May's June
Title: May’s June
Characters: Glitch, various, OC
Rating: G for Gen
Disclaimer: None of these characters are mine, except May and June. ;)
Word Count: 2,209
Glitch was just wiping down the surface of his worktable, chasing crumbs from his lunch into the bin at the end of the counter, when he heard a girl’s voice, calling for her cow.
For a moment he thought it might be DG or Az, upset over a lost toy, but then he remembered the two little girls were long grown, and that he was living in the past again.
Then he wondered why anyone would be looking for a cow inside a palace, particularly down here in the tech wing.
Leaving the crumbs and the clock sprogs to keep each other company a while longer, Glitch left his personal office and stepped into the hall. He saw two Crafters in blue worksuits, and between them they were leading a dark-haired woman in a white shirt and black pants by both arms. She was struggling faintly, and still calling for some nameless cow.
“Good morning,” Glitch said pleasantly. He’d long ago learned that charm was often more disarming than confrontational demands, though he wanted very much to ask the men what in blazes they thought were doing. “Has someone lost a cow, then?”
His cheery question garnered glances from the Crafters, looks somewhere between annoyance and forbearance, which he was rather familiar with by now.
“We’ll shut her up, Mr. Claviere. She’s stuck in a Folsom’s loop.”
“You mean she’s glitching,” Glitch smiled. “Well, that’s fixed easily enough, at least in robots.” He tried to catch the unit’s attention so he could extend a warm smile to her, maybe comfort her a bit, but she wouldn’t make eye contact, which was odd, since all units were supposed to do that as a matter of course.
“Yeah, well, it’s a bit beyond a glitch. Fatal malfunction, this one.”
Glitch felt a jab of nausea inside. “You’re not…?” He broke off, in case she could still understand.
The tech who replied was not so considerate. “Scrap heap,” he said bluntly.
His companion seemed to get a hint from Glitch’s expression that a bit more sensitivity was called for. “Don’t worry,” he assured Glitch. “We’ll make sure she’s fully disconnected to base core. She won’t feel a thing.”
They started to press by him on their way down the hall. A second before the woman between them was forced past, she glanced up at Glitch. Her eyes finally met his, and they were black, black as her pinned-up hair and the lipstick on her mouth and the polish on her nails. “Cow?” she entreated him. She was bustled along the hall before he could say or do anything.
“Wait!” Glitch started to follow. When neither Crafter slowed down, Glitch raised his voice to the most authoritative he knew how. “In the name of the queen,” he demanded. “Stop!”
*
“I’m not sure what you expect to accomplish,” Eridelle admitted gently. “The techs insist she isn’t fixable.”
“Well, neither am I, but nobody suggested throwing me on the scrap heap!” Glitch returned indignantly. “At least I hope they didn’t. And if they did, you said no, right?”
“Well, that’s hardly a comparison, Ambrose, she’s a machine, with the strength of ten men. You know an impaired unit has to be fixed or taken out of commission, for everyone’s sake.”
Glitch peeked out the door of the throne room to be sure May was still safely occupied. She was sitting contentedly on the floor where he’d left her, with her legs out in front of her, arranging a small army of plastic farm animals on the marble between her knees. He watched her lean forward and arrange a sheep by her boot with great precision, pausing to brush back some of the hair that had fallen free of its numerous snap clips.
He closed the door softly and turned to the queen. “Your majesty, she’s harmless. All she’s interested in is cows and collecting little things to put in piles. What harm is it to give her some simple job and let her be?”
Eridelle arched a brow. “That’s rather an ominous question, Ambrose, to be quite frank. What harm? Am I to foresee all possible havoc this unit could wreak? Because I cannot, and neither can you.”
Glitch started to say more, but Eridelle went on. “I’m sorry, Ambrose, the last thing I want to do is upset you, but I have to insist the Crafters be allowed to follow their safety protocols. You can understand if I’m a little overprotective of my daughters, and of you, after everything we’ve been through?”
“Yeah, about that ‘everything we’ve been through’ bit,” Glitch said tightly. He reached up and unzipped his head, watched her pale. “You owe me, cookie. You owe me big, and this doesn’t even begin to cover the chips.”
*
The royal car was smooth-riding, but the dirt road they were on was still causing a lot of jostling. It didn’t seem to bother May, but Glitch was finding it exhausting. The chauffeur angled to avoid a pot hole, causing Glitch's sleep-deprived body to make more adjustments.
“Cow?” May inquired.
“Are you out of cows again?” Glitch asked her. He reached in his coat pocket, and found the last two animals from the most recent package he’d bought. He regarded them a moment in his palm. “I have a pecking chicken and something that’s either a weird dog or a really tall, skinny piglet.”
She did not laugh, May never laughed. She made Wyatt Cain look like a court jester most days, but she somehow managed to convey that both the pecking chicken and the weird pig-dog were satisfactory offerings. She took them from his hand and studied them from all angles, as if taking note of every seam and mote of paint, and then slipped them into her pants pocket.
The car, Glitch noticed, was beginning to slow.
“I have a surprise for you, May,” he told her, trying to pitch his voice up. “How would you like to have a real cow?”
“Cow?”
“Yes, one that moos and gives milk and eats hay and all those good things.”
“Cow! Cow! Cow!”
“That’s right! Cow! Cow! Cow!” He repeated it back at her, with something close to the same level of enthusiasm, and smiled broadly, for her sake. He’d never heard her so excited, and it comforted him somewhat that he’d made the right decision for her. It was hard for Glitch to feign the cheer, though. It had been a rewarding but tough couple of weeks, and he’d had little sleep, which usually left his real emotions close to the surface. And right now he was very sad. After a couple of incidents, he’d decided a new approach and a different environment might benefit May. But it was hard. So hard…
The car stopped in front of a small farm, and Hank and Em were coming out onto the porch, waving and smiling. They would take care of her, of that Glitch had no doubt.
He wondered if May would miss him.
He hoped not.
*
Glitch turned on the small lamp at the end of the table, but the machinery on the smooth surface held no interest for him.
His workshop seemed empty and quiet. Not that May had ever made much noise, but she’d been a presence, someone to talk to. He’d taught her to make tea and go to the kitchens with a note for whatever food he was in a mind for, and other simple tasks, and it had made a tremendous difference in the long hours he spent here. She’d shown some aptitude for cards, which he’d appreciated, and he hoped he’d remembered to tell Em that so they could continue playing the games with her.
Now the place was silent, and he wasn’t going to find all his paperclips lined up across the worktable anymore, or his books stacked up vertically with each corner a little offset so they formed a spiral halfway to the ceiling.
When he pulled out his desk drawer to get a pen, and discovered he still had one of her hair clasps in the middle compartment, he almost burst into tears. He laid his head down on his arms and closed his eyes, awash in doubts about everything he’d done.
Soft footfalls and a gentle hand on his shoulder roused him from his dark reveries. “Glitch, are you all right?” DG asked.
“Fine,” he lied, sitting up and trying to look like he’d been dozing and not wallowing in misery. “Just really tired after the drive this morning. What’s up?”
“I just got a call from Popsicle. Seems May’s had a lovely time visiting the farm, but now she’s ready to come home.” DG smiled gently.
“What? How do they… well… how do they know?”
“Because she asked for you.”
“She did? My name? She said something besides ‘cow’?” Glitch was so beside himself with conflicting emotion that he didn’t know whether to stand up or sit down and ended up doing first one, then the other. “She said something besides ‘cow’?”
“Yes! She really did!” DG laughed. Then her expression sobered. “Glitch, how come you never told me that my nurture units were your foster parents before they were mine?”
“Well, who else would I have trusted you with?” he asked her softly. “Who else would I have trusted with May?”
“Are you going to go get her in the morning?”
“I’m going to go get her right now.” Glitch stood up firmly this time, mind made up, and pulled his coat off the back of his chair.
“I thought you said you were tired! It’s almost eight o’clock!”
“I couldn’t sleep anyway,” he admitted.
*
To his great frustration, Glitch was unable to procure a driver, both chauffeurs were on jobs and not due back for some time. He found himself knocking on Wyatt Cain’s door.
“I need to go to Sparkle Falls to get May,” he informed his friend the moment he laid eyes on him.
“I thought you just left her there.”
“I did but now I’m going back for her. It’s a long story,” he said irritably, waving off Cain’s usual need for details. “Can you…?”
“Sure.” Cain left the doorway momentarily and returned with keys and a coat.
*
“She seemed content enough here all day,” Em said, leading the two men up the front walk to the softly glowing farmhouse. “Spent most of the day feeding the cow pieces of hay. But she got real upset at seven o’clock and started calling for you and taking all the clips out of her hair.”
Glitch’s heart dropped with guilt. Seven o’clock was when he always brushed May’s hair. He slipped past Em and Wyatt and hurried up the front steps towards the open door. “May?”
She appeared as if conjured, nearly knocked him over as she threw her arms around him. He staggered until he caught his balance, then hugged her back, reaching up to pat the long hair that she usually wore up, that was now spilling down her shoulders. He would pin it all back in place for her, neatly, just the way she liked.
*
Glitch picked a cup of apple slices off the buffet table and wandered over to the dining hall window. Nibbling on a piece of the fruit, he moved the curtains aside to check on May. She was out in the middle of the meditation garden, brushing her new pet cow with methodical, even strokes of the brush. June, as the creature had been named, was drinking out of the water fountain intended to commemorate the coronation of the queen’s great great great grandmother. Glitch had always found it ridiculously ostentatious, with its nine tiers of giant scallop shells held aloft by dancing dolphins. To see June getting a cool drink out of it made him smile. To see May stop brushing and lean over the nearest scallop and put her hands in the water made him smile, too. He’d explain to her later that the coins in there were for looking, not touching, but for now he left her to explore the structure and pick up the little gold disks. She would probably stack them all on a dolphin’s nose, and he was curious to see how high they would go.
Raw appeared at his side, also looking out the window. Without saying anything, the Viewer inspired comment, as he tended to do, and Glitch found himself making a confession.
“Sometimes I wonder if I did the right thing,” he admitted softly. “If I’d let them start over with her, she might have been so much more. Had so much more. Maybe I was selfish, and emotional, and…”
“And human,” Raw finished for him. “OK to make decision with heart instead of brain sometimes.”
“Good thing!” Glitch laughed a little, gesturing slightly at his famously half-empty head, and Raw patted him on the arm.
“Love not need perfect vessel,” he assured Glitch.
Glitch wasn’t sure if Raw was referring to him, or to May, but he guessed it didn’t matter. It really applied equally well to all of them, their whole little family cobbled together here under the roof of Finaqua. At the end of it, May fit right in.
Characters: Glitch, various, OC
Rating: G for Gen
Disclaimer: None of these characters are mine, except May and June. ;)
Word Count: 2,209
Glitch was just wiping down the surface of his worktable, chasing crumbs from his lunch into the bin at the end of the counter, when he heard a girl’s voice, calling for her cow.
For a moment he thought it might be DG or Az, upset over a lost toy, but then he remembered the two little girls were long grown, and that he was living in the past again.
Then he wondered why anyone would be looking for a cow inside a palace, particularly down here in the tech wing.
Leaving the crumbs and the clock sprogs to keep each other company a while longer, Glitch left his personal office and stepped into the hall. He saw two Crafters in blue worksuits, and between them they were leading a dark-haired woman in a white shirt and black pants by both arms. She was struggling faintly, and still calling for some nameless cow.
“Good morning,” Glitch said pleasantly. He’d long ago learned that charm was often more disarming than confrontational demands, though he wanted very much to ask the men what in blazes they thought were doing. “Has someone lost a cow, then?”
His cheery question garnered glances from the Crafters, looks somewhere between annoyance and forbearance, which he was rather familiar with by now.
“We’ll shut her up, Mr. Claviere. She’s stuck in a Folsom’s loop.”
“You mean she’s glitching,” Glitch smiled. “Well, that’s fixed easily enough, at least in robots.” He tried to catch the unit’s attention so he could extend a warm smile to her, maybe comfort her a bit, but she wouldn’t make eye contact, which was odd, since all units were supposed to do that as a matter of course.
“Yeah, well, it’s a bit beyond a glitch. Fatal malfunction, this one.”
Glitch felt a jab of nausea inside. “You’re not…?” He broke off, in case she could still understand.
The tech who replied was not so considerate. “Scrap heap,” he said bluntly.
His companion seemed to get a hint from Glitch’s expression that a bit more sensitivity was called for. “Don’t worry,” he assured Glitch. “We’ll make sure she’s fully disconnected to base core. She won’t feel a thing.”
They started to press by him on their way down the hall. A second before the woman between them was forced past, she glanced up at Glitch. Her eyes finally met his, and they were black, black as her pinned-up hair and the lipstick on her mouth and the polish on her nails. “Cow?” she entreated him. She was bustled along the hall before he could say or do anything.
“Wait!” Glitch started to follow. When neither Crafter slowed down, Glitch raised his voice to the most authoritative he knew how. “In the name of the queen,” he demanded. “Stop!”
*
“I’m not sure what you expect to accomplish,” Eridelle admitted gently. “The techs insist she isn’t fixable.”
“Well, neither am I, but nobody suggested throwing me on the scrap heap!” Glitch returned indignantly. “At least I hope they didn’t. And if they did, you said no, right?”
“Well, that’s hardly a comparison, Ambrose, she’s a machine, with the strength of ten men. You know an impaired unit has to be fixed or taken out of commission, for everyone’s sake.”
Glitch peeked out the door of the throne room to be sure May was still safely occupied. She was sitting contentedly on the floor where he’d left her, with her legs out in front of her, arranging a small army of plastic farm animals on the marble between her knees. He watched her lean forward and arrange a sheep by her boot with great precision, pausing to brush back some of the hair that had fallen free of its numerous snap clips.
He closed the door softly and turned to the queen. “Your majesty, she’s harmless. All she’s interested in is cows and collecting little things to put in piles. What harm is it to give her some simple job and let her be?”
Eridelle arched a brow. “That’s rather an ominous question, Ambrose, to be quite frank. What harm? Am I to foresee all possible havoc this unit could wreak? Because I cannot, and neither can you.”
Glitch started to say more, but Eridelle went on. “I’m sorry, Ambrose, the last thing I want to do is upset you, but I have to insist the Crafters be allowed to follow their safety protocols. You can understand if I’m a little overprotective of my daughters, and of you, after everything we’ve been through?”
“Yeah, about that ‘everything we’ve been through’ bit,” Glitch said tightly. He reached up and unzipped his head, watched her pale. “You owe me, cookie. You owe me big, and this doesn’t even begin to cover the chips.”
*
The royal car was smooth-riding, but the dirt road they were on was still causing a lot of jostling. It didn’t seem to bother May, but Glitch was finding it exhausting. The chauffeur angled to avoid a pot hole, causing Glitch's sleep-deprived body to make more adjustments.
“Cow?” May inquired.
“Are you out of cows again?” Glitch asked her. He reached in his coat pocket, and found the last two animals from the most recent package he’d bought. He regarded them a moment in his palm. “I have a pecking chicken and something that’s either a weird dog or a really tall, skinny piglet.”
She did not laugh, May never laughed. She made Wyatt Cain look like a court jester most days, but she somehow managed to convey that both the pecking chicken and the weird pig-dog were satisfactory offerings. She took them from his hand and studied them from all angles, as if taking note of every seam and mote of paint, and then slipped them into her pants pocket.
The car, Glitch noticed, was beginning to slow.
“I have a surprise for you, May,” he told her, trying to pitch his voice up. “How would you like to have a real cow?”
“Cow?”
“Yes, one that moos and gives milk and eats hay and all those good things.”
“Cow! Cow! Cow!”
“That’s right! Cow! Cow! Cow!” He repeated it back at her, with something close to the same level of enthusiasm, and smiled broadly, for her sake. He’d never heard her so excited, and it comforted him somewhat that he’d made the right decision for her. It was hard for Glitch to feign the cheer, though. It had been a rewarding but tough couple of weeks, and he’d had little sleep, which usually left his real emotions close to the surface. And right now he was very sad. After a couple of incidents, he’d decided a new approach and a different environment might benefit May. But it was hard. So hard…
The car stopped in front of a small farm, and Hank and Em were coming out onto the porch, waving and smiling. They would take care of her, of that Glitch had no doubt.
He wondered if May would miss him.
He hoped not.
*
Glitch turned on the small lamp at the end of the table, but the machinery on the smooth surface held no interest for him.
His workshop seemed empty and quiet. Not that May had ever made much noise, but she’d been a presence, someone to talk to. He’d taught her to make tea and go to the kitchens with a note for whatever food he was in a mind for, and other simple tasks, and it had made a tremendous difference in the long hours he spent here. She’d shown some aptitude for cards, which he’d appreciated, and he hoped he’d remembered to tell Em that so they could continue playing the games with her.
Now the place was silent, and he wasn’t going to find all his paperclips lined up across the worktable anymore, or his books stacked up vertically with each corner a little offset so they formed a spiral halfway to the ceiling.
When he pulled out his desk drawer to get a pen, and discovered he still had one of her hair clasps in the middle compartment, he almost burst into tears. He laid his head down on his arms and closed his eyes, awash in doubts about everything he’d done.
Soft footfalls and a gentle hand on his shoulder roused him from his dark reveries. “Glitch, are you all right?” DG asked.
“Fine,” he lied, sitting up and trying to look like he’d been dozing and not wallowing in misery. “Just really tired after the drive this morning. What’s up?”
“I just got a call from Popsicle. Seems May’s had a lovely time visiting the farm, but now she’s ready to come home.” DG smiled gently.
“What? How do they… well… how do they know?”
“Because she asked for you.”
“She did? My name? She said something besides ‘cow’?” Glitch was so beside himself with conflicting emotion that he didn’t know whether to stand up or sit down and ended up doing first one, then the other. “She said something besides ‘cow’?”
“Yes! She really did!” DG laughed. Then her expression sobered. “Glitch, how come you never told me that my nurture units were your foster parents before they were mine?”
“Well, who else would I have trusted you with?” he asked her softly. “Who else would I have trusted with May?”
“Are you going to go get her in the morning?”
“I’m going to go get her right now.” Glitch stood up firmly this time, mind made up, and pulled his coat off the back of his chair.
“I thought you said you were tired! It’s almost eight o’clock!”
“I couldn’t sleep anyway,” he admitted.
*
To his great frustration, Glitch was unable to procure a driver, both chauffeurs were on jobs and not due back for some time. He found himself knocking on Wyatt Cain’s door.
“I need to go to Sparkle Falls to get May,” he informed his friend the moment he laid eyes on him.
“I thought you just left her there.”
“I did but now I’m going back for her. It’s a long story,” he said irritably, waving off Cain’s usual need for details. “Can you…?”
“Sure.” Cain left the doorway momentarily and returned with keys and a coat.
*
“She seemed content enough here all day,” Em said, leading the two men up the front walk to the softly glowing farmhouse. “Spent most of the day feeding the cow pieces of hay. But she got real upset at seven o’clock and started calling for you and taking all the clips out of her hair.”
Glitch’s heart dropped with guilt. Seven o’clock was when he always brushed May’s hair. He slipped past Em and Wyatt and hurried up the front steps towards the open door. “May?”
She appeared as if conjured, nearly knocked him over as she threw her arms around him. He staggered until he caught his balance, then hugged her back, reaching up to pat the long hair that she usually wore up, that was now spilling down her shoulders. He would pin it all back in place for her, neatly, just the way she liked.
*
Glitch picked a cup of apple slices off the buffet table and wandered over to the dining hall window. Nibbling on a piece of the fruit, he moved the curtains aside to check on May. She was out in the middle of the meditation garden, brushing her new pet cow with methodical, even strokes of the brush. June, as the creature had been named, was drinking out of the water fountain intended to commemorate the coronation of the queen’s great great great grandmother. Glitch had always found it ridiculously ostentatious, with its nine tiers of giant scallop shells held aloft by dancing dolphins. To see June getting a cool drink out of it made him smile. To see May stop brushing and lean over the nearest scallop and put her hands in the water made him smile, too. He’d explain to her later that the coins in there were for looking, not touching, but for now he left her to explore the structure and pick up the little gold disks. She would probably stack them all on a dolphin’s nose, and he was curious to see how high they would go.
Raw appeared at his side, also looking out the window. Without saying anything, the Viewer inspired comment, as he tended to do, and Glitch found himself making a confession.
“Sometimes I wonder if I did the right thing,” he admitted softly. “If I’d let them start over with her, she might have been so much more. Had so much more. Maybe I was selfish, and emotional, and…”
“And human,” Raw finished for him. “OK to make decision with heart instead of brain sometimes.”
“Good thing!” Glitch laughed a little, gesturing slightly at his famously half-empty head, and Raw patted him on the arm.
“Love not need perfect vessel,” he assured Glitch.
Glitch wasn’t sure if Raw was referring to him, or to May, but he guessed it didn’t matter. It really applied equally well to all of them, their whole little family cobbled together here under the roof of Finaqua. At the end of it, May fit right in.