Jul. 28th, 2008 07:33 pm
The Lost and Found Part 1
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lovely_ambitionTITLE: The Lost and Found Part 1
Pairing: None, this part.
Rating: PG.
Disclaimer: These characters are not the property of me.
Summary: When they put Ambrose's brain back in, he wasn't supposed to keep glitching and certainly not for days at a time. It's been three-plus days and Ambrose has strange coordinates on his hand.
Notes: Dedicated to![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
lionille and koslorollo, who showed me that OC's can be wonderful when they're serving Our Fair Heroes' plot.
The world being strange and new shouldn’t have been so familiar to Ambrose, but in truth, he was beginning to become accustomed to not knowing where he was or who he was with or even why he was there. The worst part was that this was with a brain. The medics had looked at him with disdain and disbelief (he remembered that, unfortunately) when he’d asked why it wasn’t doing better, saying only that healing was not immediate and magic did not fix all.
This was probably why Ambrose found himself sitting up in a lush, green field of trees he couldn’t name to the sound of several birds chirping on the horizon, the Black Mountains looming darkly as the suns set down into them.
“Uh…” was about all he got out before the sheer unfamiliarity of the place struck him mute and he picked himself up in the middle of nowhere and tried to locate footprints (none and the wetness of the ground meant they’d been washed away).
He didn’t even know how many days he’d been unconscious this time. All he knew was that his hand bore the marks of ink and there were three markings there. One was four in vertical lines. One was five. And one was a location that made absolutely no sense: C. Due W51.6N88.9’
It might have made sense except he was fairly sure that the Black Mountains were in the East. Or were they? Or was he looking at the Spire Mountains that ranged from the West down to the South? Ambrose ran a hand through his disheveled hair and wished he had a compass or maybe Wyatt Cain and his seeming ability to tell what direction was which.
Cain. Wait. That prompted something, something in the back of his mind but…no. It’d been there and then it was gone and he couldn’t put his finger on it. He sighed as he got to his feet and gave an audible whine when his boots sloshed and his coat dripped water and he had dirt just about on every visible inch of his body.
He was a mess and he was lost.
“Hey there!” a loud shout caught him off guard and he stumbled and started like a fawn caught traipsing in the words. He turned slowly to find a shotgun being pointed in his direction by a grizzled and grey old man, standing at the cliffs amidst all those strange trees that Ambrose couldn’t name. “Come on over, before you catch your death.”
Behind him stood a woman with hair that had probably once shone as beautifully golden as fields of grain and hay but now was a dulled grey, hand on her hip to push back a duster that revealed a waiting gun that she had yet to lay a finger on.
Ambrose probably should have run.
Instead, his weariness, his wetness, and his confusion as to why he was in the middle of a forest near some mountain-range drove him to pick up his soggy feet and join the elderly couple at the top of the embankment, peering down at the valley he’d been asleep in. “Do you know me?” he couldn’t help asking.
“Just know an idiot when I see one,” the man said in return, tone pointed as he looked him up and down and harrumphed, shaking his head. “Catch your death, you will, going around in that state. Especially the way it gets here at nights.” He cocked the gun and flicked off the safety, not waiting for either Ambrose or the woman as he started his descent down towards a sprawling house in the distance, the sound of a waterfall beckoning them closer.
The woman rested her palm on Ambrose’s back and looked up at him with sympathy in her blue eyes. “Don’t mind him,” she said under her breath, a confidential whisper. She was wearing layer upon layer of beiges and greens and tugged a wool sweater tight under her beige trenchcoat. “He hasn’t eaten yet today and he’s a mite cranky.”
Ambrose managed a shaky smile, wrapping his arms around his wet torso as he followed along in the previously-established path and tried not to shiver too badly as night came on quickly and, just as promised, was cold as the bite of the Northern regions of the O.Z. With one last glance over his shoulder (the wind chilly against his back), Ambrose rethought his position. Those had to be the Spire Mountains, which put him right in the old country, where the Resistance had sent most of their most valuable members along with the citizens of the O.Z. who weren’t able to keep up the fight any longer. Shrouded by the wall of the Mountains, Azkadellia had long ignored the people as they were useless without magic, resources, and didn’t dare to threaten her reign. They were merely Resistance outposts to heal the wounded, to let the tired and the old convalesce. Ambrose had somehow found his way into one of those outposts and he was about to sit down to dinner with them.
“I’m Harry,” the man introduced over the burning candles that lit up the dinner table. It was hours after Ambrose had been brought to one of the many bathrooms and made to bathe, relax, and dry off that he had been summoned by a young maid for dinner. “And this is my wife, Susan.”
“Call me Sue,” she insisted as they were served a hearty course of soup by that same pretty young maid that had summoned Ambrose earlier. “We noticed you around midday, thought you were dead t’il we saw you were still breathing. Not many a man winds up sleeping near the Spires, these days. What’re you doing out here?”
“I don’t really know,” Ambrose admitted, staring at the silver spoon in his fingers as he watched it spin back and forth, illuminated by the candles. He fumbled with it slightly, extending his palm to her – and he’d made sure he hadn’t washed the ink off. “I had these coordinates on my hand, but I have issues with memory. I lose days at a time, but I had this address, these…” He trailed off when he caught Harry exchanging a long glance with Sue. “What?” he asked flatly, voice full of wariness.
“It’s our house, kid,” Harry answered, his gaze filled with suspicion. “Why is it you’ve got our address on you?”
“What sort of memory issues?” was Sue’s pointed question.
Two questions at once and Harry was glaring at him with a look that was as sharp as razors, so Ambrose turned to answer Sue. “I had my brain put back in,” he said, ruefully. “That was supposed to cure me of all my memory ills. They didn’t mention in the pamphlet that I’d lose all sense of what I was doing for three to four days at a time when all the work was done.”
“Why are you here?” Harry demanded, his lack of care at Ambrose’s mental predicament clear. “Who gave you that address?”
“I don’t know!” Ambrose spat out, nearly tearing at his hair while Sue slurped at her soup, seemingly uncaring about the fact that he had their house’s address written carelessly on his hand. “I just know I found myself here! I’m as lost as I ever was and I don’t intend any harm. I mean, I think I don’t,” he corrected, wrinkling his nose and hating the cloud of confusion that came with his current situation.
He abandoned argument to try the soup, which appeared to be squash and zucchini of some sort – both items were difficult to get in Central City, lending Ambrose to believe that somewhere in the premises of the sprawling wooden home (that felt more a mansion with its seven bedrooms and three baths, built around an enclosed park and waterfall) was a storage area for vegetables and fruits of the like.
“Very good soup,” Ambrose weakly offered. “The dill really makes it…uh, spike.”
He was met with a smile of approval from Harry, at that, like ice had thawed instantaneously to reveal warm and fuzzy bunny rabbits lurking beneath. “Thank you,” he said.
“You cooked it?” Ambrose asked, gaping for what wouldn’t be the first or the last time. “But you have the…she…”
“Ella does work in exchange for us putting her through school,” Sue explained. “She wouldn’t let us just pay so she puts up this funny little show of serving meals and waiting around the house. Harry cooks all the meals and we all take turns cleaning.” Ella, the diminutive little brunette whose hair was pinned up in at least four ponytails, gave Ambrose a sheepish smile and waved from where she was currently poring over a textbook while wolfing down a sandwich. “Eat up, there’s roast later and Harry’s cooked up a raspberry tart.”
“Took me four hours,” Harry confided, leaning on one forearm to tell Ambrose as if they were talking about hunting animals or something else incredibly manly. His striped button-down was rolled to the sleeves and the elbow creaked as he waved a fresh-baked biscuit at him. “But you’ll taste the difference.”
“I’m sure I will,” Ambrose agreed with a nervous smile, unable to shake the feeling that Harry still didn’t like him for something.
Sue patted him on the back and shared a warm smile with him as she sat forward in her chair, studying Ambrose from her position some feet away. “You’re a thin thing,” she observed bluntly. “Ella, make sure and double his servings. We need to get him good and healthy if he’s going to be staying under our roof.”
“Staying?” Ambrose asked warily.
“You have our address on your hand,” Harry pointed out over a full spoonful of soup.
“You’re here for a reason,” Sue agreed, hand still on his shoulder (thinner, admittedly, ever since the surgery. He just hadn’t had any form of appetite to speak of). “We won’t be letting you go so soon. It might just be that you needed to find us as much as we were meant to find you.” Blue eyes turned somewhat dark as she looked him over. “What’s your name, son?”
“Ambrose,” he answered, feeling somewhat like he was outside of the room, like he was watching this scene and missing something. There was something in the room he could use as a clue, but his brain refused to pinpoint just what it was. They settled when he said his name and shared yet another look, one that made Ambrose wonder just how much was spoken between the two of them with just a look alone. “Ambrose,” he repeated. “Advisor to the Queen.”
“Well, we know that,” Sue blithely remarked. ‘The question is, what’re you doing all the way out here away from your friends and family?”
“I still don’t know,” Ambrose admitted as the roast was served and the soup was taken away. Ella lingered by him and in the mess of her brown hair, he tried to think of DG, to catch a flash of why he had come out here with the information written on his hand, but nothing came to him.
He didn’t know.
Both the roast and the raspberry tart were wonderful from first taste to last and Ambrose made sure to give Harry all the due praise for it (and he smiled, lighting up like a firefly and revealing laugh line upon laugh line as Sue affectionately ran a weathered hand through his thinning hair) and then Ambrose was led to an expansive bedroom by Ella, whose nose was still in a book.
“What are you studying?” Ambrose asked curiously, guiding her away from a pole that she was on an imminent course for.
“If I can get my grades up, I’m hoping to enroll in the Tin Man academy,” Ella said enthusiastically. “Harry and Sue are real big proponents of getting the police force back together because they say it’ll symbolize the restitution of order in Central City which’ll expand out through the O.Z.” She sounded so young and cheerful and positive about it and Ambrose almost remembered those days when he was optimistic. Someone’s got to keep your wide-eyed optimism in check, said a ghost’s voice and Ambrose nearly had it again, nearly had it! But it was gone. He’d lost some of that optimism when he’d regained his mind and the blackouts still happened without fail. “I need to pass politics and physics, though,” Ella admitted with a heave of a sigh, opening the door to Ambrose’s room. “I’m no good at physics. Can’t wrap my head around the formulas let alone how fast a speeding bullet’s bound to go under water.”
Symbols and letters flitted through Ambrose’s mind and all he managed was, “Lambda.”
“What’d you call me!?” Ella spat out, green eyes fraught with distress and worry and the freckles on her face disappeared in a pink flush of anger.
Ambrose stared uselessly at the now-fired-up girl (who couldn’t have been older than seventeen) staring at him like he’d gone and insulted her, her parents, and possibly her favorite toy as a child. His mouth opened and closed in confusion until he stumbled upon some kind of explanation. “It’s the symbol! The symbol for wave particles! Physics,” he insisted, babbling on and on.
“Oh,” Ella exhaled and seemed to let her anger deflate as she gestured to a pair of pressed pale-blue pajamas lying on the bed. “This’ll be your room until you go, but Harry and Sue say you ought to stick around until you’ve got some meat on your bones.”
Ambrose grinned and let out a laugh, but Ella didn’t seem like she was bound to join in the laughter.
“They’re serious, mister,” she promised with a brusque nod of her head. “Breakfast’s at eight.” She closed the door as she left, nearly deafening Ambrose when she shouted, ‘he’s in his room!’ down the hall to someone who was bound to have asked and as he tried to stop the ringing in his head, he turned to give the room a long look.
And before he could forget, he transcribed the numbers on his palm to a piece of paper on the writing desk nearby, setting the quill down atop the parchment when he was through and just studying the numbers.
Why had they been there? Why would he need to be here at this house?
Whatever quiet thoughts he’d been trying to mull on were interrupted by heavy footfalls sprinting past his door and he abandoned the quest for deep thoughts while he was under this roof, climbing into both bed and the pajamas and wondering what he was missing, what was lurking just outside of his consciousness that could put all this together and remove the mental block that refused to lift.
He fell asleep to the drifting sounds of Harry and Sue having a conversation somewhere nearby and every once in a while there came a familiar name and the hint of knowledge that Ambrose wanted to know about, but he felt as though he hadn’t slept in three days and the dreams and the darkness came on swiftly, ruling out the notion of eavesdropping even the tiniest snatches of conversation.
Morning came peacefully and Ambrose didn’t rouse until birds outside his window bade him awake. The sun spilled in the window and painted the floor a pale yellow and Ambrose turned slightly in comfortable sheets, trying to pinpoint where he was when it came to him.
There were joyful sounds outside his door and it didn’t take long for him to realize that it was Ella shrieking and pounding down the hall. “Come back here! Trigger! Trigger, stop it!” she shouted and when Ambrose opened the door, he found Ella playing tug-of-war with a golden retriever with something of a wolf’s look about the face. She peered up at him, hair a knotty mess in a tight bun and grinned brilliantly with slightly crooked teeth. “Ambrose, meet Trigger. He’s the house pet.”
The dog let out a bark and nearly pounced on Ambrose.
Were it not for his impeccable (occasional) balance, he might have been pushed to the ground, but he managed to steady himself at the last minute and wrapped his arms around the dog as if it were a person. “Trigger,” he weakly said. “Enthusiastic thing.”
“That he is,” Ella agreed warmly, whistling. “C’mon Trigger!” She trotted off down the hall in a brisk half-run. “Sue wants to see you out front! Says she found something in the valley where they found you!”
Ambrose watched her go, half in the hall (despite his lack of dress) and shouted a “Hey!” in Ella’s direction, but she had already run out the door, leaving Ambrose with only the lead that Sue was in the front and she had something.
What she had was his embroidered bag and letters in her hand. He’d taken those letters because…because…why did he take those letters?
“These are all stamped for the Longview Post,” Sue remarked, pilfering through and keeping one in every three. “Why are you acting a courier when you ought to be inventing things back in that shining palace?”
“I don’t know,” Ambrose said again and had the feeling he was going to get very tired of saying that. “I really don’t.” He tilted his head to one side and looked at the array of letters, noticing that some of them were addressed to a SUSAN & HARRY, the ones that were being kept. “You know someone in Central,” he realized with a warm smile, seeing as it somehow gave him a tie beyond the fact that he was being clothed, provided for, and fed by these people.
“We have family there, at least…since the Witch fell,” Sue agreed tersely. The subject seemed to be off-limits and Ambrose didn’t know if he had pushed too far, just yet. Everyone had lost someone in the Witch’s War, it felt like (Ambrose himself had lost parents and a sister, from what the histories said) and to have met someone who didn’t lose family was the true miracle. “We’ve got more nieces and nephews around these parts, though. They settled around us when peace came about. They’re doing good work in the mines and the fields, not to mention in the little inns in the villages.”
Ambrose offered a sympathetic smile and he sat to rifle through his bag, digging out various items until he came to a carved horse with a bullet in it. “This isn’t mine,” he realized aloud, brain straining to recall something. Had he told Cain that he was taking the horse? And why would he have it? Why would Cain willingly part with one of his most treasured items?
He tucked away the horse before he could be asked what it was (and that was a difficult thing to explain when he knew what it was, just not why he had it).
“What isn’t yours, son?” Sue asked, glancing his way.
Ambrose pulled out one of the guns tucked away in the depths of the bag because that…definitely wasn’t his either. “This.” And he wasn’t lying about that.
He let Sue pry it from his hands and he didn’t even protest when she was on her feet, bellowing for Harry. “Sorry, Ambrose, we’ve got business. Serve yourself some breakfast and enjoy the grounds, why don’t you? Just make sure to stay away from the woods. Black bears lurk there, these days.”
She was gone in a flash before Ambrose could even ask why she’d taken such an interest in the gun that wasn’t his. He rubbed a hand over his aching-head, glancing to the trees and the waterfall in the middle of the sprawling house and debated a wander through them.
He supposed it couldn’t hurt.
By the time he reached the inner sanctum of the waterfall, his head was throbbing and Ella was perched on one of the low-lying trees poring through a thick tome. “Physics?” Ambrose asked, to which she nodded and angrily flicked a page over. “That bad?”
“I don’t see why I have to know this,” she muttered, digging out something from her bag and holding it out. “Here, eat,” she said, gesturing with her chin to the banana bread she was holding out to him. “Sue says our mission is to get some meat on your bones, plus you probably need something being that you haven’t eaten breakfast.”
“How did you…”
“Harry’s put it all away now and you’re still in your bedclothes,” Ella said distractedly. “Do you know any Tin Men?”
“Just one,” Ambrose said wryly. “A stubborn one, but he did well by the force.”
“Did he have to learn about physics?”
It was a good question and one he didn’t know the answer to. He was sure Cain must have studied physics as it was a required course like all the others that were demanded at the Tin Man Academy, but it both never came up and was never offered by Cain as something he knew. Then, they hadn’t exactly stopped to discuss motors and gravity while running for their lives.
“It’s very important,” Ambrose half-lied. “It makes you look smart.”
“Glasses can make me look smart,” Ella complained, shutting the book with a thud and jumping to her feet. “C’mon, I’ll show you the shooting range. You know how to fire a gun?”
“No, but I know the physics involved.”
He was met with a glower for that, but Ambrose was grinning away. She followed, though, and he marked that a success – even if he did have to swallow half a loaf of banana bread, a bag of raisins, and several pieces of bread on the way. At this rate, they were going to have him fattened like a turkey. He just hoped there wasn’t a guillotine at the end of this tunnel.
What he appreciated most of all, though, was that when he started talking about trajectories and much more of that ‘eugh, physics stuff’ that Ella complained about, she seemed to not only listen, but learn.
It almost put him at ease, despite the fact that he still had absolutely no idea what was going on.
tbc
Pairing: None, this part.
Rating: PG.
Disclaimer: These characters are not the property of me.
Summary: When they put Ambrose's brain back in, he wasn't supposed to keep glitching and certainly not for days at a time. It's been three-plus days and Ambrose has strange coordinates on his hand.
Notes: Dedicated to
lionille and koslorollo, who showed me that OC's can be wonderful when they're serving Our Fair Heroes' plot.The world being strange and new shouldn’t have been so familiar to Ambrose, but in truth, he was beginning to become accustomed to not knowing where he was or who he was with or even why he was there. The worst part was that this was with a brain. The medics had looked at him with disdain and disbelief (he remembered that, unfortunately) when he’d asked why it wasn’t doing better, saying only that healing was not immediate and magic did not fix all.
This was probably why Ambrose found himself sitting up in a lush, green field of trees he couldn’t name to the sound of several birds chirping on the horizon, the Black Mountains looming darkly as the suns set down into them.
“Uh…” was about all he got out before the sheer unfamiliarity of the place struck him mute and he picked himself up in the middle of nowhere and tried to locate footprints (none and the wetness of the ground meant they’d been washed away).
He didn’t even know how many days he’d been unconscious this time. All he knew was that his hand bore the marks of ink and there were three markings there. One was four in vertical lines. One was five. And one was a location that made absolutely no sense: C. Due W51.6N88.9’
It might have made sense except he was fairly sure that the Black Mountains were in the East. Or were they? Or was he looking at the Spire Mountains that ranged from the West down to the South? Ambrose ran a hand through his disheveled hair and wished he had a compass or maybe Wyatt Cain and his seeming ability to tell what direction was which.
Cain. Wait. That prompted something, something in the back of his mind but…no. It’d been there and then it was gone and he couldn’t put his finger on it. He sighed as he got to his feet and gave an audible whine when his boots sloshed and his coat dripped water and he had dirt just about on every visible inch of his body.
He was a mess and he was lost.
“Hey there!” a loud shout caught him off guard and he stumbled and started like a fawn caught traipsing in the words. He turned slowly to find a shotgun being pointed in his direction by a grizzled and grey old man, standing at the cliffs amidst all those strange trees that Ambrose couldn’t name. “Come on over, before you catch your death.”
Behind him stood a woman with hair that had probably once shone as beautifully golden as fields of grain and hay but now was a dulled grey, hand on her hip to push back a duster that revealed a waiting gun that she had yet to lay a finger on.
Ambrose probably should have run.
Instead, his weariness, his wetness, and his confusion as to why he was in the middle of a forest near some mountain-range drove him to pick up his soggy feet and join the elderly couple at the top of the embankment, peering down at the valley he’d been asleep in. “Do you know me?” he couldn’t help asking.
“Just know an idiot when I see one,” the man said in return, tone pointed as he looked him up and down and harrumphed, shaking his head. “Catch your death, you will, going around in that state. Especially the way it gets here at nights.” He cocked the gun and flicked off the safety, not waiting for either Ambrose or the woman as he started his descent down towards a sprawling house in the distance, the sound of a waterfall beckoning them closer.
The woman rested her palm on Ambrose’s back and looked up at him with sympathy in her blue eyes. “Don’t mind him,” she said under her breath, a confidential whisper. She was wearing layer upon layer of beiges and greens and tugged a wool sweater tight under her beige trenchcoat. “He hasn’t eaten yet today and he’s a mite cranky.”
Ambrose managed a shaky smile, wrapping his arms around his wet torso as he followed along in the previously-established path and tried not to shiver too badly as night came on quickly and, just as promised, was cold as the bite of the Northern regions of the O.Z. With one last glance over his shoulder (the wind chilly against his back), Ambrose rethought his position. Those had to be the Spire Mountains, which put him right in the old country, where the Resistance had sent most of their most valuable members along with the citizens of the O.Z. who weren’t able to keep up the fight any longer. Shrouded by the wall of the Mountains, Azkadellia had long ignored the people as they were useless without magic, resources, and didn’t dare to threaten her reign. They were merely Resistance outposts to heal the wounded, to let the tired and the old convalesce. Ambrose had somehow found his way into one of those outposts and he was about to sit down to dinner with them.
“I’m Harry,” the man introduced over the burning candles that lit up the dinner table. It was hours after Ambrose had been brought to one of the many bathrooms and made to bathe, relax, and dry off that he had been summoned by a young maid for dinner. “And this is my wife, Susan.”
“Call me Sue,” she insisted as they were served a hearty course of soup by that same pretty young maid that had summoned Ambrose earlier. “We noticed you around midday, thought you were dead t’il we saw you were still breathing. Not many a man winds up sleeping near the Spires, these days. What’re you doing out here?”
“I don’t really know,” Ambrose admitted, staring at the silver spoon in his fingers as he watched it spin back and forth, illuminated by the candles. He fumbled with it slightly, extending his palm to her – and he’d made sure he hadn’t washed the ink off. “I had these coordinates on my hand, but I have issues with memory. I lose days at a time, but I had this address, these…” He trailed off when he caught Harry exchanging a long glance with Sue. “What?” he asked flatly, voice full of wariness.
“It’s our house, kid,” Harry answered, his gaze filled with suspicion. “Why is it you’ve got our address on you?”
“What sort of memory issues?” was Sue’s pointed question.
Two questions at once and Harry was glaring at him with a look that was as sharp as razors, so Ambrose turned to answer Sue. “I had my brain put back in,” he said, ruefully. “That was supposed to cure me of all my memory ills. They didn’t mention in the pamphlet that I’d lose all sense of what I was doing for three to four days at a time when all the work was done.”
“Why are you here?” Harry demanded, his lack of care at Ambrose’s mental predicament clear. “Who gave you that address?”
“I don’t know!” Ambrose spat out, nearly tearing at his hair while Sue slurped at her soup, seemingly uncaring about the fact that he had their house’s address written carelessly on his hand. “I just know I found myself here! I’m as lost as I ever was and I don’t intend any harm. I mean, I think I don’t,” he corrected, wrinkling his nose and hating the cloud of confusion that came with his current situation.
He abandoned argument to try the soup, which appeared to be squash and zucchini of some sort – both items were difficult to get in Central City, lending Ambrose to believe that somewhere in the premises of the sprawling wooden home (that felt more a mansion with its seven bedrooms and three baths, built around an enclosed park and waterfall) was a storage area for vegetables and fruits of the like.
“Very good soup,” Ambrose weakly offered. “The dill really makes it…uh, spike.”
He was met with a smile of approval from Harry, at that, like ice had thawed instantaneously to reveal warm and fuzzy bunny rabbits lurking beneath. “Thank you,” he said.
“You cooked it?” Ambrose asked, gaping for what wouldn’t be the first or the last time. “But you have the…she…”
“Ella does work in exchange for us putting her through school,” Sue explained. “She wouldn’t let us just pay so she puts up this funny little show of serving meals and waiting around the house. Harry cooks all the meals and we all take turns cleaning.” Ella, the diminutive little brunette whose hair was pinned up in at least four ponytails, gave Ambrose a sheepish smile and waved from where she was currently poring over a textbook while wolfing down a sandwich. “Eat up, there’s roast later and Harry’s cooked up a raspberry tart.”
“Took me four hours,” Harry confided, leaning on one forearm to tell Ambrose as if they were talking about hunting animals or something else incredibly manly. His striped button-down was rolled to the sleeves and the elbow creaked as he waved a fresh-baked biscuit at him. “But you’ll taste the difference.”
“I’m sure I will,” Ambrose agreed with a nervous smile, unable to shake the feeling that Harry still didn’t like him for something.
Sue patted him on the back and shared a warm smile with him as she sat forward in her chair, studying Ambrose from her position some feet away. “You’re a thin thing,” she observed bluntly. “Ella, make sure and double his servings. We need to get him good and healthy if he’s going to be staying under our roof.”
“Staying?” Ambrose asked warily.
“You have our address on your hand,” Harry pointed out over a full spoonful of soup.
“You’re here for a reason,” Sue agreed, hand still on his shoulder (thinner, admittedly, ever since the surgery. He just hadn’t had any form of appetite to speak of). “We won’t be letting you go so soon. It might just be that you needed to find us as much as we were meant to find you.” Blue eyes turned somewhat dark as she looked him over. “What’s your name, son?”
“Ambrose,” he answered, feeling somewhat like he was outside of the room, like he was watching this scene and missing something. There was something in the room he could use as a clue, but his brain refused to pinpoint just what it was. They settled when he said his name and shared yet another look, one that made Ambrose wonder just how much was spoken between the two of them with just a look alone. “Ambrose,” he repeated. “Advisor to the Queen.”
“Well, we know that,” Sue blithely remarked. ‘The question is, what’re you doing all the way out here away from your friends and family?”
“I still don’t know,” Ambrose admitted as the roast was served and the soup was taken away. Ella lingered by him and in the mess of her brown hair, he tried to think of DG, to catch a flash of why he had come out here with the information written on his hand, but nothing came to him.
He didn’t know.
Both the roast and the raspberry tart were wonderful from first taste to last and Ambrose made sure to give Harry all the due praise for it (and he smiled, lighting up like a firefly and revealing laugh line upon laugh line as Sue affectionately ran a weathered hand through his thinning hair) and then Ambrose was led to an expansive bedroom by Ella, whose nose was still in a book.
“What are you studying?” Ambrose asked curiously, guiding her away from a pole that she was on an imminent course for.
“If I can get my grades up, I’m hoping to enroll in the Tin Man academy,” Ella said enthusiastically. “Harry and Sue are real big proponents of getting the police force back together because they say it’ll symbolize the restitution of order in Central City which’ll expand out through the O.Z.” She sounded so young and cheerful and positive about it and Ambrose almost remembered those days when he was optimistic. Someone’s got to keep your wide-eyed optimism in check, said a ghost’s voice and Ambrose nearly had it again, nearly had it! But it was gone. He’d lost some of that optimism when he’d regained his mind and the blackouts still happened without fail. “I need to pass politics and physics, though,” Ella admitted with a heave of a sigh, opening the door to Ambrose’s room. “I’m no good at physics. Can’t wrap my head around the formulas let alone how fast a speeding bullet’s bound to go under water.”
Symbols and letters flitted through Ambrose’s mind and all he managed was, “Lambda.”
“What’d you call me!?” Ella spat out, green eyes fraught with distress and worry and the freckles on her face disappeared in a pink flush of anger.
Ambrose stared uselessly at the now-fired-up girl (who couldn’t have been older than seventeen) staring at him like he’d gone and insulted her, her parents, and possibly her favorite toy as a child. His mouth opened and closed in confusion until he stumbled upon some kind of explanation. “It’s the symbol! The symbol for wave particles! Physics,” he insisted, babbling on and on.
“Oh,” Ella exhaled and seemed to let her anger deflate as she gestured to a pair of pressed pale-blue pajamas lying on the bed. “This’ll be your room until you go, but Harry and Sue say you ought to stick around until you’ve got some meat on your bones.”
Ambrose grinned and let out a laugh, but Ella didn’t seem like she was bound to join in the laughter.
“They’re serious, mister,” she promised with a brusque nod of her head. “Breakfast’s at eight.” She closed the door as she left, nearly deafening Ambrose when she shouted, ‘he’s in his room!’ down the hall to someone who was bound to have asked and as he tried to stop the ringing in his head, he turned to give the room a long look.
And before he could forget, he transcribed the numbers on his palm to a piece of paper on the writing desk nearby, setting the quill down atop the parchment when he was through and just studying the numbers.
Why had they been there? Why would he need to be here at this house?
Whatever quiet thoughts he’d been trying to mull on were interrupted by heavy footfalls sprinting past his door and he abandoned the quest for deep thoughts while he was under this roof, climbing into both bed and the pajamas and wondering what he was missing, what was lurking just outside of his consciousness that could put all this together and remove the mental block that refused to lift.
He fell asleep to the drifting sounds of Harry and Sue having a conversation somewhere nearby and every once in a while there came a familiar name and the hint of knowledge that Ambrose wanted to know about, but he felt as though he hadn’t slept in three days and the dreams and the darkness came on swiftly, ruling out the notion of eavesdropping even the tiniest snatches of conversation.
Morning came peacefully and Ambrose didn’t rouse until birds outside his window bade him awake. The sun spilled in the window and painted the floor a pale yellow and Ambrose turned slightly in comfortable sheets, trying to pinpoint where he was when it came to him.
There were joyful sounds outside his door and it didn’t take long for him to realize that it was Ella shrieking and pounding down the hall. “Come back here! Trigger! Trigger, stop it!” she shouted and when Ambrose opened the door, he found Ella playing tug-of-war with a golden retriever with something of a wolf’s look about the face. She peered up at him, hair a knotty mess in a tight bun and grinned brilliantly with slightly crooked teeth. “Ambrose, meet Trigger. He’s the house pet.”
The dog let out a bark and nearly pounced on Ambrose.
Were it not for his impeccable (occasional) balance, he might have been pushed to the ground, but he managed to steady himself at the last minute and wrapped his arms around the dog as if it were a person. “Trigger,” he weakly said. “Enthusiastic thing.”
“That he is,” Ella agreed warmly, whistling. “C’mon Trigger!” She trotted off down the hall in a brisk half-run. “Sue wants to see you out front! Says she found something in the valley where they found you!”
Ambrose watched her go, half in the hall (despite his lack of dress) and shouted a “Hey!” in Ella’s direction, but she had already run out the door, leaving Ambrose with only the lead that Sue was in the front and she had something.
What she had was his embroidered bag and letters in her hand. He’d taken those letters because…because…why did he take those letters?
“These are all stamped for the Longview Post,” Sue remarked, pilfering through and keeping one in every three. “Why are you acting a courier when you ought to be inventing things back in that shining palace?”
“I don’t know,” Ambrose said again and had the feeling he was going to get very tired of saying that. “I really don’t.” He tilted his head to one side and looked at the array of letters, noticing that some of them were addressed to a SUSAN & HARRY, the ones that were being kept. “You know someone in Central,” he realized with a warm smile, seeing as it somehow gave him a tie beyond the fact that he was being clothed, provided for, and fed by these people.
“We have family there, at least…since the Witch fell,” Sue agreed tersely. The subject seemed to be off-limits and Ambrose didn’t know if he had pushed too far, just yet. Everyone had lost someone in the Witch’s War, it felt like (Ambrose himself had lost parents and a sister, from what the histories said) and to have met someone who didn’t lose family was the true miracle. “We’ve got more nieces and nephews around these parts, though. They settled around us when peace came about. They’re doing good work in the mines and the fields, not to mention in the little inns in the villages.”
Ambrose offered a sympathetic smile and he sat to rifle through his bag, digging out various items until he came to a carved horse with a bullet in it. “This isn’t mine,” he realized aloud, brain straining to recall something. Had he told Cain that he was taking the horse? And why would he have it? Why would Cain willingly part with one of his most treasured items?
He tucked away the horse before he could be asked what it was (and that was a difficult thing to explain when he knew what it was, just not why he had it).
“What isn’t yours, son?” Sue asked, glancing his way.
Ambrose pulled out one of the guns tucked away in the depths of the bag because that…definitely wasn’t his either. “This.” And he wasn’t lying about that.
He let Sue pry it from his hands and he didn’t even protest when she was on her feet, bellowing for Harry. “Sorry, Ambrose, we’ve got business. Serve yourself some breakfast and enjoy the grounds, why don’t you? Just make sure to stay away from the woods. Black bears lurk there, these days.”
She was gone in a flash before Ambrose could even ask why she’d taken such an interest in the gun that wasn’t his. He rubbed a hand over his aching-head, glancing to the trees and the waterfall in the middle of the sprawling house and debated a wander through them.
He supposed it couldn’t hurt.
By the time he reached the inner sanctum of the waterfall, his head was throbbing and Ella was perched on one of the low-lying trees poring through a thick tome. “Physics?” Ambrose asked, to which she nodded and angrily flicked a page over. “That bad?”
“I don’t see why I have to know this,” she muttered, digging out something from her bag and holding it out. “Here, eat,” she said, gesturing with her chin to the banana bread she was holding out to him. “Sue says our mission is to get some meat on your bones, plus you probably need something being that you haven’t eaten breakfast.”
“How did you…”
“Harry’s put it all away now and you’re still in your bedclothes,” Ella said distractedly. “Do you know any Tin Men?”
“Just one,” Ambrose said wryly. “A stubborn one, but he did well by the force.”
“Did he have to learn about physics?”
It was a good question and one he didn’t know the answer to. He was sure Cain must have studied physics as it was a required course like all the others that were demanded at the Tin Man Academy, but it both never came up and was never offered by Cain as something he knew. Then, they hadn’t exactly stopped to discuss motors and gravity while running for their lives.
“It’s very important,” Ambrose half-lied. “It makes you look smart.”
“Glasses can make me look smart,” Ella complained, shutting the book with a thud and jumping to her feet. “C’mon, I’ll show you the shooting range. You know how to fire a gun?”
“No, but I know the physics involved.”
He was met with a glower for that, but Ambrose was grinning away. She followed, though, and he marked that a success – even if he did have to swallow half a loaf of banana bread, a bag of raisins, and several pieces of bread on the way. At this rate, they were going to have him fattened like a turkey. He just hoped there wasn’t a guillotine at the end of this tunnel.
What he appreciated most of all, though, was that when he started talking about trajectories and much more of that ‘eugh, physics stuff’ that Ella complained about, she seemed to not only listen, but learn.
It almost put him at ease, despite the fact that he still had absolutely no idea what was going on.
tbc
Tags: