," Ambrose said to Cain, fascinated. "Look, watch--are you watching? There it is, going along, wreaking devastation and horror in a perfectly normal way, holding pattern, holding direction, and then, boom! Right around a tile, off in a new direction. And then this row over here, that thought it was going to be spared, will lose one lone tile in an act of senseless cleaning. This hand is the cruel and chaotic god of dirty grout, smiting vengefully and at random."
"I love you," Cain said.
"There's a heady feeling of power, that goes with it," Ambrose went on, "I must be experiencing it on some level, because I feel very--" And then Ambrose caught up with his body, and decided the shaking of his hands and the flush of his face and the stupid grin he was wearing weren't in response to the joys of housekeeping, after all. It didn't stop him from talking, but neither of them listened past that point, or held it against him. Mostly, they smiled, and Ambrose cried as casually as possible as he rambled, because Ambrose had been crying for a month, at that point, and it was only to be expected. Cain offered him a handkerchief that was wrinkled but clean.
There it is, Ambrose thought, as Cain came and sat down beside him on the floor. Love.
(Next chapter: Ch. 7)