The Lost and Found - Part 3

[lovely_ambition]

TITLE: The Lost and Found - Part 3
Pairing: Jeb/DG, implications of Ambrose/OMC.
Rating: PG-13.
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. Yes, I'm totally aware this fic has revolving pairings, mostly because each part seems to be something new. This part also contains a lot of suggestiveness.



Ambrose was sneaking in the back door of the house at two in the morning and praying to the gods that it wouldn’t creak like…

Crrrrrrrrkk.

Like that.

“Fiddlecraps,” Ambrose cursed under his breath as the lights went on and suddenly Trigger was barking up a storm and Ella was awake (if her shouts were any indication) and Harry was booming out words and that meant Sue and Cain would be down in no time to find out if they had an intruder. Or worse, they’d be down to…

“How’d it go?” Sue immediately interrogated, wrapping her housecoat tighter around herself as she gestured Ambrose inside with an arm wrapped snugly around his back.

He sighed and tried to ignore Ella knotting her hair into a side-ponytail and bounding to his other side, batting eyelashes dreamily up at him and puckering her lips. “Didja kiss her?” Ella asked, affecting a swoon. “Ambrose, oh Ambrose, kissy kiss me,” she squealed as Ambrose pushed her lightly away and laughed as she rejoined him. “Did she at least ‘thank’ you for the dinner?” she asked, in a far more lascivious tone.

“Ella,” Cain said warningly.

“Oh, please, Wyatt, I’m not a baby anymore,” she retorted. “I know all about the way Mara likes to thank men for dinner.” She made a perfect ‘o’ of her lips and blew a kiss Ambrose’s way with a mischievous smirk on her lips. She gave another shriek of a laugh as Ambrose gave a firmer (yet still playful) push and she pushed right back. “Are you going to see her again?”

Ambrose sank down into the chair that Sue had guided him to and tried to pick just one person to look at while he answered. Due to proximity, that person was Ella and he tugged lightly at her ponytail. “No,” he said, lightly to cover the fact that this issue went far, far deeper than it appeared to go. “She’s…not my type.”

Sue got a thoughtful look on her face, chewing the inside of her cheek at that. “Right.”

“Right?” Cain asked, the word echoed by Ambrose who said it at exactly the same time.

“We set him up with Philip.”

That seemed to be something that wasn’t supposed to be said because Cain was leveling a piercing glare in Sue’s direction. “Mother,” he half-growled. “Are you joking? You want to send Ambrose off on a date with Philip where they might not always be in public?”

“What’s wrong with Philip?” Ambrose asked warily, gaze darting rapidly between Cain and Sue. “Wha…”

“He’s a tart,” Ella whispered to him, perched on the armrest of the chair Ambrose had been sat in. “Tight trousers, hardly likes to wear sleeves, and his eyes are doused in the best of makeup. He’s pretty, but Sue won’t let me near him because she says I’m too young.”

“Ella,” Harry patiently spoke up for the first time all evening. “Ain’t it time for you to go to bed?”

Ella glanced up and took one look at Harry’s face before she sighed and gave a tired nod, pushing to her feet and ruffling Ambrose’s hair lightly. “Night, player,” she said, sidling off and corralling Sue as she went. “Trigger’s whining again, I think he needs a good belly rub,” she said, to give Sue an excuse to leave, as well.

Ambrose watched Ella and thanked the gods for her quick thinking and thanked them doubly so when he was left with only Harry and Cain and when they were side-by-side, he didn’t know how he could have missed them for anything but father and son. It wasn’t a match, but it was a resemblance. Or maybe it was just in the way that they carried themselves.

He sighed wearily and stared up at the two men, who both looked at him expectantly.

“What?” he asked, because neither of them seemed to be asking anything, even though they looked like they wanted to. As if synchronized, they folded their arms over their broad torsos and the silence reigned on. Ambrose wasn’t sure how much of The Amazing Male Cain Synchronized Show he could take when it was nearly three in the morning, so he turned to Cain with a tired look on his face and tried to plead wordlessly for an end to this debacle.

Cain took a step forward and broke free of the tense hold he had on his own arms. “Say no about Philip,” he advised gravely.

“We’ll find you someone else,” Harry pitched in. “Sue, she gets excited seeing as Philip’s tended to give men and women a good time, but it’s never anything more than a night out. We want more than that for you.”

Ambrose looked up from his chair and met Cain’s eyes, trying to seek out whether Cain agreed with that, but he couldn’t see past the icy exterior and he was too tired to delve deeper.

“Come on to bed,” Harry encouraged. “I’ll put in a call to Richard.” He glanced over Cain’s way. “You remember your cousin Richard, Wy? He’s the one who took over the post office when all went down the drain and managed to double the efficiency. I think you’ll like him,” he said, offering a hand out to Ambrose to help him up from his lazy sit. With one last look at Cain and one worried check with Harry, he was happy to retire to bed and try and wipe the smell of cologne from him with as much soap as was needed.

And then, apparently, he was going to try again with ‘Richard’.

*

Several days later, the doorbell rang while Ambrose was developing an irrigation system for the Cains’ vegetable garden. They had been determined to get him to gain even more weight and apparently could see the difference in his face (“not so scarily gaunt,” was Sue’s favourite way of putting it), but they still wouldn’t let him go. Calls were put in and he had a date with Richard in a week’s time.

“Anyone else going to get that?” Ambrose called out from his small workspace in the sunroom near the back-porch.

Cain was in town to get parts for the garage (filled with cars that the Cains had salvaged and now worked on sporadically), Ella was at school, Harry was in the gardens, and Sue seemed to be nowhere around.

“I guess I am,” Ambrose muttered, prying his gloves off of his hands and rubbing at stains on his face with the back of his hand, feeling rather felinesque in the gesture. He pried off his labcoat and goggles and cursed again under his breath when the bell kept being rung with endless fervour, again and again. He ran quickly and with Glitch’s grace through halls he’d become accustomed to (even if he still wasn’t quite aware why he’d gone there) until he was at the front door.

He opened it to greet whatever wayward former-Resistance member it might be and nearly swallowed his tongue when he saw who it really was.

“Glitch?” Two voices echoed as one as they stared at him, broken apart from their subdued prior conversation.

“Jeb.” Okay, that one made sense. He was Harry and Sue’s grandson and would typically visit being that it seemed all the Cains were programmed to put family before all else, but…“DG?”

“Wha…t are you doing here?” DG slowly tried to puzzle that one out curiously, staring at him with those wide blue eyes of hers that always seemed to make everything in the nearby vicinity pale in comparison. “When you said you were going to figure out what was ‘so very great’ about what we were doing, we thought you just meant…well, maybe Central City.”

“What are you doing here?” Ambrose asked in turn. “Not you, Jeb, clearly you have cause.”

Jeb seemed to acknowledge that with a raise of both brows, pushing into the house to leave Ambrose to his conversation with DG, calling out a ‘Grandma! Grandpa! I’m here’ before he left Ambrose’s earshot. DG was staring at him warily and Ambrose was staring back and right now, they were the only two people under that roof without a cause to be and Ambrose was hoping DG would fill in the blanks on his cause.

“What am I doing here?” Ambrose finally asked. “I woke up nearby with this address on my hand and a bunch of Cain’s things in my bag.”

“I think you got a bit irked that we were always going back and forth and leaving,” DG admitted, offering a small shrug. “I mean, after the surgery, after you were going to live and that was sure, Mr. Cain started spending most of his time here and then Jeb followed suit, so I came along to keep him company on his trips.”

“Met the grandparents already, have you?” Ambrose asked slyly. “Is it really that serious?”

“Well, after he accidentally pelted pebbles at my mother’s window thinking it was mine, he said he’d drag me here and have them smother me to death,” DG retorted dryly. “Besides, it’s nice here. Loud, but nice.” She threaded her arm with Ambrose’s and tugged him inside. “You know, if you’d said you were coming here, you could have joined us instead of running away on your little spirit journey which you just ‘had to do on your own’.” She leaned her cheek against his shoulder, wandering into the depths of the house to the small balcony that overlooked the park below.

Cain was down there now, with Ella, and Jeb had joined along, enduring things being pelted at him from both of the others.

“Hey, can I join?” DG called down.

“Sure, just bring Trigger with,” Cain called back up. He disappeared from sight just as DG relinquished her hold on Ambrose and they traded places smoothly – up for down and down for up. DG picked up several of the fuzzy-yellows balls lying about and started to join Ella in throwing them at Jeb, who did his best to dodge them, even as Trigger started prancing around him and barking eagerly.

Ambrose couldn’t help his grin, laughing warmly when Jeb was tackled to the ground not by the dog, but by Ella.

“She’s …enthusiastic,” Ambrose noted to Cain, glancing over his shoulder to find him being joined. “So, DG tells me I threw a fit because everyone was visiting your parents and that I wanted to know what was so great. That’s why, and I’m still patching this theory together, that I stole your things and came out here to see what sort of place could pull all of you away from your new homes.”

“Is that it?” Cain asked, something in his tone sounding disapproving – or maybe that was just Ambrose’s imagination, as he had expected something of the sort. “I thought you were going to go seek your soul or some other crap a psychiatrist might say.”

“Have you been seeing a psychiatrist to find out what they’d say?” Ambrose asked, delight jumping around in his eyes and an ‘I told you so!’ on his lips, but Cain gave a grunt that didn’t seem to serve as any answer at all. “And maybe I am finding myself. This is as good a place as any, even if I had to…and my apologies… crash your parents’ house to find it.”

“If you really want them to quit it with the parade of my relatives, you just have to say,” Cain advised, leaning his forearms over the railing of the deck.

“No, it’s fine,” Ambrose assured, giving Cain a wayward and worried look. “You don’t have any siblings, do you? I think that might cross a line, somewhere.” What sort of line, he wasn’t sure. One that was in the back of his mind and existed for the sole purpose that one day, Ambrose might be able to name it.

Cain’s expression went slack and something dark passed over his face. “I used to have a sister,” he said, lightly. “Ella was her goddaughter.”

“The Witch’s War?” Ambrose asked carefully.

“No. No, just…” Cain sighed and rubbed a hand over his face. “Just an accident before any of that. She was younger than me by three annuals, had it in her head that she wanted to explore the world, like a certain Princess we know. She never came back, one time. We got a letter saying they found her car wrecked along the road.”

Ambrose fell to silence at that, any jokes about marrying into the Cain family falling by the wayside and he rested an awkward hand on Cain’s shoulder to try and comfort him.

“I really do mean it when I say we should talk about our families more,” Ambrose said, voice hushed and hoarse as they watched the happy scene below. “I lost my sister too, but I lost her and my parents to the Witch.” He craned his neck to look up at Cain’s face and tilted him in Ambrose’s direction to look at him properly, feeling closer than ever before and something in him turned into worry, like Cain might see through him and discover something about him that not even Ambrose knew. “Cain…”

Cain drew his gaze away from his son to turn and look Ambrose in the eyes and for a moment, they might have said something genuine, but that moment passed and Cain lightly pried Ambrose’s hand off of his shoulder.

“You ought to call Richard,” Cain advised quietly. “He’ll want to know what your dinner preferences are before he makes reservations.”

“Yeah,” Ambrose half-sighed out the word, sounding unsure about even a simple agreement he had given a thousand times before. “I’ll call.”

And then Cain slipped away like Ambrose had never had his hand on him to keep him in place.

tbc