Title: To Me A Kingdom
Author: Signy
Characters: Glitch, Cain
Pairing: none
Warning: none
Summary: After working out some mutual frustration, Glitch and Cain seriously discuss his plans for the future. Unfortunately for Cain’s peace of mind, Glitch has one.
Disclaimer: These characters aren’t my property. Alas.
Notes: Ix is a neighboring country. Baum first wrote about it in a standalone book, then folded it into the Ozverse. Anyone who’d like to imagine a suitable ‘I.X.’ acronym is welcome; I couldn’t think of anything that didn’t sound stupid.
Previous chapters:
One:
http://community.livejournal.com/tinman_fic/108716.htmlTwo:
http://community.livejournal.com/tinman_fic/124535.htmlThree:
http://community.livejournal.com/tinman_fic/134664.htmlFour:
http://community.livejournal.com/tinman_fic/154648.htmlFive:
http://community.livejournal.com/tinman_fic/164634.htmlSix:
http://community.livejournal.com/tinman_fic/172442.htmlSeven:
http://community.livejournal.com/tinman_fic/183698.htmlEight:
http://community.livejournal.com/tinman_fic/210560.html For a long second, neither man moved. Glitch looked stunned, not quite believing that Cain had actually hit him. Cain, for his part, was having second thoughts about the advisability of his course of action-he was a tin man, not a psychiatrist; what the hell did he know-but backing down seemed, on the whole, like a marginally worse idea.
He followed up the first punch with an uppercut that sent Glitch sprawling.
Glitch looked up at him, and the sheer force of the anger in his eyes was enough that Cain took an involuntary step backwards. Glitch rolled to his feet, poised for battle, and it suddenly occurred to Cain that the man was not only much, much better at unarmed combat than he was, but that Glitch was teetering on the edge of a full-scale emotional breakdown and, to top it all off, was madder than hell.
It also occurred to him that nobody knew where he was, and that maybe-just maybe-he could have put a little more thought into his impromptu intervention.
Glitch lashed out with his left foot, and followed up the first kick with an appallingly fast flurry of punches. Cain managed to dodge some of them, but for every blow he evaded, there seemed to be two or possibly three that connected.
Getting up again, Cain finally managed to land another punch, straight to the kidneys, and had the satisfaction of seeing Glitch stumble. He recovered quickly, though, and did something horrible involving another roundhouse kick and a left-right combo, and after that Cain stopped keeping track.
Eventually, both of them were sprawled on the floor, and neither of them seemed to have any inclination to get up. The room was very quiet for a long time as they caught their breath and catalogued their various injuries.
“You were pulling your punches,” Cain said accusingly, after noticing that several blows he clearly recalled taking didn’t seem to have left any marks. He’d seen Longcoats crumple under a fraction of the punishment Glitch had dished out to him, and he didn’t exactly think he was as superhuman as all that.
“Well, of course I was,” Glitch said, somewhat indistinctly, through the fat lip Cain had inflicted in one of his luckier moments. “Sparring like this-it’s just a game, that’s all. I mean, I still know that much. You were pulling yours, too.”
Cain became very involved in examining his battered knuckles in minute detail.
Glitch’s eyes widened. “You weren’t pulling them!”
The guilty look on Cain’s face spoke for itself, and Glitch whooped with laughter. “But I thought… I thought you were holding back on purpose…! You mean you really couldn’t…” he sputtered, then surrendered fully to the humor of the situation, slid back down to the floor, and laughed himself breathless.
Cain smiled sheepishly, then chuckled, and before he had time to think about it, he was laughing too-it really was too absurd for anything else. The feared and fearsome Commander of the Tin Men getting his ass handed to him in an upholstered spare room, at the hands of a zipperhead who was doing his best not to hurt him…if that overworked god who watched over tin men had any heart, he’d see to it that Cain’s recruits never, ever heard about this. Ever.
As the laughter spent itself, it took the tension with it. “Where the hell did you learn to fight like that, anyway?” Cain asked.
“How would I know?” Glitch asked, without rancor. “Picked it up along the way, I guess.” He shrugged.
Cain shook his head. “Not anywhere in the O.Z. you didn’t. I’ve never seen anything like it. I just wish you’d teach it to some of my men. Especially the ones I’m training up for bodyguard duty.”
“I don’t know,” Glitch demurred, still without bitterness. “I don’t really think I’d be a very good teacher, especially since I don’t really know what I’m doing.”
“You knew enough to beat the living crap out of me without half trying,” Cain pointed out.
“That’s not what I mean. I can do it, I just don’t know all the hows and whys of what I’m doing-it’s as much a surprise to me as it is to whoever I’m fighting. That’s not something I can teach.” He shrugged in an exaggeratedly casual sort of way. “Ask Ahamo, that’s what you should do. He and the Queen probably know where I learned it, and then you can send your bodyguards there.”
Cain shook his head. “I’d still rather you were part of the process. You could spar with them, if nothing else. I trust you a whole lot more than I do some random teacher I’ve never met.”
Glitch snorted a soft breath of laughter that had nothing to do with humor. “You don’t need to make up a job for me, Cain,” he said gently. “I’m not going to kill myself. I know that’s what everyone’s thinking, but I’m not. Scout’s honor, all right?”
Cain sighed. “I never claimed to be subtle.”
“Just as well, really,” Glitch said. “It’s actually a relief to have someone come out and ask. To talk to me, instead of over, under, around, and any others I’ve forgotten.”
“Kind of hard to talk to a person who spends most of his time hiding from the rest of us,” Cain said. “I’m just saying.”
“Azkadellia can’t be in the same room with me without looking sick,” Glitch said bluntly. “The Queen, now, she just gets this look like she’s attending Ambrose’s funeral, and I guess that’s about how she does feel. Why should I inflict more of that kind of pain on any of them?”
“Azkadellia can’t be in the same room with anyone without looking sick,” Cain countered. “She’s carrying more guilt than she can bear. It isn’t just you.”
“But I’m the one she used to come to when she needed a friend,” Glitch said wistfully.
Cain gave him a sharp look. “You remember that?”
Long silence. “Ambrose did,” he said. “The clover brought back more than just the laws of thermodynamics. I lost most of it, but sometimes I can almost see the shape of the holes where it all used to be, if that makes any sense.”
Cain nodded.
“I hate this,” Glitch said, still without bitterness. “I was okay before I met DG, you know. I was a halfwit, but I was a whole halfwit.”
“Do you ever wish you hadn’t met her?”
Glitch hesitated, then shook his head. “She’s DG,” he said simply, as though that was explanation enough. And it was.
“And we’d all be dead if you hadn’t, or wishing we were,” Cain repeated. “That really was the Witch’s big mistake, if you think about it. If she’d finished you off, we’d never have known about that machine in time to do anything about it, let alone figured out how to shut down the damned thing.”
“Ambrose’s achievements, not mine,” Glitch objected.
“Same difference,” Cain shot back. “I landed a punch or two on Ambrose that I don’t think he’ll forget in a hurry, but it’s Glitch who’s going to walk out of here with the black eye.”
Glitch snickered. “Don’t flatter yourself,” he said under his breath.
Cain ignored that. “You and your machines were at the heart of her stupid plan for world domination, and that means you were the key to her defeat. If the Witch had had any real grasp of strategy she’d have killed you. By any logical standard, she should have. And if I’d been in her place, I would have.”
Glitch rolled onto his stomach, looked up at Cain, and he smiled. “Thanks, Cain,” he said simply. He meant it, and that was somehow simultaneously reassuring and the polar opposite.
Cain suppressed a shudder and changed the subject. “So… now what?”
“Oh, I figured that out ages ago,” Glitch said easily, rolling back over and folding his hands beneath his head.
“And…?” Cain prompted.
“I’m leaving.”
Be cool, Cain; be casual. “Where to?”
“Not sure yet,” Glitch said. “I figured to follow the old road for a while, and see where it takes me, and then follow it somewhere else.”
Oh, well, as long as there’s a plan, we’ve got nothing to worry about. “Got any particular direction in mind?”
“Not a direction,” Glitch corrected. “Just a destination. I’ll find someone to put me back together. Somewhere. And I won’t come back until I do.”
Cain abandoned casual, and sat up. “Glitch…” he began. “You can’t just wander around the O.Z. by yourself. It isn’t safe.”
“Oh no? Come on, Cain-who do you think was holding my hand all those annuals? I took care of myself then, and I can do it now.”
“DG says she found you dangling upside down in a Guild prison,” Cain pointed out.
“Don’t go there, Cain,” Glitch warned. “That’s way too fragile a glass house.”
“Fair enough,” Cain conceded. “But be honest-you really think you can handle this kind of a road trip on your own? Face it, Glitch! You’d forget where you were going five minutes down the road. You’d be halfway to Ix by Tuesday, and never be seen again.”
Glitch said nothing. He didn’t have to. His expression said it all.
“You knew that,” Cain said, wonderingly. “That’s your plan? Disappear? Glitch, that’s a really, really bad idea. Can you imagine how distraught DG would be? You can’t do that to her.”
“I wasn’t planning to slip away in the dead of night, Cain,” Glitch said. “I’ll tell them before I go. Then they have a choice; they can wish me luck, or they can lock me up in one of those pretty new cells, because that’s the only way I’m staying here.”
“Glitch...” Cain trailed off, unsure what to say next.
“It’s nobody’s fault,” Glitch continued, slipping into Ambrose’s voice. “It’s just a string of choices, is all. If A, then B. Conversely, if not-A, then C. And so forth. Each pair of choices leads to a pair of outcomes, and each potential outcome leads to further choices and thus further potential outcomes. Therefore, it’s simply a matter of figuring out the best possible outcome, and then arranging the choices in such a way that the best outcome becomes at least feasible. So that’s what I’m doing. Basic strategy.”
Cain nodded. “What outcome are you looking to arrange?”
“I want to be whole,” Glitch said simply. “Right now I’m not. And it’s killing me.”
Cain replayed a number of comments in his mind before asking, “So, do you want to be wholly Ambrose… or wholly Glitch?”
Glitch shrugged. “Obviously, one is preferable. It’s also unlikely. The other is acceptable, at least when compared to some of the statistically probable alternatives.”
“That’s pretty cold-blooded,” Cain said. “You’re playing dice with the rest of your life, Glitch. It was miracle enough you found your way home once. How many miracles do you think you deserve?”
“I don’t know, Cain. How many times do I deserve to get my guts kicked out?” Ambrose’s effortless brilliance was fading from his voice, but it wasn’t quite gone yet. “What crime am I supposed to be expiating? I’m not asking for miracles, Cain. I’m asking for some kind of life that can be mine, not his. Is that really so much to want?”
The words could have been self-pitying, but they weren’t; he was too matter-of-fact. If A, then B. Gods only knew how he’d managed it, but Glitch had thought this through, and he’d already made his choices.
“No, of course not, but… damn it. Look, I’m not your father or your superior officer, and I have no right to tell you what to do with your life,” Cain said. “But as your friend, I have to be honest. Maybe you can’t think beyond losing yourself, and in your shoes I’d probably want to do the same thing. But I’m asking you-don’t make the rest of us lose you, too. Give things a little more time to heal. The brick road isn’t going anywhere.”
“No,” Glitch said. “If I leave, I’ve got half a chance of finding myself. Or at least one of them. If I stay…” he shrugged, half-smiled. “Well, I’d guess that there’s a pretty good chance I’d end up breaking that Scout’s honor promise. Or something.”
“The entire royal family is going to have a collective litter of kittens,” Cain said flatly. He was running out of logical arguments. And frankly, he needed to hear some more of Glitch’s, because chances were he was going to end up being the one making them sound reasonable for the royals, and it was always good to know what you were agreeing with before you committed yourself.
“Politically, I serve no useful purpose whatsoever. I’m an unpleasant reminder of the lengths to which the Witch was willing to go, and that does nobody any good, especially not poor Az. Scientifically, I’m worthless. Tapped out. Frick and Frack can pick up where I left off with Ambrose, unless and until I get him back. Socially… if it’s that important to them to keep me in sight, keep me ‘safe’…well, I wasn’t kidding about those spiffy new cells. I won’t fight.”
Cain, involuntarily, spent a split second imagining that scene in vivid and sickening detail, and then deliberately took a few moments to try and erase the image from his mind. “Don’t go yet,” he offered. “There’s two solid feet of snow on the ground, and probably going to be more before there’s less. Spring, okay? Azkadellia is going to feel like she drove you away anyway; it’d be doing her a kindness to not make her have to imagine you freezing to death, at least.”
Glitch sat up, gave Cain an appraising look. “Done,” he said.
Cain raised an eyebrow. That had been too easy. “You weren’t planning on leaving until spring anyway, were you?”
“Of course not,” Glitch said, with just a hint of mischief in his voice. “I hate snow. You know that.”
Cain just shook his head in admiration. It wasn’t every day he was so neatly outfoxed. Glitch had just won himself an advocate in what would doubtlessly be an ugly family scene, and had conceded nothing at all. And they both knew it.
And, too, they both knew that Glitch was running out of other choices.