The Path Not Taken 1/3
Title: The Path Not Taken 1/3
Pairing: Ambrose/girl!Cain
Rating: Steady PG-13.
Disclaimer: Yeah, no, not mine.
Summary: Wyatt Cain wanted nothing more than to be a Tin Man and follow in her parents' footsteps. It doesn't go exactly like that.
Notes: This is an AU. The premise is that Cain was born a woman, so no actual genderswitch so much as AU. If you need help envisioning, I've used Robin Wright Penn the whole time. And this whole thing is dedicated to kseda who told me that she wanted to read it and so it existed.
She’d come to Central City to be a Tin Man, so she told him as they met up in the halls of the school. He hadn’t intended to stop until she came running after him, whistling as loud as a person could and shoving a dropped book atop his stack of them and from there, they had wound up walking back to the classrooms.
Her name was Wyatt Cain, which was a bit strange and when Ambrose voiced that aloud, he got a look that he was sure she’d given a thousand times before in her life.
“Right up until that last day, my parents thought I was a boy,” Cain explained (she just wanted to be called ‘Cain’, she said, because when people called her ‘Wyatt’, it always came with an expression of disbelief). She was sixteen and Ambrose was scantly eighteen, but she seemed to constantly act like she was the older of the two of them and as they walked down the halls, he watched her thick blonde hair fall over her shoulders and spilled forward on the leather vest that had come from home (“Father sent it. He wanted me to be warm.”)
They only got past ages and pleasantries before they arrived at the classroom and Ambrose had to part ways with her, shuffling the books in his grasp so they didn’t fall a second time.
He glanced back over his shoulder no less than three times, shaking his head and scoffing at the strange encounter with Miss Wyatt Cain, she of the blonde hair and the blue eyes and the clothes that fit like her parents were still buying clothes for a son they didn’t have.
He arrived at his lab sooner rather than later and left thoughts of Tin Men-To-Be at the door before greeting his inventions with a hearty ‘hello!’, shutting the door on the room (room, ha, more like a glorified closet) and went back to work.
*
They ran into each other again in the little dining area outside that overlooked the Central City Lake. She was sitting alone and Ambrose had never been too much of a social man and so he had wandered over and asked if he could sit there, rather than have to share with one of the businessmen or the performers. There were no other students around and a closer look at Cain showed that she was holding a pack of ice to her chin. She hadn’t given him a yes or a no yet as to his question.
“I doubt you got that during a lecture in strategy,” Ambrose appraised, shooting Cain a curious look. He barely knew her and he doubted that he’d get a straightforward answer, but it was worth the shot.
She was staring at the table in front of them, barely moving and her eyes looked glazed over, as if Cain was somewhere else all-together.
Ambrose leaned over and lightly tapped her shoulder. “Cain?”
She jumped and jolted, catching his eyes and stared at him for a long minute. “Ambrose, from the other day,” she placed him.
“Wyatt Cain. The girl with the boy’s name and a purple bruise on her cheek,” Ambrose returned in kind, reaching a gangly arm over to pry the ice off and take a better look at the bruise. “That’s a male fist, but likely no older than seventeen.” He winced around the same time that Cain winced when the ice went back onto it. “And it looks like he didn’t hold back.”
“I started it, if you think I’m just some damsel,” Cain warned, blonde hair falling into her eyes as she tipped her gaze back down to the table and she appeared perilously close to slipping back into that faraway land. “He made a comment about my fighting technique. He said it was sloppy.”
“Was it?”
“Yes. I still didn’t like him saying it.”
Ambrose couldn’t help the quirk of a tiny smile. “So you gave him a firsthand demonstration of your technique.”
For that, he was rewarded with something of an impish and proud grin on Cain’s face. She looked back at him and he brushed away the hair in her face, taking a better look at the bruise in the process, all the while she smiled warmly at him, like they’d just discovered their very first inside joke.
“Yeah, well,” Cain remarked, sounding a lot more relaxed than before. “He deserved it. I got sent out of class.”
Ambrose started to open the compartments of the box before him, drawing out pieces of his lunch and offering some of it to Cain. She quietly accepted and the ice went from her cheek to the table before they quietly talked about the classes that Cain had to take before she could officially take the exam to become a Tin Man. Eventually, the conversation came back around to him.
“I’ve been done for annuals, yet,” Ambrose admitted sheepishly, poking around at his sandwich. “I’m one of the more lowly advisors on staff, but the more I invent, the more I get taken into notice. I have a workshop, same as everyone else, but…well, closet is a nice way to describe it. Not like the Head Advisor,” he murmured, staring wistfully into space. “A whole floor to himself for whatever he wants to do with it.”
“You can get there, though,” Cain pointed out, tying her hair back. “You said so yourself. The more you invent, the more they notice you. You should invent something personally for the new Queen.”
Their new Queen had barely taken the throne and was still learning from her parents’ example. She was beautiful and Ambrose had always been fond of her. The problem was that she didn’t even know who he was.
“Make her something,” Cain insisted again. “Introduce yourself and give her your invention. She won’t be able to forget you after that. Especially if you actually have some kind of talent lying in there,” she added with something of a sly smile. “You could just be a talentless hack for all I know.”
“Hey!” Ambrose reacted with a defensive scowl. “I’m incredibly smart. The tests say that no one in the O.Z. parallels me, so far.” Cain seemed to take that as face value and the laughter stopped as she just studied him for a while, fingers lightly touching the wound on her cheek. “Do you need more ice?” Ambrose asked, fiddling now with the trash that remained of his lunch.
“No, it’ll be fine,” Cain promised. “I want him to have to look at it.”
Ambrose just watched her for a long moment and smiled.
“I think I like you, Wyatt Cain,” he determined. “You’ve got spunk.”
“I’ve got more than that,” Cain promised. “You just have to get to know me better to see it.”
*
The room that Ambrose had for inventions was small at best and miniscule in reality. There was enough room for tools, Ambrose, and only three machines. So when Cain poked her head in and then wiggled into the room, there became barely enough breathing room for either of them.
“People knock,” Ambrose mumbled, utterly focused on the necklace he had put into creation just the other night after he had taken Cain’s suggestion to heart and had begun to invent something specifically for the Queen to use. He had come up with a necklace that monitored the wearer’s temperature and automatically adjusted the air around them to make it comfortable. It used magic, the elements, and some sentient rocks, but if anyone could do it, it would be Ambrose.
Cain crouched over and peered through the abacus in the middle of the room and stared up at Ambrose from her lowered position. “I came to visit. I had a free class.”
“Did you get punched again?” Ambrose asked wryly, tweaking the set of the stone with a screwdriver.
“No, I just finished a paper and had nothing else to do,” Cain easily replied. “So, did you listen to me?”
Ambrose didn’t choose to answer in words and rather held up the chain of the necklace in her view, where it would be easily seen. The pendant was a dark color, like deep blue blood, and was nearly done. Cain seemed to find that very promising and smiled broadly.
“She doesn’t like it yet,” Ambrose warned. “So don’t go getting smug on me.”
“I won’t. Not yet, at least,” Cain answered, lingering by the doorway. She stayed for a moment and gave a nod, as if content that Ambrose had listened to her advice, and then without any other words, Cain was gone.
Ambrose returned his attention to the necklace and tried to forget about that little show of a visit.
*
Ambrose found himself taken with the enigma that he found Cain to be. Whereas he thought she ought to be straightforward in terms of personality, she would always come up with something to surprise him. For instance, she had steady hands to shoot a gun, but he’d discovered her carving little animals with a knife at some meals and admired the steadiness of her fingers.
While he expected her to not care about any of the books he read, she would always be bringing some new philosophical book or historical book to read when they got together. She liked to talk about more than just the program and they would often have hour-long discussions about the history of the O.Z. and its people, from the Viewers to the punishment practices to the munchkin culture.
Cain was definitely more than the other Tin Men were and seemed to want to learn about things. Whether or not she’d keep an open-mind about them later, well, that was up in the air.
He wanted to find out, though.
*
Ambrose had never seen Cain outside of the clothing she wore for school which was, without fail, always too baggy and too long and too large for her frame. At least, he had never seen her without those clothes until their night out. She had invited him along with a group of friends (who were all Tin-Men-In-Training) to a nearby club, which had happened the very moment that Ambrose had made a happy remark about loving dancing. He was dressed in a striped shirt with a pair of loose trousers and pulled open the door to let Cain in while he sought out his button-down to go overtop the clothes. He barely glanced at her as he waved her on in.
“I haven’t done this in…well, in a very, very long time,” Ambrose laughed anxiously, digging through his things and shoving platinums into his pockets as he pulled on the white button-down and turned to find Cain straddling the arm of a reading chair.
Ambrose had to honestly do a double-take and make sure he hadn’t just invited a stranger into his room.
“You’re staring,” Cain accused.
“Your clothes fit,” Ambrose said, eyeing her. “That’s got to be a miracle.” She was in a blue tank-top and a pair of jeans, but as Ambrose had mentioned, they weren’t too many sizes too big. Someone had obviously curled Cain’s hair into loose waves, but the heat of Central City had already wrecked that. He had to duck the book thrown at his head, but Ambrose just laughed as he tugged on his white shirt and ran a hand through his own unruly curls, yanking Cain’s hand and tugging her away. “Come on. I’ve been waiting for this all day, no dawdling now.”
Cain was chuckling quietly, but Ambrose was happy that she wasn’t giving him a hard time about anything as they joined the rest of the group in their finest and made for the club. Some of them smoked on route and the others chattered about the recent lessons and climate of the city. Cain had yet to let go of Ambrose’s hand, twisting it up and letting it swing between them as they spoke about the Queen and how much she had liked his latest invention, allowing her to watch memories of her life again and again. They had a small group of no more than eight, but the mood was pleasant and contagious and by the time they arrived, no one was in a low mood.
Cain and Ambrose were the last to enter the thick din of noise, smoke clouding the upper levels of the club, and Cain tugged Ambrose in the direction of the group before he could become lost staring at his surroundings. The truth of the matter was that Ambrose’s fellow advisors all had their own families to go home to and were usually annuals older than him and he had no one to accompany him to one of these places.
Cain brought him along and sat him down in one of the booths while ordering drinks. “Aren’t you going to dance?” Ambrose asked with panicky alarm, not wanting to simply sit in the back of the club for the entire night when he didn’t know when his next trip might be, if ever. He hadn’t been there in two annuals and he’d missed the thumping bass beat and the way it resonated through his body, sending chills down his spine.
Cain leaned down and nudged his knee with her heeled foot. “You go on,” she encouraged. “Jen wants a dance, anyhow,” she indicated, nodding to one of the redheaded women that they’d come with.
And so Ambrose allowed himself to be dragged out onto the dance floor and let himself be swallowed whole by the atmosphere. Sweat dripped down his neck and soaked the collar of his shirt and he could feel some of the old rhythm returning to him and his hands rumpled Jen’s clothes as they wrapped around her front and she pushed back against him and they twisted and writhed to the slow rhythm, her hands in the air and ruffling through her curled hair as they danced and Ambrose could feel his heart racing.
He had missed this more than it could be humanly possible, it felt like, in that moment.
The song ended and people began to change positions on the floor, substituting old partners for new. Jen didn’t go anywhere for several dances, turning until they were face-to-face and she giggled at everything he said, running her palms up his chest while whispering to him about the latest gossip amongst the student ranks. He felt drunk even though he’d yet to drink a single drop of alcohol, but the music was heady and he could smell the sweet fruit of Jen’s perfume as he bowed his head down and pressed his nose to her neck.
They danced like this, twined, for a full hour and only occasionally did he see anyone else from their party on the floor. Once, he’d caught Cain dancing with one of the other men - Thorne, was it? - but it was mostly the other boys trying to pick up girls in the age-old mating rituals.
Eventually, Jen hobbled away, sliding her shoes off and pulling herself into the booth they had claimed.
Ambrose thought that would be his cue to retire from the floor and take his own break to replenish on fluids and to join in the conversation rather than moving his body to the beat out there on the floor, but a firm palm on his chest told him otherwise, that he wasn’t going anywhere. He expected to find a strange girl, maybe one of the club girls who seemed to thrive in the environment, but when he glanced the few inches down, he found Wyatt Cain looking up at him. “We’re not giving you a breather,” she shouted above the music.
Ambrose should have known annuals later that everything changed that night.
Right then, he was too intoxicated by it all to care. He let Cain slide his hands over her hipbones and down the back of her jeans, tucking his long fingers into her pockets and angling him until he slid up against her and tightened his arms’ grasp. They were snug and took up little space on the floor as Cain pressed right in with him and draped her arms around his neck, sliding in with a slow roll of her hips. Ambrose untucked his fingers (all but his thumb) and held onto her hips to guide them into the slow sway. His breaths grew stilted and he stared down between them, trying to look through the fringes of sweaty hair to see into Cain’s eyes, to constantly make sure everything was alright.
They pushed up against each other and Cain’s hands gravitated further down until they rested perilously low, just above his behind and the heat of the club was making it hard to do anything but sweat and be breathless.
Cain didn’t know the intricacies of rhythm, but she was trying and giving about as good as Ambrose could give and he tightened his grasp on her, easing closer still as he felt his heart beat harder than before. He fathomed that Cain might be able to see it through his shirts and his lashes fluttered as he glanced down at the minimal space between them, Cain’s chest against him and his hand on her hip strayed just barely up to brush at the tank top and lift it, catching a bit of skin on the stroke down and Ambrose watched the reaction - a shiver and goosebumps on her arm - and they kept dancing until the last strains of the song died down and there was the announcement of a five-minute break before they returned.
Ambrose had to take a long moment to catch his breath as he disentwined himself from Cain, fingers twined with hers for a long moment and when she pulled to go back to the table, he tugged and caught her. “Not yet,” was all he had to say, staring at her.
Cain stared back with confusion, shaking her head. “Is something wrong?”
“No,” Ambrose exhaled, confused as to exactly what was right anymore when he was seeing the world in a very new and different way. Perplexing was the best way to put it. “Thank you, for the dance,” he managed, summoning up words.
“My pleasure. You’re right about your rhythm,” Cain said with a warm smile, tugging him along if he wasn’t about to let go of her. “C’mon, there’s beer waiting at the table with your name on it.”
Ambrose didn’t know how to say it then, but beer was definitely not about to quench any kind of thirst he had.
He couldn’t say no, though, so he followed along and tried not to watch that droplet of sweat roll down Cain’s neck and bare back and desperately tried not to want to do something as stupid as lick it off the toned shoulderblades that presented themselves, all tanned and with just one dark mark between them, perfectly so.
He had to stop thinking about it by force when he returned to a rallied cheer and the group asking if they could have the next dance with him.
*
Two days after they had gone to the club, Ambrose couldn’t seem to stop having very personal dreams about Wyatt Cain and their dance. Except she wasn’t always wearing the tank top and sometimes was in just a pair of underwear. In one dream, she’d been wearing Ambrose’s shirt and nothing else. And then sometimes, they weren’t in the club at all, but in his room. The dreams didn’t stop and his waking hours sometimes devolved into milder daydreams.
He was in the middle of one of those daydreams when there came a firm knock at his door. Ambrose nearly jumped out of his skin, hand over his heart as he prayed fervently that it wasn’t Cain, come to check on him and see how he was faring, today.
“Who’s there?” he asked warily.
“It’s the Cains,” said a male voice. “Wyatt was supposed to tell you that we were coming.”
Somewhere in the back of his mind, Ambrose recalled that Cain had made mention that her parents were going to come and raid his laboratory to look for inventions that might be useful at the Tin Men headquarters. Both her parents were Tin Men and they had met during training, which happened to be a constant conversation topic because Cain seemed to believe that the same thing was bound to happen to her. She had insisted that she was going to send them along and here they were.
He nervously unlatched the door, trying to ignore that part of his mind that crowed that he was meeting the parents and none of her other friends were. He had to make a decent first impression before he could be too smug about it. “Sir, Ma’am,” he respectfully said as he nodded his head to them.
They didn’t seem to ask for permission before they inched their way in and began to study the five various inventions that littered the small lab. Well, at least Ambrose understood where Cain got that from.
They weren’t there very long and asked questions that were simple to answer (at least, for a genius like Ambrose) and then they all stood in the hallway outside the lab, exchanging pleasantries while laughing at anecdotes and stories about Cain when she was younger.
“How old are you, Ambrose?” Mr. Cain asked, curiously. “Those were a great deal of inventions in there and you seem to have earned the Queen’s attention, but you don’t look older than twenty-one annuals.”
“I’m nineteen,” Ambrose replied with something of a shy smile. “I started here when I was seventeen. They say I’m the smartest man in the O.Z.”
“Are you?” Mrs. Cain demanded, bluntly.
“I don’t know,” Ambrose nervously answered, gaze flickering between the two. “I haven’t met everyone in the O.Z. yet to tell whether I’m smarter than all of them.”
From the slow smile of a response that both the Cains gave him, Ambrose had the feeling that he’d just given them the exact right answer.
*
Things started to go downhill only scant months later when Cain turned up for their usual post-dinner talk and walk around the palace and she only came so she could cancel. She was dressed far nicer than usual in a midnight blue dress with a wrap around her shoulders and Ambrose wondered at first if it was for him before Cain began to make her apologies.
The words ‘sorry’ and ‘opportunity’ happened to come up too much for his liking.
There was someone else, of course, and it was Thorne and he had asked Cain out to dinner and a show. Cain stood staring up at Ambrose in the moonlight with the breeze wafting past them and pushing her hair around. “It’s just like how my parents met,” she explained to him with an edge of desperation to her voice. “And he’s the best in the class, well, second best after me,” she corrected. “I’ll be back tomorrow and I’ll tell you all about it.”
That was the problem. Ambrose didn’t want to hear anything about it, not whatsoever.
He was a good friend though. No, he was more than that. He was her best friend, so he pushed aside whatever burgeoning feelings of lust he had for Cain and wished her luck with a kiss to her cheek.
*
Cain had been dating Thorne for something like three months now and while they were adequately happy together, Cain wasn’t giddily in love the way young women of eighteen annuals were supposed to be. She was the same as always and Ambrose couldn’t help feeling like she was just going through the motions of it for the sake of doing that and he said exactly that during one of their dinners.
He was pelted with a napkin for his effort.
“Don’t say that,” Cain warned, lowly.
“You’re reacting this badly because you know I’m right,” Ambrose very patiently said. “And I don’t like watching you have anything but bliss,” he admitted, staring at her almost forlornly. “I feel like I should be honest and admit that ever since the night in the club, I’ve had something like feelings for you, but you can rest assured that my interest in you and my interest in your well-being are mutually exclusive and me thinking you’re unhappy with Thorne has nothing to do with wanting you for myself. Above all, you’re my friend, Wyatt. And you deserve bliss.”
Cain continued poking at her food with a tentative poke of her fork, glancing up at him warily.
“Just tell me if you can imagine the rest of your very long life with him and I’ll shut up,” Ambrose admitted, staring deep into his carton of food. He wasn’t brave enough to look up, thinking that twenty-annuals was too young to have his heart stomped on by the woman he thought he might be in love with.
“I can’t,” Cain quietly admitted. “But that doesn’t mean I don’t care for him. It’s just not…”
“…what you expected,” Ambrose finished her sentence for her. He finally summoned the strength to look up with sympathy. “It doesn’t mean anything except you were strong enough to try. There’ll be other men,” he promised. “Other Tin Men, even, just like your parents.”
Her parents, who now had Ambrose’s inventions littering the corners of their offices because they were so taken with his machinery. The same parents who came to visit Ambrose on a weekly basis to chat. It didn’t slip by him that he’d won the approval of her parents, just not her.
“You’re right,” Cain admitted after a long silence.
“I know. I’m a smart man, remember,” Ambrose quietly said, the humor that should have been in his voice misplaced somewhere. She had yet to make any comment about his admission and by the looks of it, she wasn’t planning on saying anything.
The important thing was, though, that he’d told her.
*
Ambrose was beginning to hate the notion of mixed-signals. As far as he could tell, Cain was still dating Thorne and had yet to break up with him. At the same time, instead of taking walks around the palace, Cain came up to Ambrose’s room and they’d simply sprawl out over his bed and he’d rest his head in her lap while she tapped Morse codes out on his bedposts and they discussed the day and the latest events in the O.Z. and Cain would usually talk without end about the Mystic Man and how it was her dream to work for him.
Those nights said he should do something.
The mornings when he saw Cain and Thorne hand in hand and exchanging long kisses said he shouldn’t even think about it.
He murmured one night when they had switched positions and she was lying with her head in his lap that he didn’t know what to make of it.
“Make of what?” she asked tiredly, eyes half-closed as she traced that same Morse code against his thigh and tapped it out. He understood it, of course, could tell she was tapping nothing more than ‘HELLO MY NAME IS’ over and over again, but there was a quiet intimacy to it that he didn’t want to drive away.
“You being with Thorne yet,” Ambrose mumbled, her exhaustion contagious.
She didn’t manage to answer, because she distracted him by smoothing her fingers out over his thigh and tapping out ‘I’M TIRED’ this time and he picked her up in his arms and let her have his bed, not saying a word when she grabbed a fistful of his shirt and pulled him down to share the king size bed for the night. When he woke up, his nose was buried in her hair and her arms were wrapped snugly around his waist and his sheets smelled of Cain.
His heart had honestly never ached as badly as it did that morning.
He stayed, as much as he wanted to run away. He wanted to be there when Cain opened her eyes and he wanted her to see that he’d be there for her, even if he was suffering a mild panic attack because of it.
It took her twenty minutes to wake up and she smiled dazedly at him as she removed her arms and lay on her back, staring at the ceiling.
“How do I break up with a man? What do they want to hear?” Cain asked, addressing the ceiling.
“Just be honest,” Ambrose advised. “It’s never led me astray.”
tbc
Pairing: Ambrose/girl!Cain
Rating: Steady PG-13.
Disclaimer: Yeah, no, not mine.
Summary: Wyatt Cain wanted nothing more than to be a Tin Man and follow in her parents' footsteps. It doesn't go exactly like that.
Notes: This is an AU. The premise is that Cain was born a woman, so no actual genderswitch so much as AU. If you need help envisioning, I've used Robin Wright Penn the whole time. And this whole thing is dedicated to kseda who told me that she wanted to read it and so it existed.
She’d come to Central City to be a Tin Man, so she told him as they met up in the halls of the school. He hadn’t intended to stop until she came running after him, whistling as loud as a person could and shoving a dropped book atop his stack of them and from there, they had wound up walking back to the classrooms.
Her name was Wyatt Cain, which was a bit strange and when Ambrose voiced that aloud, he got a look that he was sure she’d given a thousand times before in her life.
“Right up until that last day, my parents thought I was a boy,” Cain explained (she just wanted to be called ‘Cain’, she said, because when people called her ‘Wyatt’, it always came with an expression of disbelief). She was sixteen and Ambrose was scantly eighteen, but she seemed to constantly act like she was the older of the two of them and as they walked down the halls, he watched her thick blonde hair fall over her shoulders and spilled forward on the leather vest that had come from home (“Father sent it. He wanted me to be warm.”)
They only got past ages and pleasantries before they arrived at the classroom and Ambrose had to part ways with her, shuffling the books in his grasp so they didn’t fall a second time.
He glanced back over his shoulder no less than three times, shaking his head and scoffing at the strange encounter with Miss Wyatt Cain, she of the blonde hair and the blue eyes and the clothes that fit like her parents were still buying clothes for a son they didn’t have.
He arrived at his lab sooner rather than later and left thoughts of Tin Men-To-Be at the door before greeting his inventions with a hearty ‘hello!’, shutting the door on the room (room, ha, more like a glorified closet) and went back to work.
*
They ran into each other again in the little dining area outside that overlooked the Central City Lake. She was sitting alone and Ambrose had never been too much of a social man and so he had wandered over and asked if he could sit there, rather than have to share with one of the businessmen or the performers. There were no other students around and a closer look at Cain showed that she was holding a pack of ice to her chin. She hadn’t given him a yes or a no yet as to his question.
“I doubt you got that during a lecture in strategy,” Ambrose appraised, shooting Cain a curious look. He barely knew her and he doubted that he’d get a straightforward answer, but it was worth the shot.
She was staring at the table in front of them, barely moving and her eyes looked glazed over, as if Cain was somewhere else all-together.
Ambrose leaned over and lightly tapped her shoulder. “Cain?”
She jumped and jolted, catching his eyes and stared at him for a long minute. “Ambrose, from the other day,” she placed him.
“Wyatt Cain. The girl with the boy’s name and a purple bruise on her cheek,” Ambrose returned in kind, reaching a gangly arm over to pry the ice off and take a better look at the bruise. “That’s a male fist, but likely no older than seventeen.” He winced around the same time that Cain winced when the ice went back onto it. “And it looks like he didn’t hold back.”
“I started it, if you think I’m just some damsel,” Cain warned, blonde hair falling into her eyes as she tipped her gaze back down to the table and she appeared perilously close to slipping back into that faraway land. “He made a comment about my fighting technique. He said it was sloppy.”
“Was it?”
“Yes. I still didn’t like him saying it.”
Ambrose couldn’t help the quirk of a tiny smile. “So you gave him a firsthand demonstration of your technique.”
For that, he was rewarded with something of an impish and proud grin on Cain’s face. She looked back at him and he brushed away the hair in her face, taking a better look at the bruise in the process, all the while she smiled warmly at him, like they’d just discovered their very first inside joke.
“Yeah, well,” Cain remarked, sounding a lot more relaxed than before. “He deserved it. I got sent out of class.”
Ambrose started to open the compartments of the box before him, drawing out pieces of his lunch and offering some of it to Cain. She quietly accepted and the ice went from her cheek to the table before they quietly talked about the classes that Cain had to take before she could officially take the exam to become a Tin Man. Eventually, the conversation came back around to him.
“I’ve been done for annuals, yet,” Ambrose admitted sheepishly, poking around at his sandwich. “I’m one of the more lowly advisors on staff, but the more I invent, the more I get taken into notice. I have a workshop, same as everyone else, but…well, closet is a nice way to describe it. Not like the Head Advisor,” he murmured, staring wistfully into space. “A whole floor to himself for whatever he wants to do with it.”
“You can get there, though,” Cain pointed out, tying her hair back. “You said so yourself. The more you invent, the more they notice you. You should invent something personally for the new Queen.”
Their new Queen had barely taken the throne and was still learning from her parents’ example. She was beautiful and Ambrose had always been fond of her. The problem was that she didn’t even know who he was.
“Make her something,” Cain insisted again. “Introduce yourself and give her your invention. She won’t be able to forget you after that. Especially if you actually have some kind of talent lying in there,” she added with something of a sly smile. “You could just be a talentless hack for all I know.”
“Hey!” Ambrose reacted with a defensive scowl. “I’m incredibly smart. The tests say that no one in the O.Z. parallels me, so far.” Cain seemed to take that as face value and the laughter stopped as she just studied him for a while, fingers lightly touching the wound on her cheek. “Do you need more ice?” Ambrose asked, fiddling now with the trash that remained of his lunch.
“No, it’ll be fine,” Cain promised. “I want him to have to look at it.”
Ambrose just watched her for a long moment and smiled.
“I think I like you, Wyatt Cain,” he determined. “You’ve got spunk.”
“I’ve got more than that,” Cain promised. “You just have to get to know me better to see it.”
*
The room that Ambrose had for inventions was small at best and miniscule in reality. There was enough room for tools, Ambrose, and only three machines. So when Cain poked her head in and then wiggled into the room, there became barely enough breathing room for either of them.
“People knock,” Ambrose mumbled, utterly focused on the necklace he had put into creation just the other night after he had taken Cain’s suggestion to heart and had begun to invent something specifically for the Queen to use. He had come up with a necklace that monitored the wearer’s temperature and automatically adjusted the air around them to make it comfortable. It used magic, the elements, and some sentient rocks, but if anyone could do it, it would be Ambrose.
Cain crouched over and peered through the abacus in the middle of the room and stared up at Ambrose from her lowered position. “I came to visit. I had a free class.”
“Did you get punched again?” Ambrose asked wryly, tweaking the set of the stone with a screwdriver.
“No, I just finished a paper and had nothing else to do,” Cain easily replied. “So, did you listen to me?”
Ambrose didn’t choose to answer in words and rather held up the chain of the necklace in her view, where it would be easily seen. The pendant was a dark color, like deep blue blood, and was nearly done. Cain seemed to find that very promising and smiled broadly.
“She doesn’t like it yet,” Ambrose warned. “So don’t go getting smug on me.”
“I won’t. Not yet, at least,” Cain answered, lingering by the doorway. She stayed for a moment and gave a nod, as if content that Ambrose had listened to her advice, and then without any other words, Cain was gone.
Ambrose returned his attention to the necklace and tried to forget about that little show of a visit.
*
Ambrose found himself taken with the enigma that he found Cain to be. Whereas he thought she ought to be straightforward in terms of personality, she would always come up with something to surprise him. For instance, she had steady hands to shoot a gun, but he’d discovered her carving little animals with a knife at some meals and admired the steadiness of her fingers.
While he expected her to not care about any of the books he read, she would always be bringing some new philosophical book or historical book to read when they got together. She liked to talk about more than just the program and they would often have hour-long discussions about the history of the O.Z. and its people, from the Viewers to the punishment practices to the munchkin culture.
Cain was definitely more than the other Tin Men were and seemed to want to learn about things. Whether or not she’d keep an open-mind about them later, well, that was up in the air.
He wanted to find out, though.
*
Ambrose had never seen Cain outside of the clothing she wore for school which was, without fail, always too baggy and too long and too large for her frame. At least, he had never seen her without those clothes until their night out. She had invited him along with a group of friends (who were all Tin-Men-In-Training) to a nearby club, which had happened the very moment that Ambrose had made a happy remark about loving dancing. He was dressed in a striped shirt with a pair of loose trousers and pulled open the door to let Cain in while he sought out his button-down to go overtop the clothes. He barely glanced at her as he waved her on in.
“I haven’t done this in…well, in a very, very long time,” Ambrose laughed anxiously, digging through his things and shoving platinums into his pockets as he pulled on the white button-down and turned to find Cain straddling the arm of a reading chair.
Ambrose had to honestly do a double-take and make sure he hadn’t just invited a stranger into his room.
“You’re staring,” Cain accused.
“Your clothes fit,” Ambrose said, eyeing her. “That’s got to be a miracle.” She was in a blue tank-top and a pair of jeans, but as Ambrose had mentioned, they weren’t too many sizes too big. Someone had obviously curled Cain’s hair into loose waves, but the heat of Central City had already wrecked that. He had to duck the book thrown at his head, but Ambrose just laughed as he tugged on his white shirt and ran a hand through his own unruly curls, yanking Cain’s hand and tugging her away. “Come on. I’ve been waiting for this all day, no dawdling now.”
Cain was chuckling quietly, but Ambrose was happy that she wasn’t giving him a hard time about anything as they joined the rest of the group in their finest and made for the club. Some of them smoked on route and the others chattered about the recent lessons and climate of the city. Cain had yet to let go of Ambrose’s hand, twisting it up and letting it swing between them as they spoke about the Queen and how much she had liked his latest invention, allowing her to watch memories of her life again and again. They had a small group of no more than eight, but the mood was pleasant and contagious and by the time they arrived, no one was in a low mood.
Cain and Ambrose were the last to enter the thick din of noise, smoke clouding the upper levels of the club, and Cain tugged Ambrose in the direction of the group before he could become lost staring at his surroundings. The truth of the matter was that Ambrose’s fellow advisors all had their own families to go home to and were usually annuals older than him and he had no one to accompany him to one of these places.
Cain brought him along and sat him down in one of the booths while ordering drinks. “Aren’t you going to dance?” Ambrose asked with panicky alarm, not wanting to simply sit in the back of the club for the entire night when he didn’t know when his next trip might be, if ever. He hadn’t been there in two annuals and he’d missed the thumping bass beat and the way it resonated through his body, sending chills down his spine.
Cain leaned down and nudged his knee with her heeled foot. “You go on,” she encouraged. “Jen wants a dance, anyhow,” she indicated, nodding to one of the redheaded women that they’d come with.
And so Ambrose allowed himself to be dragged out onto the dance floor and let himself be swallowed whole by the atmosphere. Sweat dripped down his neck and soaked the collar of his shirt and he could feel some of the old rhythm returning to him and his hands rumpled Jen’s clothes as they wrapped around her front and she pushed back against him and they twisted and writhed to the slow rhythm, her hands in the air and ruffling through her curled hair as they danced and Ambrose could feel his heart racing.
He had missed this more than it could be humanly possible, it felt like, in that moment.
The song ended and people began to change positions on the floor, substituting old partners for new. Jen didn’t go anywhere for several dances, turning until they were face-to-face and she giggled at everything he said, running her palms up his chest while whispering to him about the latest gossip amongst the student ranks. He felt drunk even though he’d yet to drink a single drop of alcohol, but the music was heady and he could smell the sweet fruit of Jen’s perfume as he bowed his head down and pressed his nose to her neck.
They danced like this, twined, for a full hour and only occasionally did he see anyone else from their party on the floor. Once, he’d caught Cain dancing with one of the other men - Thorne, was it? - but it was mostly the other boys trying to pick up girls in the age-old mating rituals.
Eventually, Jen hobbled away, sliding her shoes off and pulling herself into the booth they had claimed.
Ambrose thought that would be his cue to retire from the floor and take his own break to replenish on fluids and to join in the conversation rather than moving his body to the beat out there on the floor, but a firm palm on his chest told him otherwise, that he wasn’t going anywhere. He expected to find a strange girl, maybe one of the club girls who seemed to thrive in the environment, but when he glanced the few inches down, he found Wyatt Cain looking up at him. “We’re not giving you a breather,” she shouted above the music.
Ambrose should have known annuals later that everything changed that night.
Right then, he was too intoxicated by it all to care. He let Cain slide his hands over her hipbones and down the back of her jeans, tucking his long fingers into her pockets and angling him until he slid up against her and tightened his arms’ grasp. They were snug and took up little space on the floor as Cain pressed right in with him and draped her arms around his neck, sliding in with a slow roll of her hips. Ambrose untucked his fingers (all but his thumb) and held onto her hips to guide them into the slow sway. His breaths grew stilted and he stared down between them, trying to look through the fringes of sweaty hair to see into Cain’s eyes, to constantly make sure everything was alright.
They pushed up against each other and Cain’s hands gravitated further down until they rested perilously low, just above his behind and the heat of the club was making it hard to do anything but sweat and be breathless.
Cain didn’t know the intricacies of rhythm, but she was trying and giving about as good as Ambrose could give and he tightened his grasp on her, easing closer still as he felt his heart beat harder than before. He fathomed that Cain might be able to see it through his shirts and his lashes fluttered as he glanced down at the minimal space between them, Cain’s chest against him and his hand on her hip strayed just barely up to brush at the tank top and lift it, catching a bit of skin on the stroke down and Ambrose watched the reaction - a shiver and goosebumps on her arm - and they kept dancing until the last strains of the song died down and there was the announcement of a five-minute break before they returned.
Ambrose had to take a long moment to catch his breath as he disentwined himself from Cain, fingers twined with hers for a long moment and when she pulled to go back to the table, he tugged and caught her. “Not yet,” was all he had to say, staring at her.
Cain stared back with confusion, shaking her head. “Is something wrong?”
“No,” Ambrose exhaled, confused as to exactly what was right anymore when he was seeing the world in a very new and different way. Perplexing was the best way to put it. “Thank you, for the dance,” he managed, summoning up words.
“My pleasure. You’re right about your rhythm,” Cain said with a warm smile, tugging him along if he wasn’t about to let go of her. “C’mon, there’s beer waiting at the table with your name on it.”
Ambrose didn’t know how to say it then, but beer was definitely not about to quench any kind of thirst he had.
He couldn’t say no, though, so he followed along and tried not to watch that droplet of sweat roll down Cain’s neck and bare back and desperately tried not to want to do something as stupid as lick it off the toned shoulderblades that presented themselves, all tanned and with just one dark mark between them, perfectly so.
He had to stop thinking about it by force when he returned to a rallied cheer and the group asking if they could have the next dance with him.
*
Two days after they had gone to the club, Ambrose couldn’t seem to stop having very personal dreams about Wyatt Cain and their dance. Except she wasn’t always wearing the tank top and sometimes was in just a pair of underwear. In one dream, she’d been wearing Ambrose’s shirt and nothing else. And then sometimes, they weren’t in the club at all, but in his room. The dreams didn’t stop and his waking hours sometimes devolved into milder daydreams.
He was in the middle of one of those daydreams when there came a firm knock at his door. Ambrose nearly jumped out of his skin, hand over his heart as he prayed fervently that it wasn’t Cain, come to check on him and see how he was faring, today.
“Who’s there?” he asked warily.
“It’s the Cains,” said a male voice. “Wyatt was supposed to tell you that we were coming.”
Somewhere in the back of his mind, Ambrose recalled that Cain had made mention that her parents were going to come and raid his laboratory to look for inventions that might be useful at the Tin Men headquarters. Both her parents were Tin Men and they had met during training, which happened to be a constant conversation topic because Cain seemed to believe that the same thing was bound to happen to her. She had insisted that she was going to send them along and here they were.
He nervously unlatched the door, trying to ignore that part of his mind that crowed that he was meeting the parents and none of her other friends were. He had to make a decent first impression before he could be too smug about it. “Sir, Ma’am,” he respectfully said as he nodded his head to them.
They didn’t seem to ask for permission before they inched their way in and began to study the five various inventions that littered the small lab. Well, at least Ambrose understood where Cain got that from.
They weren’t there very long and asked questions that were simple to answer (at least, for a genius like Ambrose) and then they all stood in the hallway outside the lab, exchanging pleasantries while laughing at anecdotes and stories about Cain when she was younger.
“How old are you, Ambrose?” Mr. Cain asked, curiously. “Those were a great deal of inventions in there and you seem to have earned the Queen’s attention, but you don’t look older than twenty-one annuals.”
“I’m nineteen,” Ambrose replied with something of a shy smile. “I started here when I was seventeen. They say I’m the smartest man in the O.Z.”
“Are you?” Mrs. Cain demanded, bluntly.
“I don’t know,” Ambrose nervously answered, gaze flickering between the two. “I haven’t met everyone in the O.Z. yet to tell whether I’m smarter than all of them.”
From the slow smile of a response that both the Cains gave him, Ambrose had the feeling that he’d just given them the exact right answer.
*
Things started to go downhill only scant months later when Cain turned up for their usual post-dinner talk and walk around the palace and she only came so she could cancel. She was dressed far nicer than usual in a midnight blue dress with a wrap around her shoulders and Ambrose wondered at first if it was for him before Cain began to make her apologies.
The words ‘sorry’ and ‘opportunity’ happened to come up too much for his liking.
There was someone else, of course, and it was Thorne and he had asked Cain out to dinner and a show. Cain stood staring up at Ambrose in the moonlight with the breeze wafting past them and pushing her hair around. “It’s just like how my parents met,” she explained to him with an edge of desperation to her voice. “And he’s the best in the class, well, second best after me,” she corrected. “I’ll be back tomorrow and I’ll tell you all about it.”
That was the problem. Ambrose didn’t want to hear anything about it, not whatsoever.
He was a good friend though. No, he was more than that. He was her best friend, so he pushed aside whatever burgeoning feelings of lust he had for Cain and wished her luck with a kiss to her cheek.
*
Cain had been dating Thorne for something like three months now and while they were adequately happy together, Cain wasn’t giddily in love the way young women of eighteen annuals were supposed to be. She was the same as always and Ambrose couldn’t help feeling like she was just going through the motions of it for the sake of doing that and he said exactly that during one of their dinners.
He was pelted with a napkin for his effort.
“Don’t say that,” Cain warned, lowly.
“You’re reacting this badly because you know I’m right,” Ambrose very patiently said. “And I don’t like watching you have anything but bliss,” he admitted, staring at her almost forlornly. “I feel like I should be honest and admit that ever since the night in the club, I’ve had something like feelings for you, but you can rest assured that my interest in you and my interest in your well-being are mutually exclusive and me thinking you’re unhappy with Thorne has nothing to do with wanting you for myself. Above all, you’re my friend, Wyatt. And you deserve bliss.”
Cain continued poking at her food with a tentative poke of her fork, glancing up at him warily.
“Just tell me if you can imagine the rest of your very long life with him and I’ll shut up,” Ambrose admitted, staring deep into his carton of food. He wasn’t brave enough to look up, thinking that twenty-annuals was too young to have his heart stomped on by the woman he thought he might be in love with.
“I can’t,” Cain quietly admitted. “But that doesn’t mean I don’t care for him. It’s just not…”
“…what you expected,” Ambrose finished her sentence for her. He finally summoned the strength to look up with sympathy. “It doesn’t mean anything except you were strong enough to try. There’ll be other men,” he promised. “Other Tin Men, even, just like your parents.”
Her parents, who now had Ambrose’s inventions littering the corners of their offices because they were so taken with his machinery. The same parents who came to visit Ambrose on a weekly basis to chat. It didn’t slip by him that he’d won the approval of her parents, just not her.
“You’re right,” Cain admitted after a long silence.
“I know. I’m a smart man, remember,” Ambrose quietly said, the humor that should have been in his voice misplaced somewhere. She had yet to make any comment about his admission and by the looks of it, she wasn’t planning on saying anything.
The important thing was, though, that he’d told her.
*
Ambrose was beginning to hate the notion of mixed-signals. As far as he could tell, Cain was still dating Thorne and had yet to break up with him. At the same time, instead of taking walks around the palace, Cain came up to Ambrose’s room and they’d simply sprawl out over his bed and he’d rest his head in her lap while she tapped Morse codes out on his bedposts and they discussed the day and the latest events in the O.Z. and Cain would usually talk without end about the Mystic Man and how it was her dream to work for him.
Those nights said he should do something.
The mornings when he saw Cain and Thorne hand in hand and exchanging long kisses said he shouldn’t even think about it.
He murmured one night when they had switched positions and she was lying with her head in his lap that he didn’t know what to make of it.
“Make of what?” she asked tiredly, eyes half-closed as she traced that same Morse code against his thigh and tapped it out. He understood it, of course, could tell she was tapping nothing more than ‘HELLO MY NAME IS’ over and over again, but there was a quiet intimacy to it that he didn’t want to drive away.
“You being with Thorne yet,” Ambrose mumbled, her exhaustion contagious.
She didn’t manage to answer, because she distracted him by smoothing her fingers out over his thigh and tapping out ‘I’M TIRED’ this time and he picked her up in his arms and let her have his bed, not saying a word when she grabbed a fistful of his shirt and pulled him down to share the king size bed for the night. When he woke up, his nose was buried in her hair and her arms were wrapped snugly around his waist and his sheets smelled of Cain.
His heart had honestly never ached as badly as it did that morning.
He stayed, as much as he wanted to run away. He wanted to be there when Cain opened her eyes and he wanted her to see that he’d be there for her, even if he was suffering a mild panic attack because of it.
It took her twenty minutes to wake up and she smiled dazedly at him as she removed her arms and lay on her back, staring at the ceiling.
“How do I break up with a man? What do they want to hear?” Cain asked, addressing the ceiling.
“Just be honest,” Ambrose advised. “It’s never led me astray.”
tbc