Aug. 6th, 2008 12:52 pm
The Lost and Found - Part 4
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lovely_ambitionTITLE: The Lost and Found - Part 4
Pairing: Jeb/DG, one-sided Ambrose/Cain.
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![[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. Yes, I'm totally aware this fic has revolving pairings, mostly because each part seems to be something new. Previous parts found here.
The house had grown even louder with the addition of Jeb and DG -- who shared a room on the opposite side of the house -- and now in addition to Harry and Sue’s nightly conversations, Ella’s playful running after Trigger and Cain’s slow pacing around the house, there was the sound of DG and Jeb settling into their room.
The new house arrangements were also the precise thing that brought Cain to Ambrose’s room, shoving a pillow at him and closing the door behind him. “Cain?”
“I am not sleeping on the east wing of the house while they are doing that,” he half-growled the words, storming inside and dropping a handful of blankets on the reclining chair before yanking the pillow out of Ambrose’s hands, settling for the night – as he was already clad in a pair of pale pajamas.
The east wing held four rooms all within hearing distance of each other and one was Cain’s room (and had been since he was a boy). Ambrose had been staying on the west side in a room beside Ella’s and down the hall from Harry and Sue’s. He was trying to puzzle out what was going on and just why that meant he suddenly had to give up his privacy.
“You can’t stay with Ella?” he asked mildly. It didn’t take much time for him to receive a dour glare at the suggestion. “Or not.” And the notion of Cain sleeping in his parents’ room brought up several amusing images that probably should never be enacted, for the dignity of all involved. Ambrose sighed as he burrowed under the covers and tried to ignore all the crashing around that Cain seemed intent on doing while he was getting into the chair. “What! Is such a problem!” he snapped.
“They’re having sex,” Cain spat out the words, seeming to choke on each and every one, having more than a slight bit of difficulty. “And I can hear it all.”
Ambrose cringed on Cain’s behalf and hoped that the sounds from the other wing of the house wouldn’t carry this far. When Cain wasn’t settling, Ambrose grasped one of the extraneous pillows and pelted it in Cain’s direction. “I get that you’re being a priggish father who doesn’t want to hear his son and DG having sex, but it doesn’t mean you have to keep me from sleeping!”
He settled again with a heavy ‘thump’ of his head against the pillow and Cain stopped rustling around.
…and it turned out that yes, in fact, you could hear what was going on in the other wing if you let the room fall to abject silence.
Ambrose groaned and sat up, giving Cain a pitiful and resigned look. “Go back to rustling,” he muttered. Ambrose thought of DG as a daughter and he was having no issue associating with what Cain was feeling, having to sit there and listen to his son go at it.
Well, if the sounds were any indication, they were both having a lot of fun. Ambrose most certainly didn’t need to know that, however.
He rubbed at his eyes and glanced over to where Cain was looking at him pointedly, as if ‘I told you so’ was about to come tumbling off his lips and Ambrose wasn’t sure how whether he wanted to put up with it, so he just held a hand out. “Can I have my pillow back?” he requested lightly.
Cain tossed it over easily and Ambrose smashed it down over his ears as he tried to block out any and all sounds of DG sleeping with a man – even if it was Jeb Cain who, outside of Raw and Cain, was possibly the only other man in the O.Z. that Ambrose wouldn’t heavily bruise for daring to touch his Princess.
Ambrose fell asleep to the curious wonderment of what this meant for all of them, if Jeb and DG were this serious.
He woke up to the light of day spilling into his window and he woke to Wyatt Cain snoring away. The pillow had been abandoned somewhere and Cain seemed to be fast under the spell of a deep sleep. Ambrose had learned (way back when, still having been Glitch) that Cain had a tendency to sleep like the dead and wake in a snap, as if he had grown too fearful to ever sleep through the full night.
He watched him, for a time, thinking of the circumstances and where he was. The clock blared numbers that told him that Sue would be by with a wake-up call soon enough and Ambrose had little time left to put his thoughts into order.
Maybe I am finding myself.
His own words came back to him as he watched Cain slumped gracefully in the chair – his large frame somehow making the lack of room work for him – and he sat up slowly, the sheets rustling about him as he debated what came next. Did he ask people questions or go sit naked in the woods somewhere…? How did someone learn to become who they were and not just what they’d been for ten annuals?
“Cain?” Ambrose said simply.
Even a quiet word as such jolted Cain awake and he pushed a hand under his blanket to go for a revolver that wasn’t there. Ambrose simply waited patiently for the little show of masculinity to end before he offered a weary smile that he hoped looked friendly and innocent.
Cain passed a hand over his face and sank deeper into his chair. “They done?”
“I’d hope hours ago, Cain, it’s dawn,” Ambrose noted wryly. “How long do you think your parents will let me stay?” he asked curiously, settling himself against the headboard and staring at Cain, trying not to let his morning-thoughts carry away into the terrible notion that they would kick him out as soon as he had given them enough inventions to make up for the food he ate.
Cain just groaned, shoving his blanket up, and his feet hit the floor with a heavy ‘thud’. “Ambrose, if you wanted, they’d let you stay here forever. Why do you think Ella is still around?”
“She said they were putting her through school.”
“And she never wanted to leave. Her cousins tried to take her home with them when she was thirteen,” Cain explained, wandering the room and borrowing the hairbrush to push it through the small tendrils of wayward hair on his head, before Ambrose could even protest. “She wanted to stay here. My parents were only too happy to oblige.”
Ambrose processed that while he watched Cain moved through his room like a native, plucking open a drawer and digging out a pair of denims and a workshirt before he kicked it closed with a waiting foot. If Ambrose had ever forgotten that this was Cain’s home, he’d be instantly reminded in the moments watching him move around it as if he could do it with his eyes closed.
“Come on, my mother’s bound to knock down your door in ten minutes,” Cain encouraged, wandering around to the far side of the bed so he could nudge at Ambrose. “I’m heading to town today, so keep an eye on Jeb and DG for me, will you? Make sure Ella doesn’t convince them to do anything too insane.”
“What could she possibly do?” Ambrose tiredly sighed as he rolled out of bed.
“Well, jumping off the waterfall into the jagged rocks is a prime concern, but wandering the bear-infested forests runs a close second. So does playing with the paintball guns that are loaded with real ammo half the time,” Cain said.
“Okay, watching the kids,” Ambrose hurriedly agreed. Cain was gone in the flash of an eye and before Ambrose could even change into his clothes for the day, Sue was trying to knock down his door with capable fists, pounding away as hard as she could. He groaned and fell into a sit on the bed, letting his head hit the pillow hard. “Can’t I sleep in, just today?”
“Harry says he needs you to show him how to use the fancy new spatula you cooked up,” she directed. “Else there’ll be no pancakes to be had.”
“M’coming,” Ambrose sleepily mumbled.
When he got to breakfast and found DG and Jeb sitting over cups of orange juice and trying to look as innocent as they could, Ambrose made sure to level them with the most intense of displeased glowers.
“Good morning, Glitch,” DG said happily, clearly in a much better mood than Ambrose was. But then, she probably hadn’t had nightmares of being dragged to a room where his parents were having sex, then a room where DG was, and then yet another where the Queen was performing lewd acts with the baser population of the Realm of the Unwanted.
“Maybe for you,” was his mumbled reply, trudging over to the stove to help with the raspberry pancakes and stir the caramel syrup. “Did you hear it too?” he asked Harry as he started to warm up the spatula (he’d installed a nifty little device that warmed it, meaning you could warm a pancake while it was sitting on the conductive metal of the spatula).
“Hear what?”
“The…you know. Jeb and…”
“I’m sure I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Harry insisted with a growl in his tone, a look in his eye being very clear about the fact that he did not in any way want to discuss any of the noises that had plagued the house last night.
“Well, I heard,” announced a cheerful and sarcastic voice from the doorway. “Jeb, seriously. I have enough nightmares as it is, please don’t help them with your inability to keep it in your pants,” Ella complained as she sulked heavily, sitting at the table and prying a glass of water for herself.
“Actually, it was DG’s…mmgphf.” Whatever Jeb had been trying to say was covered by DG’s palm clapping over his mouth.
She offered a broad and nervous grin. “Yeah-ha, we’ll uh, we’ll make sure that we’re quieter from now on when we play a game of Twister. Really,” she insisted with big, blue, innocent eyes. “That’s all we were doing, Sue. Ella, we swear.”
“Is that what they call it, now,” Harry muttered, flipping over some of the bubbling pancakes, shooting Ambrose a curious look, up and down. “Not that you’re not invited to bring back anyone to your bed, Ambrose. Just mind the noise.”
Suddenly, the conversation had gone from awkward to impossibly worse and Ambrose could feel his cheeks reddening as they went from pink to a tomato red.
“I…H-Harry, I…”
“We don’t have to talk about it. In fact, I’d prefer we don’t,” Harry said sharply, loading the pancakes onto a plate. “But the fact is, you’re a grown man, same as Wy, and you’re entitled to doing whatever you like with your life. Even if that means bringing home one of my nieces or nephews and having sex in the room down the hall from mine.”
Suddenly, Ambrose had the desire to never have sex again in his whole life.
He wondered if that was the same for Jeb and DG, who both looked like they had swallowed something foul.
Ambrose swallowed the awkward feeling in his throat and plastered a smile on his face, nodding to Harry as if to give his consent to the conversation topic, even though he never wanted to talk about this, especially not with Sue and Ella and DG and Jeb in the room. Thank the gods that Cain was away for the day because if he’d been there to listen in on the conversation, Ambrose suspected he might genuinely die of humiliation.
“Let’s just…” Ambrose gestured vaguely to the pan before him. “Let’s just make breakfast.”
*
After the day Ambrose had experienced – Harry seemed to spend the rest of his hours making sure that Ambrose understood that he and Sue wanted to give him the freedom to do whatever he liked while Ambrose tried to make Harry understand that he really didn’t want to discuss any of it – he rewarded himself with a long walk through the park. It was a warm day and it seemed he wasn’t the only one out there by the waterfall, being that he could hear splashing around.
Gods, please, if that’s Jeb and DG, let them be wearing clothes, he offered a brisk prayer. Though, after their own participation in that morning’s conversation of doom, he doubted they would be doing anything untoward, given that Jeb looked like he might crawl into a hole to avoid further humiliation.
It turned out that Ambrose didn’t need to worry about them because it was just Cain in the water, swimming a gentle breaststroke forward. His coat, vest, and hat sat on a rock nearby and he was swimming in just about all his clothes, the water making them translucent from where Ambrose was walking.
He was by the perimetre, shrouded by trees, and a vague thought in the back of his mind said something like ‘you’re being a stalker’, but he simply kept walking around and around, the soil of the path cushioning his footsteps.
Cain had a slow grace to him as he pushed through the water – and a fog lay low on the pool of water as the waterfall churned a very short distance away – and Ambrose kept on the path as he circled one more time, finding new angles to observe the scene.
It felt so strange to lurk and not say anything, to be the outsider willingly.
Ambrose could swear that something was twisting and turning in his stomach and he couldn’t place it. It could have been envy that Cain had experienced this peaceful home until he chose to leave it, until Adora had pulled him away. It might have been anger that he hadn’t been told about it after, that Glitch and Ambrose both had been kept in the dark while the others had their respite.
Or it might have been longing.
Ambrose hesitated by a thick evergreens and watched, eyes drawn to Cain’s form and wondering if he should break the silence of the woods – the soft calls of birds, the falling of pinecones, the wind rustling in the trees – and join him. He didn’t, though, stuck where he was as he placed the feeling pushing through him as a mix of everything, but the longing was so wild that he couldn’t attribute it because of this one encounter, of watching Cain stripped of nearly everything.
He’d promised to find himself and he didn’t even know what sort of person he wanted to be with. He’d known, once upon a time, and then he’d been Glitch and now his existence was a cobbling of two lives together and he had to find the meeting of the two and what they wanted.
Cain…well, Cain might be someone he could see himself pursuing, but he wasn’t about to just settle because he was there and he might be good for him. He couldn’t just dive in because other people around him had found some modicum of happiness in a relationship. Beyond that, Cain seemed to actually have a healthy amount of respect and friendship for Ambrose and he wasn’t willing to throw that away in a moment of desperation because he wanted to jump the gun and just be with someone to see if it really afforded that much happiness (or to find out that the happiness was there before and the coupling had no affect on that).
Cain would understand that, Ambrose thought ruefully. More than anyone he would understand why moving on too quickly wasn’t always what people wanted.
So he would go out with Richard and he would date whatever other cousins were pushed his way. If he wanted to find out who he was now, part of that was finding out what sort of people he could stand to be around and which he couldn’t wait to boot to the door. Mara had been the start (well, if he were honest, he’d started when he woke up to Raw, DG, and Cain looking down on him like angels from above) and now Richard. He was sure there was a whole list to go through and he was happy to roll along with the plan.
It was safer to do that. He had no connection to those people, not the way he did to people like Cain and Azkadellia and Raw.
If it failed, he could move on and not damage the important friendships in his life.
He left the woods without ever letting Cain know he was there.
After all, he had a date to prepare for.
tbc
Pairing: Jeb/DG, one-sided Ambrose/Cain.
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. Previous parts found here.The house had grown even louder with the addition of Jeb and DG -- who shared a room on the opposite side of the house -- and now in addition to Harry and Sue’s nightly conversations, Ella’s playful running after Trigger and Cain’s slow pacing around the house, there was the sound of DG and Jeb settling into their room.
The new house arrangements were also the precise thing that brought Cain to Ambrose’s room, shoving a pillow at him and closing the door behind him. “Cain?”
“I am not sleeping on the east wing of the house while they are doing that,” he half-growled the words, storming inside and dropping a handful of blankets on the reclining chair before yanking the pillow out of Ambrose’s hands, settling for the night – as he was already clad in a pair of pale pajamas.
The east wing held four rooms all within hearing distance of each other and one was Cain’s room (and had been since he was a boy). Ambrose had been staying on the west side in a room beside Ella’s and down the hall from Harry and Sue’s. He was trying to puzzle out what was going on and just why that meant he suddenly had to give up his privacy.
“You can’t stay with Ella?” he asked mildly. It didn’t take much time for him to receive a dour glare at the suggestion. “Or not.” And the notion of Cain sleeping in his parents’ room brought up several amusing images that probably should never be enacted, for the dignity of all involved. Ambrose sighed as he burrowed under the covers and tried to ignore all the crashing around that Cain seemed intent on doing while he was getting into the chair. “What! Is such a problem!” he snapped.
“They’re having sex,” Cain spat out the words, seeming to choke on each and every one, having more than a slight bit of difficulty. “And I can hear it all.”
Ambrose cringed on Cain’s behalf and hoped that the sounds from the other wing of the house wouldn’t carry this far. When Cain wasn’t settling, Ambrose grasped one of the extraneous pillows and pelted it in Cain’s direction. “I get that you’re being a priggish father who doesn’t want to hear his son and DG having sex, but it doesn’t mean you have to keep me from sleeping!”
He settled again with a heavy ‘thump’ of his head against the pillow and Cain stopped rustling around.
…and it turned out that yes, in fact, you could hear what was going on in the other wing if you let the room fall to abject silence.
Ambrose groaned and sat up, giving Cain a pitiful and resigned look. “Go back to rustling,” he muttered. Ambrose thought of DG as a daughter and he was having no issue associating with what Cain was feeling, having to sit there and listen to his son go at it.
Well, if the sounds were any indication, they were both having a lot of fun. Ambrose most certainly didn’t need to know that, however.
He rubbed at his eyes and glanced over to where Cain was looking at him pointedly, as if ‘I told you so’ was about to come tumbling off his lips and Ambrose wasn’t sure how whether he wanted to put up with it, so he just held a hand out. “Can I have my pillow back?” he requested lightly.
Cain tossed it over easily and Ambrose smashed it down over his ears as he tried to block out any and all sounds of DG sleeping with a man – even if it was Jeb Cain who, outside of Raw and Cain, was possibly the only other man in the O.Z. that Ambrose wouldn’t heavily bruise for daring to touch his Princess.
Ambrose fell asleep to the curious wonderment of what this meant for all of them, if Jeb and DG were this serious.
He woke up to the light of day spilling into his window and he woke to Wyatt Cain snoring away. The pillow had been abandoned somewhere and Cain seemed to be fast under the spell of a deep sleep. Ambrose had learned (way back when, still having been Glitch) that Cain had a tendency to sleep like the dead and wake in a snap, as if he had grown too fearful to ever sleep through the full night.
He watched him, for a time, thinking of the circumstances and where he was. The clock blared numbers that told him that Sue would be by with a wake-up call soon enough and Ambrose had little time left to put his thoughts into order.
Maybe I am finding myself.
His own words came back to him as he watched Cain slumped gracefully in the chair – his large frame somehow making the lack of room work for him – and he sat up slowly, the sheets rustling about him as he debated what came next. Did he ask people questions or go sit naked in the woods somewhere…? How did someone learn to become who they were and not just what they’d been for ten annuals?
“Cain?” Ambrose said simply.
Even a quiet word as such jolted Cain awake and he pushed a hand under his blanket to go for a revolver that wasn’t there. Ambrose simply waited patiently for the little show of masculinity to end before he offered a weary smile that he hoped looked friendly and innocent.
Cain passed a hand over his face and sank deeper into his chair. “They done?”
“I’d hope hours ago, Cain, it’s dawn,” Ambrose noted wryly. “How long do you think your parents will let me stay?” he asked curiously, settling himself against the headboard and staring at Cain, trying not to let his morning-thoughts carry away into the terrible notion that they would kick him out as soon as he had given them enough inventions to make up for the food he ate.
Cain just groaned, shoving his blanket up, and his feet hit the floor with a heavy ‘thud’. “Ambrose, if you wanted, they’d let you stay here forever. Why do you think Ella is still around?”
“She said they were putting her through school.”
“And she never wanted to leave. Her cousins tried to take her home with them when she was thirteen,” Cain explained, wandering the room and borrowing the hairbrush to push it through the small tendrils of wayward hair on his head, before Ambrose could even protest. “She wanted to stay here. My parents were only too happy to oblige.”
Ambrose processed that while he watched Cain moved through his room like a native, plucking open a drawer and digging out a pair of denims and a workshirt before he kicked it closed with a waiting foot. If Ambrose had ever forgotten that this was Cain’s home, he’d be instantly reminded in the moments watching him move around it as if he could do it with his eyes closed.
“Come on, my mother’s bound to knock down your door in ten minutes,” Cain encouraged, wandering around to the far side of the bed so he could nudge at Ambrose. “I’m heading to town today, so keep an eye on Jeb and DG for me, will you? Make sure Ella doesn’t convince them to do anything too insane.”
“What could she possibly do?” Ambrose tiredly sighed as he rolled out of bed.
“Well, jumping off the waterfall into the jagged rocks is a prime concern, but wandering the bear-infested forests runs a close second. So does playing with the paintball guns that are loaded with real ammo half the time,” Cain said.
“Okay, watching the kids,” Ambrose hurriedly agreed. Cain was gone in the flash of an eye and before Ambrose could even change into his clothes for the day, Sue was trying to knock down his door with capable fists, pounding away as hard as she could. He groaned and fell into a sit on the bed, letting his head hit the pillow hard. “Can’t I sleep in, just today?”
“Harry says he needs you to show him how to use the fancy new spatula you cooked up,” she directed. “Else there’ll be no pancakes to be had.”
“M’coming,” Ambrose sleepily mumbled.
When he got to breakfast and found DG and Jeb sitting over cups of orange juice and trying to look as innocent as they could, Ambrose made sure to level them with the most intense of displeased glowers.
“Good morning, Glitch,” DG said happily, clearly in a much better mood than Ambrose was. But then, she probably hadn’t had nightmares of being dragged to a room where his parents were having sex, then a room where DG was, and then yet another where the Queen was performing lewd acts with the baser population of the Realm of the Unwanted.
“Maybe for you,” was his mumbled reply, trudging over to the stove to help with the raspberry pancakes and stir the caramel syrup. “Did you hear it too?” he asked Harry as he started to warm up the spatula (he’d installed a nifty little device that warmed it, meaning you could warm a pancake while it was sitting on the conductive metal of the spatula).
“Hear what?”
“The…you know. Jeb and…”
“I’m sure I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Harry insisted with a growl in his tone, a look in his eye being very clear about the fact that he did not in any way want to discuss any of the noises that had plagued the house last night.
“Well, I heard,” announced a cheerful and sarcastic voice from the doorway. “Jeb, seriously. I have enough nightmares as it is, please don’t help them with your inability to keep it in your pants,” Ella complained as she sulked heavily, sitting at the table and prying a glass of water for herself.
“Actually, it was DG’s…mmgphf.” Whatever Jeb had been trying to say was covered by DG’s palm clapping over his mouth.
She offered a broad and nervous grin. “Yeah-ha, we’ll uh, we’ll make sure that we’re quieter from now on when we play a game of Twister. Really,” she insisted with big, blue, innocent eyes. “That’s all we were doing, Sue. Ella, we swear.”
“Is that what they call it, now,” Harry muttered, flipping over some of the bubbling pancakes, shooting Ambrose a curious look, up and down. “Not that you’re not invited to bring back anyone to your bed, Ambrose. Just mind the noise.”
Suddenly, the conversation had gone from awkward to impossibly worse and Ambrose could feel his cheeks reddening as they went from pink to a tomato red.
“I…H-Harry, I…”
“We don’t have to talk about it. In fact, I’d prefer we don’t,” Harry said sharply, loading the pancakes onto a plate. “But the fact is, you’re a grown man, same as Wy, and you’re entitled to doing whatever you like with your life. Even if that means bringing home one of my nieces or nephews and having sex in the room down the hall from mine.”
Suddenly, Ambrose had the desire to never have sex again in his whole life.
He wondered if that was the same for Jeb and DG, who both looked like they had swallowed something foul.
Ambrose swallowed the awkward feeling in his throat and plastered a smile on his face, nodding to Harry as if to give his consent to the conversation topic, even though he never wanted to talk about this, especially not with Sue and Ella and DG and Jeb in the room. Thank the gods that Cain was away for the day because if he’d been there to listen in on the conversation, Ambrose suspected he might genuinely die of humiliation.
“Let’s just…” Ambrose gestured vaguely to the pan before him. “Let’s just make breakfast.”
*
After the day Ambrose had experienced – Harry seemed to spend the rest of his hours making sure that Ambrose understood that he and Sue wanted to give him the freedom to do whatever he liked while Ambrose tried to make Harry understand that he really didn’t want to discuss any of it – he rewarded himself with a long walk through the park. It was a warm day and it seemed he wasn’t the only one out there by the waterfall, being that he could hear splashing around.
Gods, please, if that’s Jeb and DG, let them be wearing clothes, he offered a brisk prayer. Though, after their own participation in that morning’s conversation of doom, he doubted they would be doing anything untoward, given that Jeb looked like he might crawl into a hole to avoid further humiliation.
It turned out that Ambrose didn’t need to worry about them because it was just Cain in the water, swimming a gentle breaststroke forward. His coat, vest, and hat sat on a rock nearby and he was swimming in just about all his clothes, the water making them translucent from where Ambrose was walking.
He was by the perimetre, shrouded by trees, and a vague thought in the back of his mind said something like ‘you’re being a stalker’, but he simply kept walking around and around, the soil of the path cushioning his footsteps.
Cain had a slow grace to him as he pushed through the water – and a fog lay low on the pool of water as the waterfall churned a very short distance away – and Ambrose kept on the path as he circled one more time, finding new angles to observe the scene.
It felt so strange to lurk and not say anything, to be the outsider willingly.
Ambrose could swear that something was twisting and turning in his stomach and he couldn’t place it. It could have been envy that Cain had experienced this peaceful home until he chose to leave it, until Adora had pulled him away. It might have been anger that he hadn’t been told about it after, that Glitch and Ambrose both had been kept in the dark while the others had their respite.
Or it might have been longing.
Ambrose hesitated by a thick evergreens and watched, eyes drawn to Cain’s form and wondering if he should break the silence of the woods – the soft calls of birds, the falling of pinecones, the wind rustling in the trees – and join him. He didn’t, though, stuck where he was as he placed the feeling pushing through him as a mix of everything, but the longing was so wild that he couldn’t attribute it because of this one encounter, of watching Cain stripped of nearly everything.
He’d promised to find himself and he didn’t even know what sort of person he wanted to be with. He’d known, once upon a time, and then he’d been Glitch and now his existence was a cobbling of two lives together and he had to find the meeting of the two and what they wanted.
Cain…well, Cain might be someone he could see himself pursuing, but he wasn’t about to just settle because he was there and he might be good for him. He couldn’t just dive in because other people around him had found some modicum of happiness in a relationship. Beyond that, Cain seemed to actually have a healthy amount of respect and friendship for Ambrose and he wasn’t willing to throw that away in a moment of desperation because he wanted to jump the gun and just be with someone to see if it really afforded that much happiness (or to find out that the happiness was there before and the coupling had no affect on that).
Cain would understand that, Ambrose thought ruefully. More than anyone he would understand why moving on too quickly wasn’t always what people wanted.
So he would go out with Richard and he would date whatever other cousins were pushed his way. If he wanted to find out who he was now, part of that was finding out what sort of people he could stand to be around and which he couldn’t wait to boot to the door. Mara had been the start (well, if he were honest, he’d started when he woke up to Raw, DG, and Cain looking down on him like angels from above) and now Richard. He was sure there was a whole list to go through and he was happy to roll along with the plan.
It was safer to do that. He had no connection to those people, not the way he did to people like Cain and Azkadellia and Raw.
If it failed, he could move on and not damage the important friendships in his life.
He left the woods without ever letting Cain know he was there.
After all, he had a date to prepare for.
tbc
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Thank you so much for reading!
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And Ambrose telling him after a bit to go back to rustling - mwah!
And this:
the only other man in the O.Z. that Ambrose wouldn’t heavily bruise for daring to touch his Princess.
hehe~
Can't wait for the next installment!
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Thank you so so much for reading!
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And the dreams Ambrose had! LULZ!
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